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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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
Climate Change
Revealed: Scientists tell Colombia fossil-fuel transition summit to ‘halt new expansion’
Countries attending a first-of-its-kind fossil-fuel summit have been asked to consider “action recommendations” such as “halting all new fossil-fuel expansion” and “reject[ing] gas as a bridging fuel”, according to a preliminary scientific report seen by Carbon Brief.
Around 50 nations will gather in Santa Marta, Colombia from 24-29 April to debate ways to “transition away” from fossil fuels, in the face of worsening climate change and sky-high oil prices.
The talks come after a large group of nations campaigned for, but ultimately failed, to get all countries to formally agree to a “roadmap” away from fossil fuels at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil in November.
The nations gathering in Santa Marta for the summit co-hosted by Colombia and the Netherlands, call themselves the “coalition of the willing”.
Ahead of country officials arriving in Santa Marta, a global group of academics will gather in the city this week to present and discuss the latest scientific evidence on fossil-fuel phaseout, which will then inform debate among policymakers.
A preliminary scientific “synthesis report” circulated to governments attending the talks and seen by Carbon Brief offers 12 “action insights” for countries to consider, along with a wide range of “action recommendations”.
These recommendations range from “phase out subsidies on fossil-fuel production and consumption” to “kick-start a forum to develop a legal framework to ban fossil-fuel advertisements”.
‘Rapid’ assessment
The preliminary scientific report seen by Carbon Brief – titled, “Action insights for the Santa Marta process” – is the result of some rapid work by an “ad-hoc” group of around 24 scientists.
It is designed to present governments attending the talks with concrete and actionable recommendations for transitioning away from fossil fuels.
The preliminary version, which includes recommendations such as “halting all new fossil fuel expansion”, has already been circulated to governments, with a view that this could help them to prepare for the talks in advance.
It will be further debated and refined by scientists attending the academic segment of the Santa Marta talks, before a final version is made public towards the end of April, Carbon Brief understands.
The process to produce the report began shortly after the conclusion of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil in November, explains its lead author, Dr Friedrich Bohn, a research scientist and co-founder of the Earth Resilience Institute in Germany. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When [Brazil] announced there would be a Santa Marta conference led by Colombia and the Netherlands, I was sitting listening with a small group of scientists. We thought: ‘This is great news, but it should be supported by scientific expertise.’”
One of the members of Bohn’s group had a pre-existing relationship with the Colombian government, allowing a dialogue to quickly be established, he continues:
“In the beginning, the idea was to just write a peer-reviewed paper. But, because of this close connection to the Colombian government and some feedback from them, the synthesis paper evolved.”
The report came out of a “very rapidly evolved process” that relied on the “goodwill” and “enthusiasm” of the academics involved, adds coordinating author Prof Frank Jotzo, a professor of climate change economics at Australian National University. (Jotzo is a former Carbon Brief contributing editor.) He tells Carbon Brief:
“It’s an attempt to get broad coverage on relevant topics from researchers with good expertise and reputation.”
The group of 24 scientists involved spent around two months compiling the “action insights” for the report, drawing on their expertise and the latest available research, says Jotzo.
Given the rapid nature of the report, it does not aim to be “completist”, has not been externally reviewed and did not follow a stringent process for author selection comparable to that used by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, he adds.
The contributors to the report currently skew to the global north and include more men than women, adds Bohn.
‘Direct guidance’
In a departure from IPCC reports, the preliminary Santa Marta synthesis report offers “very direct guidance to action”, says Jotzo.
The report lists 12 “action insights”, each with three “action recommendations”. (The list was cut down from a shortlist of about 40-50 insights, Carbon Brief understands.)
One of the most striking in the draft is “action insight 5”, which says:
“Take immediate measures to prevent future emissions. Ban new fossil infrastructure, mandate deep methane cuts, accelerate electrification and inscribe fossil-fuel phase-down targets in NDCs [nationally determined contributions] and clean-energy pathways support to low and middle income countries (LMICs).”
The accompanying three “action recommendations” include “halting all new fossil-fuel extraction and infrastructure projects ahead of a final investment decision”, “implementing deep, legally binding methane cuts in the energy sector” and “inscrib[ing] targets for fossil-fuel phase down, electrification and green exports in NDCs”.
