- SIDS Nations Face Worsening Climate Conditions, Warns SVG PM
On Monday, St. Vincent Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves stated that developed countries have not fulfilled their commitments to SIDS nations. According to Gonsalves, developed countries are not meeting their pledges in terms of official development assistance, which are grants.
“They are not fulfilling their 2009 commitment.” In Copenhagen, they discussed doing $100 billion USD per year for developing countries affected by climate change starting in 2020. That hasn’t happened. Nothing has happened. I don’t see any of that money.”
“The loss and damage fund. They set it up at Sharm el-Sheikh at the Conference of Parties in Egypt, at the 2017 edition of the Conference of Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. They established the fund without any financial backing. A fund without any money is an oxymoron. During the 2018 edition in Dubai, several countries contributed modest amounts of money. Nothing is very significant. We must consistently emphasise this point”.
“That’s for loss and damage. What about helping me with things to prevent loss and damage by taking upfront monies, granting soft loans for me to deal with my bridges and my roads, my sea defences and river defences, and to build ports that are resilient, hospitals that are resilient, and schools that are resilient?”.
Gonsalves said the Ida International Development Association is an important source of money, and there are proposals to make that funding or terms harder.
“As you are aware, they have internally presented a proposal to tighten the terms.” Small island developing states are those with economies where the per capita income per head annually exceeds 7,000, or roughly $7,900 US. St. Vincent’s numbers have exceeded that threshold. And so to Saint Lucia, Dominica, and Grenada. And they want to harden those terms.”
“Over the whole period, between 2 and 3%. They now aim to increase the rate to between three and over 6%. And they want to reduce the 50-year period to 10 years. Grace period: Sometimes 45 years, sometimes 10 years. They want to reduce that to 35 years with ten years of grace and to increase the amount of interest roughly from 3% to about 6%.”
“You can’t really adapt to climate change unless you get cheap, long-term money. I know what people say in public. But why? Why are you looking for that? I don’t know why some sections of our population still don’t understand the simple fact that there’s something called climate change, and we are not responsible for it.”
“If a noxious substance from your neighbor’s property enters yours, you have the right to sue them. If they run the wastewater into your yard and mash it up, you can receive compensation. I’m doing this by analogy. And global warming, this refers to the process through which greenhouse gases enter the atmosphere. Historically in the contemporary period. Once it goes there, historically, it doesn’t get lost, is there? The weather patterns have changed, too. For small island developing states, the climate situation has deteriorated”, according to Gonsalves.
