The island of Barbados has been calling on wealthy nations to fund climate change solutions to mitigate the harm that disproportionately affects small nations.
A demonstrator displays hands that read “pay up” during a protest for climate finance at the COP29 U.N. Climate Summit, 23 November 2024, in Baku, Azerbaijan. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)
Editor’s note: COP29, the United Nation’s gathering of nations on climate change actions and funding, ended 22 November with a pledge that wealthy nations will pay a total of $300 billion a year in grants and low-interest loans to poor nations to mitigate the effects of climate change and transition to a low carbon economy.
But this was seen as insufficient; the poorer nations, led in part by the small nation of Barbados, had called on their wealthier counterparts to pledge more than a trillion dollars per year. In this Decoder Replay, we republish a story by correspondent Susanne Courtney, originally published September 2023, that explains the Bridgetown Initiative — a proposal for a restructuring of global finance to help small nations adapt to climate change. We launched Decoder Replay to help readers better understand current world events by seeing how our correspondents decoded similar events in the past.
Climate change is affecting the world in all kinds of ways. But while wealthy countries can afford the necessary investments to address and mitigate the effects of climate-related events and adapt their economies, low and middle-income nations don’t have those resources.
For many developing nations, much-needed investments are financially impossible when they already have too much debt to pay and the interest rates they pay on that debt are higher than those wealthy countries would pay.
That’s where the Bridgetown Initiative comes in.
It was proposed at the 2022 session of the United Nations General Assembly by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley. Her plan, the most comprehensive restructuring of the system for global finance since 1944 and updated this spring, proposes a set of reforms and calls for a tripling of low-interest loans and grants to the world’s poorest countries and the setting up of a fund to mitigate and rebuild after natural disasters.
Mottley became the voice for developing nations and, particularly, island states such as Barbados who face the immediate perils of climate change but contribute little to global warming.
Moving a slow world to take fast action on climate change
Before that, there was little political will to move on finance reforms, said Bianca Getzel, Research Officer at the London-based think tank ODI. “[Bridgetown] gave political leaders the will to move ahead with bigger discussions. [It] gave us the impetus to think outside of the box … The timing was right.”
Avinash Persaud, Mottley’s climate finance envoy and the economist and architect of the Bridgetown Initiative, has said that reform plans are gaining sup