Turning Vulnerability into Innovation: The Climate Solutions Emerging from Small Islands

In this week’s episode of Climate Confident, I sit down with Emily Wilkinson, Principal Research Fellow at ODI Global and Director of the Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative (RESI), to explore one of the most pressing and least discussed frontlines of the climate crisis: small island developing states (SIDS).

These 39 nations, scattered across the Caribbean, Pacific and Indian Ocean, contribute less than 1% of global emissions yet face the most existential threats, from rising seas and saltwater intrusion to increasingly frequent Category 5 hurricanes. Emily explains why Dominica’s 2017 disaster, damage equivalent to 226% of its GDP, was a turning point, sparking its bold ambition to become the world’s first climate-resilient nation.

We also dive into the financial side of resilience. Emily outlines groundbreaking tools such as climate-resilient debt clauses, debt-for-nature swaps, and pooled insurance schemes, innovations that give vulnerable economies breathing space after disasters. She shares examples of islands turning challenges into opportunities, like converting invasive sargassum seaweed into clean biogas, deploying floating solar in lagoons, and tapping geothermal energy beneath volcanic islands.

We discuss the Bridgetown Initiative spearheaded by Mia Mottley, which is reshaping global climate finance debates, and how small island leaders are punching above their weight on the international stage.

If you want to understand why SIDS are both the most vulnerable and the most innovative actors in the climate fight, and what their experiments can teach the rest of us, this is an episode you won’t want to miss.

Listen now to hear how small islands are rewriting the rules of resilience.

Also check out Emily's podcast - Small Islands, Big Picture

Sign up to Climate Confident+ for deep dive analysis of the major climate and energy stories of the day.

Transcript

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When people talk about an existential threat, they may be talking about quite a few things, but your whole landmass disappearing is about as existential as you can get. Right. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. Welcome to episode 239 of the Climate Confident Podcast, the go-to show for best practices in climate emissions reductions. I'm your host, Tom Raftery. And before we get started, a quick reminder. This podcast now has a subscription option. For just five euros or dollars a month you can unlock the full back catalog of hundreds of conversations with climate leaders who are actually moving the needle. Subscribers also, get a personal shout out here in the show plus direct access to me so you can pitch new directions, guests and ideas for Climate Confident. Everyone else still gets the most recent 30 days of episodes for free. But if you want the archive and a hand on the steering wheel, hit the subscribe link in the show notes. No new subscribers this week, but if you've been on the fence, now's the time to join. Now let's turn to today's conversation. We talk a lot about energy transitions, corporate pledges, and big policy shifts, but what about the countries that did the least to cause the climate crisis and yet face the sharpest edge of the impacts? I'm talking about the world's small island developing states. Entire nations where rising seas, stronger storms, and fragile economies mean climate change is not an abstract future, it's an existential threat. My guest today, Emily Wilkinson, is a Principle Research Fellow at ODI Global and Director of the Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative. She's also served as Chief scientific advisor to Dominica's Climate Resilience Agency, helping steer the island towards its bold vision of becoming the world's first climate resilient nation. Emily brings decades of experience on disaster risk, finance and adaptation, and she's here to share both the stark realities and the inspiring innovations from climate resilient debt clauses to turning invasive seaweed into clean fuel, that Island nations are pioneering. Emily, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. So my name's Emily Wilkinson. I'm a Principal Research Fellow at ODI Global, which is a global affairs think tank based in London. And I'm also director of something called the Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative RESI, which is a global advisory network for small island developing states. Okay. And before we get into that, give us a little bit about your background. Emily. How did you get into all this? So I have been working as a researcher for about 20, 25 years, and before that I was a journalist. And most of my, time working as a researcher, I've been focused on disasters, disaster risk management, governance, finance. Starting to look at disasters that are happening because of climate change and what we can do about that. And about 10, 12 years ago my work really started to center around the particular issues that small islands are facing. I think, you know, they have a particular set of problems and, you know, really complex challenges. And I thought, if I'm gonna focus on something as a researcher, if I'm working on disasters and complex risks, and climate change impacts, then these are the places in the world that I want to be focusing on. And what's surprised you most in that journey? What have, what have you found that has, impacted you most or surprised you most in that time? Yeah, I mean, I think what I started to see as I, as my work focused more and more on these small and sometimes very remote places, is that they are small. I guess it's really obvious, but they're, they're, they're never gonna be big, right? They're never gonna have huge populations. They're never gonna have more land