The multi-national nature of the COP-28 forum currently underway in Dubai allows for the range of the forum’s agenda to go beyond some of the central issues like climate change and fossil fuel recovery, probing other considerations that are of critical importance to the international community, as a whole, and to a considerable extent to underdeveloped countries, specifically. The countries of the Caribbean represented at COP 28, for example, benefitted from the first significant agreement reached in Dubai, a historic agreement on a Loss and Damage Fund designed specifically to help poor countries respond to the effects of climate change.
The United Arab Emirates, Germany and the United States are among the countries that will be contributors to the Fund. If climate-related damage is by no means the whole of the Caribbean’s environmental issues, regional Heads of Government and their delegations could at least make a legitimate claim to their presence in Dubai being justified in fairly generous measure. The Fund, when it becomes operational, will represent a significant step forward in focusing on the issues of loss and damage, though the region will be only too well aware that this is only part of the problem. Meanwhile, with the Caribbean, of late, beginning to face urgent food security challenges, it has been disclosed that the OPEC Fund for International Development (the OPEC Fund) is pursuing the teaming up with partner organizations in order to seek to address the challenges of food insecurity, not just in the Caribbean but in other food-challenged countries elsewhere in the world.