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Accelerating the Caribbean’s
climate resilience
By Jewel Fraser
PORT-OF-SPAIN , Feb. 26, 2019 (IPS)
— The Caribbean Climate Smart Accelerator
launched last year June with the
backing of Virgin’s Richard Branson has
given itself five years to help the region
become climate resilient.
Its CEO Racquel Moses, who was
appointed in January of this year, told
IPS the climate smart accelerator
sees itself as an enabler in paving the
path towards climate resilience for the
region. “The horizon for the climate
smart accelerator is just five years.
We are meant to be a catalyst to get
things started. Governments will have
the ability to take things forward after
that,” she said.
Their primary agenda during that
five-year period will be to launch five
major,“transformational” projects that
will move the region forward towards
becoming a climate smart zone, she
said.
The idea for the accelerator was floated
following the devastating 2017 hurricane
season which saw two Category
Five hurricanes that severely damaged
a number of islands, including Necker
Island owned by Richard Branson, and
left scores dead.
In the wake of that devastation, an
interim team comprising management
of Branson’s charitable foundation, Virgin
Unite, and Inter-American Development
Bank staff members got together
and hammered out the idea to make the
Caribbean a climate smart zone, said
Neil Parsan, public sector lead for the
climate smart accelerator. They defined
a climate smart Caribbean as one that
“modernises digital, physical and social
infrastructure to integrate essential
activities that are climate adaptive, mitigative
and secure a low-carbon future
for the region,” he said.
Despite the Caribbean being responsible
for less than five percent of global
greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, its
growth rate in emissions between 1990
and 2011 was three times the global
average, according to a 2017 USAID
report. So 28 governments in Latin
America and the Caribbean have eagerly
aligned themselves with the accelerator’s
objective of making the region
a climate smart zone, as have major
institutions including the World Bank,
the Organisation of American States,
the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean
States and the Caribbean Community,
Parsan said.
Moses said the accelerator was “working
in tandem” with regional governments
to coordinate activities related to
climate change. “I have been surprised
at how aggressively regional governments
have been working on the issue
of climate change. We are further along
with some governments than with others,”
she said. But generally, “they have
been quite excited to get involved.”
The five transformational projects
she is seeking to have completed over
Racquel Moses was appointed in
January as CEO of the Caribbean
Climate Smart Accelerator, an initiative
backed by the World Bank and
Virgin’s Richard Branson to make
the region resilient in the face of climate
change.
Inter Press Service / Jewel Fraser
the next five years would also be carried
out with governmental support,
she said. To qualify as one of the five, a
project has to be low carbon, make use
of renewable energy, have an impact on
a large number of people, be scalable
across several countries in the region,
create climate-related jobs, and have
the potential to be exported outside of
the region, she added.
Parsan said dozens of projects are
currently under consideration, but the
challenge for the Accelerator’s team was
“being able to identify mature, bankable,
investable, impactful projects that
align themselves to the strategic goals
of the accelerator.” Though most of
the projects under consideration meet
some of the criteria, all do not meet
every single criterion.
Once the five major projects that
the accelerator will be working on
are identified, the team will need to
source funding to help them get up
and running. “We are actually working
at putting together teams that can
address this funding,” Moses said. She
noted that Barbados’ Prime Minister
Mia Mottley had expressed the desire to
see a regional climate investment fund
created that would bankroll climate
change projects while giving investors a
better return on their investments than
the current market rate.
The accelerator’s team had met with
managers of global funds “to find out
legally how they work, and how to get
multiple funders, multiple countries,
multiple companies working together.”
Though she declined to specify what
types of projects are currently under
consideration, for reasons of confidentiality,
Moses said all projects identified
must move the region forward
to achieving its climate smart goals,
including having a low carbon footprint.
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