space. They're never gonna have like more options really and, and what they can do. Places you can move people if you know they're located in an area that's regularly flooded, like you just don't have those kind of options like you have with bigger, larger countries, bigger economies and so on. What has really impressed their resilience and their ability to, you know, find ways around these kind of constraints that they have, you know and also to be able to say that to the world, to be able to get together as a group of countries. There's 39 of these small island developing states. So that's, you know, quite a few countries, still very small population to get together and say you know, we are facing these challenges and some of them are not of our making. Their contribution to climate change is really less than 1%. We need you to help us to deal with the consequences. And they've been very, very vocal and had some success in doing that. So, you know, I think that's an issue that has, you know, it's becoming increasingly important for them to have that kind of voice internationally. And I've been really impressed by that. And you said there's 39 of them. How do you define a small island nation? Because I mean, I come from Ireland, not a very big island, very small population, 5 million people. But I'm sure Ireland wouldn't classify as a small island nation in, in under your definition. There's three sort of parts of that definition. There's the small and the islands and the developing part of it, right? So small as in small territories. Yeah, they know these are not like big islands like Australia. So yeah, smaller, smaller places in terms of territory. They're islands, so they do tend to be surrounded by water, although actually a couple of them in the category are attached to a continent. So like Belize and Guyana are in the Americas. They're not islands, but they have very, very similar characteristics. So they're included in the group. They have very long coastlines and most of the population lives on the coast and they're very vulnerable to the same sort of risks and threats that islands are. And then the other part of it is developing. So they're not countries that have high income countries or have in industrialised countries or have very, very high levels of development in the way that Ireland does. So Ireland might have been a small island developing state, maybe a hundred years ago, if we had that classification then, which we didn't. So the classification has emerged also out of having a, you know, a UN system. A multilateral system and groups of countries coming together to to work on similar issues, on issues of, of common interest. Like we also have the least developed countries category, the LDC category, which is a group of countries with lower levels of development that have special sort of treatment and access to certain kinds of support. And for those who might not be familiar, can you paint us a picture of the unique challenges that small island developing states face in the climate crisis? Yeah, so I mean this, this is really really complicated. Because of where they're located. I'll start with that, the geographies. About 85, 90% of them are located in the tropics. So they're between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, which means that they are more likely to experience tropical cyclones or very, very strong winds and heavy rainfall that comes with it. That happens. That all happens in the tropics, right? And because they're islands, they're, you know, particularly vulnerable to tropical cyclones or hurricanes as they're called in the Caribbean. Because people don't have another place to go. They can't kind of go in land or into a more sheltered area that's a lot harder. So they're in the tropics. They're also located quite a lot of them near plate boundaries. So means that they are in areas that are likely to be affected by earthquakes because of the way that they've many thousands of years ago broke away from continents. And then some of them are what we call Atoll states, which means that they were created out of very, very old volcanoes that sunk. And then around on the crater of the volcano they started kind of developing corals and then more kind of vegetation and eventually sort of very thin strips of land, which people built houses and, settled on particularly in the Pacific. And, and the Maldives and the Indian Ocean is an, a atoll state. So they are, perhaps the most vulnerable of all to climate change. And that's because of course, one of the things that's happening with climate change is that we are seeing sea levels rise around the world very gradually. But for countries that don't have any land area that's much over, two meters above sea level you know, some of them less. This is very, very significant. If the, the level of the sea is going up, not just occasionally when there's a storm and you know, you get a big wave, but actually permanently as the ice caps melt and there's more water in the sea and the sea levels and it's, and it's hotter, so the water is expanding. Some of these islands are going to be completely submerged by the end of the century. So they are the definition of this existential threat that climate change poses. When people talk about an existential threat, they may be talking about quite a few things, but your whole landmass disappearing is about as existential as you can get. Right. So, you know, there's, that's the, you know, not, that's not gonna happen to all of the small island developing states. Some of them do have like mountainous areas. Some of them are volcanic, so they have peaks and but there'll be a lot less land as the coastal areas that become eroded and sea levels rise. There'll be a lot less kind of land area for them to for people to build on and build their houses on and have roads and so on. So, they face very, very high