Small Island States Lead, Innovating for Climate Solutions

In Samoa recently, villagers gathered on the side of a road overlooking the ocean to review maps on an iPad. Since 2012, this strip of coastline – long prized for its fishing and other resources – has suffered multiple cyclones and storms, devastating farms and communities.

The cards used by the villagers are not ordinary cards. Aircraft-mounted laser imagery is being used to equip government officials with three-dimensional maps, which communities can use to identify flood and landslide hazards, protect roads and homes, alter travel routes fishing and planning the evacuation.

“This type of aerial imagery is just one of the impressive innovations we are seeing in small island states,” said Ede Ijjasz Vasquez, Senior Director of the Bank Group’s Social, Urban, Rural and Resilience Global Practice. world. “As the community mapping exercise shows, these small nations are not thinking about climate change. They know that sustainable development can only be achieved if we reduce disaster risk.

Samoa is one of 39 small island states on the front lines of climate change and intensifying natural disasters. Just last week, the UN announced that 175 nations had signed the Paris climate treaty and that 15 countries – many of them small island states – had already taken the next step by ratifying the agreement.

“Small island states are the most vulnerable to natural disasters,” said Sofia Bettencourt, operations manager at the Global Fund for Disaster Reduction and Recovery. “Climate change amplifies the risk and increases the costs of disasters.”

The journal Nature Climate Change estimates that up to 73% of island states – home to 16 million people – will face increasingly drier conditions by mid-century as sea levels continue to erode the ribs. And a United Nations report released late last year found that future disaster losses pose “an existential threat” to small island states, where expected annual losses amount to nearly 20% of social spending. compared to just 1.9% in North America and less than 1% in Europe and Central Asia.

“Recurrent losses from national disasters and climate variability create a ‘leaky bucket’ effect that undermines growth and increases national debt,” Bettencourt said. “Jamaica’s economic growth, for example, could have approached 4% per year in the absence of tropical cyclones – instead, it has averaged 0.8% over the past 40 years. Resilience is at the heart of the development challenge for small island states.

Many small island states are developing tools, models and institutions to resist climate change and preserve their unique cultures. But faced with geographic isolation, limited resources and small economies of scale, most small island states face enormous challenges in funding and managing resilience.

Between 2010 and 2014, many small island countries were managing 15-20 projects each, placing a huge administrative burden on a small number of operational staff. The vast majority of projects were under $1.5 million, but only contributed 10% of the total funding.

However, best practices are emerging. At the very beginning of the 2000s, most Caribbean countries were managing several small projects of 1 to 5 million dollars each. A decade later, eight Eastern Caribbean countries, including Dominica and Saint Lucia, were directly managing resilience programs of $20-70 million each. Intensive, hands-on implementation support has been crucial in helping island nations scale up their investments in line with the challenges – bringing the World Bank’s annual support for resilience in small island states to an average of $180 million. dollars per year.

World Bank support includes:

• The Small Island States Resilience Initiative (SISRI), with a team of 45 specialists from across the World Bank. Through SISRI, the Bank is helping small island states access financing and global expertise, as well as piloting debt-for-resilience swaps to help countries buy back high-cost commercial debt to freeing up funds for the basic needs of sustainable development.
• A new Small States Secretariat, building support for the issue within the World Bank.
• Increased collaboration with development partners in Australia, Japan, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the Asian Development Bank, in a joint effort to increase the resilience of small island states.
• A Forum on Resilience in Island Nations, to be held on May 16 in Venice, will bring together officials from more than 20 Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean/African countries. Facilitated by the World Bank, the forum aims to share project ideas, exchange best practices and build a network of practitioners.