Climate Change, Latin America & the Caribbean Meet the U.N.’s New Caribbean-Born Climate Czar

PWH Lightning Scholar Stacy-ann Robinson's research on climate loss and damage is featured in Foreign Policy's Latin America Brief.

This week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres named former Grenadian Environment Minister Simon Stiell as the new chief of U.N. climate negotiations...

Stiell’s appointment suggests rich countries may have more difficulty blocking their poorer counterparts’ demands for climate reparations than they have in the past. Grenada, alongside its Caribbean neighbors and other small island states, has for years advocated for money to be set aside within the U.N. framework not only for preventing future warming and adapting built environments for its effects, but also for compensating countries for those consequences of warming that are impossible to adapt to, such as hurricanes...

Such funding could take many forms. The Alliance of Small Island States, of which Grenada is part, has proposed a global insurance program for loss and damage since as far back as 1991; in its most recent workshops on the issue this month, it also weighed the possibility of debt-for-climate swaps as a funding mechanism, which would see portions of a country’s debt forgiven if it finances environmental projects. Jamaican environmental studies scholar Stacy-ann Robinson and co-authors wrote in the journal Climate Policy this month that new taxes on airline travel and fossil fuel extraction would most appropriately meet the loss and damage needs of small island and developing states from a climate justice perspective.

Read more in Foreign Policy's "Latin America Brief" >>