levels of, of vulnerability to climate change. In the meantime of course we are seeing the storms, the tropical storms becoming more frequent, more intense. Though, you know, what we call category five hurricanes or tropical cyclones, they used to be occasionally they would make landfall in the Caribbean. Now we're seeing one of those like practically every year. So, these changes are happening already and having a, a huge impact on these tiny countries and really small economies. And I just take one example. The country of Dominica which has a population of about 70,000 people, was hit by a hurricane in 2017. And it's a category five hurricane. And they, when they the, the, the total impact was assessed like the, the costs of assets and everything that was damaged and, and destroyed. It was calculated at being a 226% of the country's GDP. So that's over twice the amount of what the economy produces in the given year. So you can see how that is like a really, a huge impact. Like how do you, well, it takes years and years to, to recover and rebuild after something like that. Sure, of course. And, I gotta think as well, things like storm surges, it's not just the physical damage it does to the structures and the infrastructure, but also if salt water is going over agricultural land or going into fresh water reserves, it's gonna do significant damage as well, no? Exactly. So, you know, we're seeing the, what they call salt water intrusion, which is affecting as you say, agricultural land affecting crops. Lots of crops, they won't survive. when there's very salty water. And then, and we're seeing, you know, the other way as well, like from the agricultural areas we're seeing like more runoff from chemicals and other products that are used associated with farming going into the sea. And they're also affecting coral reefs and destroying the reefs. Alongside, the coral bleaching, which is happening, which is basically effect of the water being warmer and destroying the coral. So, there's a combination of things happening always. It's never just about climate change. There's also like human activities, which know, we need to start paying more attention to. And, and protecting the ecosystems and biodiversity on the coastal areas because human activities and, and people's livelihoods depend on them entirely. Like in lots of islands, like most people, there'll be some agriculture on some of the larger islands, but most of them, depending on their basic source of protein is fishing. So if the coral reefs are being destroyed and there's less kind of plants and vegetation in the reef and less small fishes. Then, you know, we, we have a complete breakdown in the ecosystem and I think there's been a lot of attention paid to these issues recently. There's the, the, the, the documentary by David Attenborough on Oceans, which I dunno if you've seen, but it's really absolutely kind of nails some of the, the major issues that are affecting all of us globally. And, none of us can afford for the oceans to be destroyed and depleted in that way. But particularly people living in small islands, I mean, they, they depend on it really disproportionately on, on these ocean resources. But tend not to over exploit them. Like they're fishing for their own, diets for, for the, for their own needs rather than this kind of really large scale fisheries. But yeah, I mean it's, these are, these are complex issues and there's lots of different kinds of damage and impact that's happening around coastal areas. We are seeing you know, beaches being eroded and shorelines being eroded. And a lot of, most of the population, 90% of the population of most small island developing states, if not more, is located on the coast. So you know, as are going to have to kind of move somewhere else, move in land, and that's gonna create, you know, lots of problems in terms of crowding as well as being extremely costly. Sure, sure. And, there are some innovative financial tools that islands are starting to use to protect themselves from disasters. Can you walk us through what they look like? This is the maybe the part of it that's like high level. Like maybe it's like we're thinking about this on a different scale, right? But like in Washington DC where we have like the World Bank and then lots of other financial institutions. So a long way away from some of these small islands in the middle of the Pacific or the Indian Ocean, there are changes that are happening in the, the international financial system that are directly responding to the needs and the demands of small island developing states. And I think that's something that I'm pleased to see it's happening. We need. There needs to be kind of more attention paid to the issues and the responses. But things like, so quite a lot of these islands are, have very high levels of debt because of the fact that they have small undiversified economies, they're very reliant on tourism, A lot of them you know, if there's a hurricane or or COVID hits. Right, that tourism like just stops. There's like, zero income at that time until they can kind of get back on their feet and, and, and get people in again. So, and they're having to borrow to recover and respond to a disaster. Increasingly more and more of these small island developing states have very high levels of debt and, they need some, some room to breathe when there is one of these kinds of disasters. So one of the innovations is something called climate resilient debt clauses, which sounds very Yeah, sort of technical or sort of nerdy, but it basically, what it is, it's, it's saying in your, in the debt contract, it basically says if there is a disaster of a certain degree of magnitude, you will not have to pay back the interest on the loan for two years after the event. It's paused. You don't have to pay anything. Of course, it makes the term of the loan longer, you'll