Barbados’ $11.5 billion investment plan for climate resilience demands urgent collective action, Senator Shantal Munro-Knight warned, urging Barbadians to harden their resolve and unite in facing the escalating crisis head-on.
Senator Munro-Knight, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, delivered this message as the Climate Finance for Action Empowerment Partnership in Barbados workshop opened on Friday at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
Senator Munro-Knight said the reality of climate change was “too urgent, too present, too real, almost too tomorrow” for the country to step back or slow down.
“We, unlike others, don’t have the space to step back from how we confront the challenge that we are facing,” she said. “This is not one the government can do alone. It requires consensus and a hardening of our resolve that we will face this challenge by innovating and standing together through partnerships.”
The minister said that Small Island Developing States like Barbados are constantly forced to make hard choices, balancing the need to build climate resilience with the responsibility to keep essential services like education, housing, and water running.
“Very often, we don’t want to engage in the hard choices of where and how government finances,” she admitted. “But those are the choices that we have to make.”
She pointed to the country’s growing need for strategic partnerships that can unlock serious investment to help Barbados act decisively, not reactively.
“In 2024, Barbados launched an investment plan for building resilience and prosperity,” she reminded the audience. “That plan estimated that we needed an $11.5 billion investment to address critical elements of building resilience. It projected that $6.6 billion would have to come from private capital, and $5.5 billion from government resources.”
She noted that the Roofs to Reefs Programme, which focuses on linking environmental protection from the island’s rooftops to its reefs, is developing its own investment plan to measure what it would take to fund climate and environmental resilience.
Senator Munro-Knight highlighted some of the concrete steps the government has already taken to strengthen how Barbados plans, tracks, and pays for climate-related projects.
Among them was the introduction of climate budget tagging in 2023, a system that allows the government to track exactly how much public spending goes towards climate action.
She also mentioned amendments to the Procurement Act in 2024, which are designed to make government spending more sustainable, and Barbados’ innovative debt conversion programme, which restructured high-interest debt to free up nearly $50 million for a sustainability fund to support projects across government, the private sector, and civil society.
Another major step was the Blue Green Development Bank, created with financing from the Green Climate Fund, to attract private capital and grants for climate-resilient investments.
Despite the global economic uncertainty, Senator Munro-Knight said there could be no backing down from Barbados’ climate commitments.
“As hostile as the global economy is now, as uncertain as it is, and as finances are shrinking, there must be no retreat on our part,” she insisted. “We must continue to think innovatively about how we crowd in and press finance and international agencies for a widening of space.”
Still, she admitted that government could do a better job of helping people understand why these measures matter.
“Those of us who understand, who get it, have a critical responsibility to bring others along,” she said. “There must be no retreat.”
The Director of the Roofs to Reefs Programme Ricardo Marshall made a passionate case for reform of what he described as an unfair global financial system that continues to disadvantage small island states like Barbados.
He said that while Caribbean countries are innovating and managing their economies responsibly, they still face major barriers when trying to access affordable financing for climate projects.
“What we need for ourselves is action, at the national, the community, and the individual level,” he said. “And that is where Roofs to Reefs comes in.”
Marshall argued that developing nations are being punished by outdated criteria that don’t reflect their true vulnerabilities.
“The system itself is stacked against us,” he said. “It’s not that we aren’t doing the work, it’s that the structure we have to work within keeps moving the goalposts.”
He lamented that the financing currently available isn’t nearly enough for islands repeatedly battered by disasters.
Referring to the COP30 loss and damage fund, he said:
“The fund has $738 million in it. If you count [Hurricane] Beryl in Barbados, Grenada, and St Vincent and the Grenadines, that $738 million is spent. If you count what occurred in Pakistan with these most recent floods, not even the major ones of last year, that fund is spent a hundred times over.”
Marshall said the Roofs to Reefs Programme is determined to keep finding creative ways to bridge that gap.
“We’ve been putting programmes in place to be innovative in our thinking, how do we access financing, and how do we use what we access as a catalyst to build more? It has made us a leader globally in how we approach climate finance.”
He added that the next step is to ensure that science directly informs both policy and programming, and that every bit of progress and every dollar saved is put to use in building a more resilient Barbados. (LG)
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