#CIFdelivers Results and Resilience in Small Island Developing States in The Caribbean

Six Caribbean countries and regional organizations gathered in Dominica in April 2024 to unpack results data from 13 years of resilience programming, with one regional track and 19 projects, worth more than $440 million in total – including 276.5 million in co-financing.

“Data is important. How do we collect the data? How do we analyze that data?” asked Dominica’s Cozier Frederick, Minister for Environment, Rural Modernization, Kalinago Upliftment, and Constituency Empowerment, during the opening ceremony of a recent workshop gathering almost 40 participants to analyze results from 13 years of Climate Investment Funds’ Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR) in the Caribbean.

Hosted by CIF and Dominica, a small island developing state that successfully bounced back and embraced resilience after devastating Hurricane Maria in September 2017, the workshop convened representatives from six PPCR partner governments - Dominica, Grenada, Haiti, St Lucia, St Vincent & the Grenadines, and Jamaica; multilateral development banks; and regional experts.  

“We spoke about building the first climate-resilient country. Dominica is sort of a petri dish of what small island states are,” explained the Minister during an interview. “This knowledge can be shared. There's a lot we can offer to humanity, to the world.”

Dominica engaged in one project out of 19 implemented by the InterAmerican Development Bank (IDB), the World Bank, and IFC in the region with $167 million of CIF direct funding. Investments in the Caribbean focused on building resilience for people, climate-proofing critical infrastructure, and developing climate information services and technical capacity for strengthened climate-responsive national and sectoral planning.  

In line with CIF’s innovative, country-led approach to monitoring and reporting, the workshop went through several steps to share, assess, and learn from results achieved. This collaborative concept was honed through other investment plans close-out events in Zambia and Indonesia, and rolled out for the first time at regional scale in the Caribbean.

Participants discussed the fact that, in most countries, more than half the population was reached by the PPCR program in one or more ways. In total, almost 6,300 units of small-scale climate-resilient infrastructure, 360 hydromet stations or related climate information services infrastructure, and more than 100 km of climate-resilient roads were built or rehabilitated.  

“Eastern Caribbean countries have really become owners of their own hazard risk data. Now they have geospatial data platforms,“ analyzed World Bank’s Mary Boyer, Disaster Risk Management specialist and Dominica’s Disaster Vulnerability Reduction Lead. “CIF’s climate resilience program has done wonders in transforming the hazard risk information profile around the Caribbean.”

“The regional program itself was about being able to build resilience across countries, a flow of information from countries to the regional track, and information-sharing from the regional track to countries,” explained IDB’s Gerard Alleng, Climate Change Senior Specialist. “But for those things to work you need the institutional capacity. And so, a strong emphasis was strengthening that capacity (…) to manage or address the impacts of climate change.”

The week-long dialogue concluded with participants agreeing that support from CIF, IDB, the World Bank, and IFC to Caribbean countries laid critical—sometimes first-of-its-kind—groundwork for climate resilience mainstreaming in national and sectoral development planning.  

But, as climate risks in the Caribbean and for small island states intensify, more support will be needed. CIF is working on future resilience programming for vulnerable nations and opened the Dominica workshop with an in-depth conversation on how to strengthen the global climate architecture. This dialogue was part of a series of consultations to ensure CIF’s new program meets developing countries’ adaptation finance needs.