(The draft report includes multiple references to “phasing out” and “phasing down” fossil fuels, rather than the “transition away from fossil fuels” language that was, ultimately, agreed by countries at the COP28 UN climate talks in Dubai in 2023.)
Another action insight says “public support for climate action is broadly underestimated and undermined by interest groups, but it can be strengthened by debunking greenwashing narratives”.
One recommendation for this insight is that nations “reject natural gas as a bridging technology and CCS [carbon capture and storage] techniques as scalable compensation”.
In a letter introducing the report to governments and civil society, the scientists note that making direct recommendations is a “challenge for our community”, but added:
“However, in the spirit of a constructive collaboration between science and policymaking, we allowed ourselves to identify some potential courses of action that our community would recommend for each particular issue – and we invite you to weigh these against your own circumstances and pick up whatever seems most useful for you and your colleagues.”
The prescriptiveness of the recommendations – something strictly prohibited in IPCC reports – was an explicit request from the Colombian government, Bohn says:
“The idea of actionable recommendations was introduced by the Colombian government.
“There was some discussion within the team about this. It’s a tricky area when you leave science and move to consultation. Therefore, we agreed, in the end, to call them ‘actionable recommendations’ and to make them as precise as possible, from the scientific perspective.”
Jotzo, a veteran of the IPCC process, tells Carbon Brief that it was “very liberating” to work on a report with a “free-form process”:
“The bulk of policy-related research is very readily deployed to recommendations pointing out what countries could do. The IPCC process, for example, just doesn’t allow that. As far as the summary for policymakers in the IPCC is concerned, it will usually be governments that filter out anything that could be interpreted as a specific recommendation.”
He adds that the hope is that some of the action insights might be reflected in the high-level segment of the Santa Marta conference:
“No one is under any illusions that governments will walk away from the Santa Marta conference and will have made a decision to implement recommendations one, seven and nine – or something like that. But it is a chance to insert directly applicable action points into national and plurilateral policy agendas.”
Colombia calling
The preliminary report will be further debated and refined by scientists attending the “pre-academic segment” of the Santa Marta talks.
This is taking place from 24-26 April, ahead of the “high-level segment” involving ministers and other policymakers from 28-29 April.
The pre-academic segment will also separately see the launch of a new advisory panel on fossil-fuel transition and a scientifically led roadmap for how Colombia can transition away from fossil fuels, Carbon Brief understands.
The high-level segment is expected to be attended by representatives from around 50 countries, including COP31 host Turkey and major oil-and-gas producers such as the UK, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Norway.
Countries expected to attend account for one-third of global fossil-fuel demand and one-fifth of global production, according to the Colombian government.
At the end of the conference, countries are due to release a report featuring a “menu of solutions” for transitioning away from fossil fuels, according to Colombia’s environment minister Irene Vélez Torres.
This report is in turn set to inform a global “roadmap” on transitioning away from fossil fuels being developed by the Brazilian COP30 presidency, which is due to be presented at COP31 in Turkey this November.
The Brazilian COP30 presidency offered to bring forward a “voluntary” fossil-fuel transition “roadmap” outside of the official COP process, after countries failed to formally agree to one during negotiations in Belém.
The post Revealed: Scientists tell Colombia fossil-fuel transition summit to ‘halt new expansion’ appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Revealed: Scientists tell Colombia fossil-fuel transition summit to ‘halt new expansion’
Technical Assessment of Woodside’s Browse Pygmy Blue Whale Management Plan
To secure their approvals, Woodside had to develop a plan for how they would manage the significant risks to threatened green turtles if the project proceeds. We’ve had two independent scientists provide a technical assessment of Woodside’s management plan for whales and turtles and their findings are gobsmacking.
Woodside’s Browse gas project could make Scott Reef’s unique green turtles extinct.
Woodside’s Browse gas project could delay or prevent the population recovery of the endangered pygmy blue whales that rely on Scott Reef, heightening their extinction risk.
Technical Assessment of Woodside’s Browse Turtle Management Plan
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Reporting for this story was supported by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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