still be paying it back like two years later than you would otherwise have been. But you don't owe any money for that two year period. And because it's been agreed in the contract beforehand, it doesn't affect your credit rating, which is really important because if you are seen to be defaulting on debt as a country or indeed as a business, right, then you get downgraded, which means the next time you want to borrow the interest rate is higher. You have to pay more. It's a, a small but really important innovation in, in these sort of financing instruments, they call them. Other countries can take them up. But they've been largely these, these alterations in the debt contract, these climate resilient debt clauses have been taken up by small island developing states. And that's increasingly happening and, and absolutely should be. So that's one thing. We've seen other things like debt for nature swaps, and debt for climate swaps. Basically saying, we'll exchange it with one of the development banks. We'll exchange a really expensive part of our debt. And it'll be bought by the World Bank and they'll offer a lower rate so loan loan back to them at a lower rate and in exchange for that country or government investing the, the, difference in activities that protect biodiversity protect the oceans or climate adaptations. So help them to be better prepared and more resilient to, to climate shock. So basically it's sort of incentive for doing the kind of investment that they would like to be able to do, but just don't have the fiscal space, they just don't have the budget to do it. So we've seen quite a lot of those across the small islands. And you know, they're really just at the forefront of a lot of the thinking around, you know, we need to kind of get better, the financial system needs to get better supporting countries so that they can make the investments that they need to and break up these debt shock recovery cycles and start really investing in things like resilient infrastructure and building coastal defenses and re planting mangroves along the coast.'cause they're really good absorbing shocks like waves larger waves and and stop a lot of the flooding that would otherwise happen. It's really been quite impressive to see these really small countries innovate and, and really push the financial institutions to do more, to to help them and other vulnerable countries to to have the resources available, to respond to the climate threats. And what other innovative things are the small island developing nations doing? You mentioned on the intro call, for example, turning seaweed into clean energy. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, so this is very interesting. The whole of the Caribbean region is being really badly affected by Sargassum which is this very smelly like noxious seaweed, which is now coming up on the shores of Caribbean countries and sort of mainland like Florida down to the Gulf of Mexico and, and Caribbean, coast of Mexico. But particularly badly affecting the, the small islands that are so dependent on tourism for income for, you know, every year. The beaches don't look very nice and, and nobody really wants to go on the beach if there's a whole load of smelly seaweed on the beach. So I mean, they're doing lots of things starting with like monitoring so that they have a better idea of when the season is and monitoring the bodies of, seaweed that are moving closer to the shore so they can be better prepared to clear it out. But also thinking, you know, well what can we do with it? Is there something useful we can do with the, with the seaweed? And try and resolve some of the other issues we have. And Barbados for example is, trying to transition to becoming a hundred percent renewable. So, the timelines will, will probably shift a bit, but in the next sort of five or 10 years, that's the idea. And so, one of the things that will need to happen is that they're going to have to either convert all the engines of the cars or completely ban imports of petrol or diesel cars and only have electric cars in the country. A group of scientists at the University of the West Indies have been looking at how they can use the seaweed to produce a biogas, which can then fuel a car. And so one of, there's one car on the island that the engine has been adapted so that it can actually run off biofuel. Which is a great innovation because it means that you don't actually have to have all electric cars, which, you know, whilst that's, yeah, that's definitely part of the, of the solution of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and certainly larger economies where there is, you know, a lot more vehicles polluting a lot more. But in an island economy, you're always gonna have to find a sort of a balanced approach and a balanced response. People won't necessarily be able to afford electric vehicles. And it's, it is a huge cost, right? To put in chargers and so on. So rather than like having to do that for all vehicles, what if we can just convert the engines and they can run off biofuel? And all that you need is the seaweed of which there is way, a lot, way too much so we can use some of that, manure which is also fairly easy to come by. And the water that sort of that's used in the production of rum so that, you know, the, the Barbados still has some sugar cane plantations and and they produce rum and you can use the kind of waste water from rum production in the process and that's all you need to produce this biogas. So there's very, very small innovations and companies that were set up by researchers doing this. But what they really need now is investment on a slightly larger scale so that they can really, you know, produce this at a level that can be used across the island and becomes more than just a a small example or case study. This is a solution that could be used across the