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Avinash Persaud is special advisor to the president of the Inter-American Development Bank on climate change and an architect of the 2022 Bridgetown Initiative. Emily Wilkinson is director of the Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative (RESI) at ODI Global.
Many communities are vulnerable to climate shocks – from the urban poor in Brazil to smallholder farmers in Africa’s Sahel region. But few are more vulnerable than those living in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) around the world, from the Caribbean to the South Pacific.
Storms and rising sea levels present an existential risk. They can wipe out annual incomes several times over. We don’t yet know the full extent of the damage wrought on Jamaica by Hurricane Melissa – the strongest hurricane to hit the island since records began – but they are expected to run into tens of billions of dollars, and recovery will take at least a decade.
These nations are the “canaries in the coal mine”, signalling the dangers that lie ahead. In 2022, the world set out a plan to tackle the threat. Economists, nonprofits and nation states got behind the Bridgetown Initiative, spearheaded by Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley.
It has historically been difficult and expensive to finance the projects many nations need to cope with our changing climate. Yet much progress has been made on the Bridgetown Initiative’s five-step plan to reform the global financial system.
We have seen wider adoption of pause clauses in debt arrangements aimed at taking the pressure off countries when they face disasters. These clauses were used for the first time by Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl in 2024. In 2023, countries agreed to unlock $100 billion in Special Drawing Rights, an international reserve of assets held by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), scaling up states’ efforts to build resilience to climate change.
More recently, progress has been made to reduce the cost of capital and currency volatility, two other major brakes on resilience investments. Brazil, the COP30 host nation, has just launched the Eco Invest programme with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which will mobilise significant new private and public finance to restore degraded rural areas, produce clean energy and create green jobs.
Closing the yawning climate finance gap
These measures have helped to close a yawning climate finance gap, but more action is needed.
Global average temperatures continue to rise, and we are close to biophysical tipping points with disastrous consequences. For many climate-vulnerable countries, investing in resilience is the best response. Climate adaptation technologies have improved substantially and countries can now build heat-ready homes and schools, while coastal defences can withstand Category 5 hurricanes like Melissa. Every dollar spent on adaptation saves up to $10 on avoided losses.
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Global South’s climate adaptation bill to top $300 billion a year by 2035: UN
Warning over massive shortfall in climate adaptation funding comes days before COP30 in Brazil, where the issue is set to be a major theme -
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The investments that have the greatest savings tend to be public goods, such as sea walls and flood defences, with few capturable revenues for private investors. The private sector has an important role to play in developing resilience technologies and implementing resilience investments, but 90% of the time, the public sector ends up paying.
Many call on rich nations to provide more grant support for the climate vulnerable. But grants are shrinking, so we must consider other ways to unlock more investment.
Climate adaptation can’t be just for the rich, COP30 president says
First, the major players who influence debt sustainability – ratings agencies such as Fitch and Moody’s, private investors, the IMF, the World Bank and other multilateral development banks (MDBs) – could change their approach. Too often, the risks of climate shocks are priced into debt repayments without considering the opportunity to gain by making countries more resilient to them. This makes it harder for countries to do the right thing.
Second, the most climate-vulnerable nations will need new borrowing instruments that are low-cost, long-term and flexible, for example ensuring that debt interest repayment timings can be adjusted if a disaster such as a devastating hurricane strikes.
Because of their AAA credit ratings, MDBs like the World Bank are best positioned to help. Small island nations require an estimated $36 billion for adaptation efforts but received a fraction of that last year, and the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) have committed to raising their adaptation finance portfolio overall to 50% of climate finance, up from 30%.
Third, climate-vulnerable countries are still paying a huge portion of their tax revenues in servicing debt. More can be done to break this vicious cycle, and one solution is something called a debt-for-resilience swap. That’s when a AAA-rated guarantor guarantees the debt of a climate-vulnerable country, allowing it to borrow at significantly lower interest rates. The proceeds are then used to buy back expensive debt – keeping the level of debt unchanged, but re-routing interest savings for resilience investments. Barbados, the Bahamas and Ecuador have done debt-for-climate swaps, but guarantors are in limited supply.
Comment: Can COP30 mark a turning point for climate adaptation?
To tackle this challenge, the IDB and other MDBs are developing the first-of-its-kind Multi-Guarantor Debt for Resilience Facility, where multiple guarantors work together to unlock more debt swaps on a larger scale.
In these difficult times, when climate change is driving ever more dangerous and unpredictable impacts in vulnerable places, we must press forward with further reforms. Bridgetown has already channelled hundreds of billions into building stable countries with a secure future – something that benefits all of us. Now we all need to raise our adaptation ambitions.
The post Hurricane Melissa’s destruction shows need for climate resilience push appeared first on Climate Home News.
Hurricane Melissa’s destruction shows need for climate resilience push
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by