If the Report deriving from the Forty-Seventh Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) held in Grenada in the wake of Hurricane Beryl is anything to go by, it would appear that the member countries of the regional movement are not prepared to simply take it ‘on the chin’ and move on. A report prepared by Barbados’ Ambassador to CARICOM, David Commissiong, not only provides an overview of the damage done to member countries in the wake of Beryl’s tirade but also suggests that CARICOM will be seeking to hold the rich countries of the North accountable for what they say is a climate-driven occurrence.
The essence of the response by CARICOM Heads to Beryl’s onslaught reposes in what the Barbadian diplomat says in his report on the post-Beryl summit was “the unanimous opinion of the Conference that the phenomenon of ‘global warming’ is at the heart of these increasingly violent hurricanes like Beryl, that periodically cause damage to Caribbean countries and that the current scenario in which the wealthy developed countries that are responsible for ‘global warming’ are providing little or no resources to assist Caribbean nations to rebuild and repair is fundamentally ‘unjust and unacceptable.’” It is a sharp and clinical declaration that sends a signal that beyond their own fixing and repairing effort, CARICOM member countries, this time around, will be seeking to hold developed countries accountable.
To address the issue of the havoc wreaked in the region’s agriculture on account of Beryl’s rampage, the author of the report used Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali’s mind–numbing estimate of the damage done to CARICOM’s land-based agricultural sector at US $160 million. Then there was Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s contribution on the damage done to the region’s fisheries sector, which, in the absence of a monetary figure, she reportedly described as “heart-rending.” Significantly, what she did reportedly say, however, (according to the report prepared by Ambassador Commissiong) was that Barbados’ fishing industry had sustained extremely significant damage, and indicated that Barbados was still in the process of calculating the repair bill.
The unanimous opinion of the Conference was that the phenomenon of “global warming” is at the heart of these increasingly violent hurricanes that are periodically causing so much damage to the Caribbean Community, and that the current scenario in which the wealthy developed countries that are responsible for “global warming” are providing little or no resources to assist Caribbean nations to rebuild and repair is “fundamentally unjust and unacceptable.”
Perhaps the most significant decision to derive from the post-Beryl meeting of regional Heads was that CARICOM Member States deliver a ‘single unified Statement at COP 29 decrying the injustice of CARICOM nations having to consistently foot repair and rebuilding bills for a destructive climate phenomenon that they are not responsible for, and insisting that immediate concrete steps must be taken to fully fund and operationalize a “Loss and Damage” mechanism.’ We will have to see where that takes us.
