by Nimi Iti

Created on: April 05, 2008

While climate change has become a hot-topic in the media today, few have experienced the ravaging impacts first-hand as much as the citizens of Small Island developing states (SIDS). The low-lying lands, inherent susceptibility to natural disasters, excessive dependence on trade, sheer remoteness of location and small but rapidly growing populations of these Islands makes them more vulnerable than most regions to the effects of climate change even though they do very little to contribute to the causes.

Before Hurricane Ivan swept through the Caribbean Island of Grenada in 2004, the Island's economy was forecast to grow by just below five percent for that year and average out at five percent for the following three years. After Ivan, economic activity for 2004 declined to minus 1.4 percent(1) as the hurricane destroyed most of the Islands infrastructure and 80 percent of its primary export-the nutmeg crop.(2) The country lost 200 percent of its GDP. Grenada reacted in the last few years by not only reinforcing and increasing coastal barriers, but also by diversifying its economy to include tourism and knowledge-based industries while carrying out disaster management training for its populace. Such is how drastic the impacts of climate change and the resulting adaptation measures can be.

Small Islands cannot avoid adaptation. For them, climate change is as real as daylight and adapting to its already present or future impacts is a daily affair.
At local levels, this can be as simple as placing concrete blocks on zinc roofs to prevent them from being blown away by strong hurricane winds or by relocating vulnerable populations when the threat of a disaster is imminent.

It is not all reactive action, however. Small Islands are doing their own part to reduce the effects of their existence on the environment. Since they are made up of small localised communities cut off from the rest of the world, they are ideal locations for renewable energy projects that would adequately cater for their respective energy needs. Such projects are springing up every day in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) states. From solar generating plants in Barbados to biomass cogeneration plants in Belize, Caribbean nations have truly bitten the renewable energy bullet.

These massive restructuring programmes are difficult for small Islands and indeed developing countries to undertake however, because of the high costs of financing the projects. This brings us to the question of who should pay for

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