region, across the Caribbean, but also in other countries along, as I mentioned, in sort of mainland Americas that have this problem with Sargassum as well. They could be adopting a similar techniques to produce biofuels. The step that's missing is for people and investors to believe that this kind of excellent solution to two problems could come from a small island and believe in that and invest in that. And I think that that's the next, step really. Okay. And what other low carbon transition innovations are islands pioneering that might surprise people? The other thing that they're grappling with and finding really interesting ways round is and again, sort of looking at how to produce energy locally. So that they're not reliant on importing diesel and, and fossil fuels, which are very expensive, by the way, and have to travel a long way. If you think about some of the islands in the Pacific. They're having to bring fuels in on, on ships that have to travel thousands of kilometers. This is all very expensive and, and means that they're, you know, reliant on these supply chains, which, you know, can easily be disrupted. So they're, thinking about renewable energy, not just because it's good for the planet and of frankly their contribution if they do become a hundred percent renewable or the islands, you know, their, their contribution to reducing greenhouse gas emissions would be sort of pretty insignificant anyway. But, you know, the reason why they're doing it is so that they need to be less reliant on, on imports. But also because the islands are very spread out. So a lot of the Pacific Island, it's not just one or two islands. There's hundreds of islands in the, as part of one state. Most of the people living on some of the, what they call outer islands you know, won't have had electricity anyway, so we're talking about, bringing to islands sources of energy rather than having to kind of convert an existing grid or, or network. So it makes sense absolutely for them to look at ways in which they can produce energy locally. And of course, you know, there's plenty of sun and plenty of supply of solar panels, particularly from China in the Pacific. So that's a bit controversial. But they are, producing kind of pretty accessible, reasonably cheap solar panels. And what some of the islands are looking at now is how can they have solar farms in their lagoon. So they don't have a lot of land area to put their panels in, but they do have a lot of water area. And inside these kind of atolls I mentioned before, which is like thin strip of land around a lagoon there's area there in which that they would be able to have floating solar panels. So this, we are seeing some of these projects begin to take off to have floating solar panels as well as obviously wind and wave energy is, you know, particularly important. It's interesting to see that they are beginning to look at, you know, what, what do we have available? Not huge land areas. We can't have these massive solar farms in the way that larger countries, but, you know, we can put them in water and in the Indian Ocean the Maldives is actually, investing in land reclamation, building new islands where they'll also be able to put in solar panels and other ways of producing renewable energy. The other thing just to note that some of the islands are volcanic and have sources of geothermal energy which they have not yet used. And this could be a game changer for countries like Dominica and the Caribbeans that they, you know, potentially have a huge source of geothermal energy just off their coastline, underwater, under underground. That could be not just produce enough energy for Dominica, for the island and the population, but actually be sold to neighboring islands. So be, you know, really important source of income for this tiny island in the future. And there are, there are a couple in the Caribbean and in the South Pacific that, you know, have untapped sources of geothermal energy. So this is all great for islands. It's very expensive to develop the technologies and to maintain them as well. I think one of the things that we will need to focus on a lot going forward is how do you make sure that when you are investing in putting in solar panels or sort of larger solar farms, that those all of that infrastructure can be protected when there is a storm that it can be maintained because, you know, obviously this is floating on, on the sea, it's kind of saltier. There's more, it's more likely to be corroded than if they're in land somewhere. So all of these things need to be looked at and all kind of make the, the challenge a little bit. It's it's a little bit steeper than for, for some other countries, but they're, they're doing all of this and they don't need to. And I think, you know, they don't need to in the sense of they're not, you know, historically responsible for climate change. They don't produce a massive amount of CO2 emissions from any of their activities. So really don't need to be doing this for the planet, but they're choosing to because it's, you know better for their communities and better for their economies And we talked on the podcast before about initiatives like the Bridgetown initiative, the one that was spearheaded by Mia Motley, prime Minister of, of Barbados. How has that reshaped the conversation around climate finance for islands? Yeah, the Bridgetown initiative is really interesting because it's obviously being led by the leader of a small island developing state. And prime Minister Mia Motley is pretty well known internationally certainly in the climate change community, but I think probably beyond that as well, people will have seen her speaking in big international events and been impressed by her passion and the balance she can bring to the conversation. So being both very clear that we need to change, that the current financial