Saying there isn’t enough time between last month’s special summit in Trinidad to meet again so soon, Caribbean Community leaders have called off a planned informal summit this weekend to iron out a series of issues, including preparation for the annual global climate change summit in the United Arab Emirates from the end of November to mid-December, officials said this week.
Current bloc Chairman and Prime Minister of Dominica Roosevelt Skerrit had floated the idea of an informal session in Dominica, but the Guyana-based community secretariat announced the cancellation Monday, saying there are too many competing interests for the summit to take place.
The bloc of 15- nations, from Guyana and Suriname in coastal South America to Belize in Central America and Haiti in the center, wants to properly prepare for this year’s COP 28 climate summit as the region continues to express disappointment with Western and other polluting nations. The region is demanding that they fork out billions to help the Caribbean and other nations, feeling the growing negative effects of a changing climate, adapt to the changes and mitigate the effects.
The region has had an impressive showing at the last two summits, with Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley functioning as the de facto spokesperson for the region, but most governments say they are disappointed with unfulfilled promises by polluting nations to provide climate financing for developing nations, many of them the victims of changing weather patterns including stronger and more deadly hurricanes.
Skerrit said recently that the leaders needed to meet without the fanfare of a formal summit to iron out some key issues, including the free movement of people in the bloc, the worsening crime situation in the region, barriers to effective trade, and changing trends in the geopolitical arena.
“COP 28 is coming. We need to have a clearly defined and cohesive position going into COP 28, where every one of us will speak from the same hymn sheet. There is also the need for climate financing, the need for the reform and transformation of the international finance system and architecture so that we can have a better deal for ourselves in the Caribbean,” said Skerrit.
Caricom and other Third World nations have been pressing the developed world to fulfill promises to set aside $100 billion to help the worst affected countries, but the Belize-based Caribbean Community Climate Change Center says the West is shifting the proverbial goalpost.
“The US$100 billion by 2020, when it was agreed, was seen as the floor. It is now seen as the ceiling. Even the most creative of accounting has shown that they have not achieved that. The last that we saw from the climate policy institute is them coming in at US$83.3 billion, and this includes everything under the sun. So even with that, you find that they are US$17 billion short. They still have some way to go,” said the center. “The world does have that amount of money. We need only look at the Ukraine War. We see what happened under COVID-19 and what they were able to do. It is not a lack of money. It is a lack of desire.”
Other key issues for the now abandoned summit had included an extensive discussion on countries allowing any Caricom national to freely travel within the region without restrictions by next March, as this is seen as a key component to free trade.
No new date has been fixed for the informal summit, the secretariat said.