architecture for, climate change, but for more broadly, for sustainable development is not fit for purpose. It doesn't serve the countries that it was set up to serve. So after the Second World War along with establishing the United Nations and all of the agencies and dimensions of like what the, the United Nations is and what it does. We have these Bretton Woods institutions as well, the World Bank, the IMF, and then a series of kind of regional development banks and this whole kind of architecture that was established to ensure that financial stability so that countries like wouldn't get into troubles and get into difficulty and, and disrupt the whole system. And create the kinds of needs and conflict that resulted in the second World War, right? Essentially that's why the system was set up for our collective good. But it was set up at a time, and this is something that Mia Motley talks about you know, really articulately. It was set up at a time when most of the developing countries that are now member states of the UN, they didn't exist. This was still in like during a colonial period. So most African countries and almost all of the small island developing states did not exist in the 1950s. They became independent later on. The system certainly does not serve their interests particularly well. It wasn't set up to consider their interests in that way. So most of them are not represented on the governing boards or decision making of these big financial institutions. And that's a big problem. And, you know, the needs are, are greater than ever. And I think the Bridgetown initiative is a response to that. It's basically saying these are some of the things that we need to look at and change about the way, finance is allocated about decision making, how finance is made available to countries, about the kind of support that they need and debt relief that's needed. About the way that the Bridgetown Initiative is now talking about insurance as well, about the way the insurance industry works, which is not serving the needs of developing countries, there's very little insurance available and it's extremely expensive and insurance companies are making a lot of money out of insuring people against climate risks. So yeah, there's a whole series of things that we need to take a look at and, think about how they can be adjusted and changed and we, you know, we should be doing that. And I think it's great that the leadership on this conversation is coming from a developing country, from a small island developing state and from a woman and a really excellent female leader because, for too long we've been sort of sat around kind of complaining about the system, but not coming up with particularly good, or innovative or, you know, workable solutions. And the Bridgetown Initiative does that, it actually proposes some, some ways out of this mess. And one of the issues that is raised by the Bridgetown Initiative and now being called out by a lot of developing countries and particularly small island developing states, is this issue of accessing climate finance. So we have some big climate funds now, which money has been put into the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund and they exist to support countries to to undertake these low carbon transitions and to adapt to climate change. But if the countries that they're supposed to be benefiting can't access the funds because the application process is too long. It's really expensive. You have to pay consultants to come and do studies to demonstrate that you are experiencing the climate impacts that you are, because you didn't already have that data.'cause it's really kind of, you know, expensive to be continually monitoring coastlines and to have that historical data. Lots of countries don't have it, so they're having to, you know, pay consultants normally expensive consultants from developed countries to come in and, and provide that evidence. That's then going to, you know, get the project approved. And then eventually, maybe after three years since the first concept note was put together, you might get your project funded. By which point a lot of things have changed, maybe the priorities have changed and you need something else. So this is a big issue which needs to be addressed. You know, there's no point in saying, well, we have these funds, the money's there. If the most vulnerable countries can't access it and can't get on and, implement these projects. And there's the things that they're being required to do, not just access the money, but to demonstrate that it's being well spent and to report on it. Whilst we all have sympathy for fund managers who, you know, obviously want funds to be used appropriately and will have lots of kind of checks and balances to make sure that happens. These things need to be adapted. If they were developed, you know, with a, a country in mind that has you know, a huge bureaucracy, lots of lots of people working in government who can provide that data and, departments that are dedicated to doing these things, then, that's obviously a lot easier if you've just got, a few people in the ministry whose, whose job it is to write these applications and report on implementation and, and so on. And also have another job to do. Their day to day job of, making sure government runs and delivering services. Then, it's really, really tricky for them. So we need to look at how to adjust and be a little bit more reasonable about our expectations of, small countries and small governments. So that's just, that's just one of the sort of issues on the agenda at the moment, raised by the Bridgetown Initiative and others around the way that climate finance needs to really, the whole infrastructure needs to be reformed. Right. And is there any particular example of a creative financial solution like insurance pools or resilience bonds that are working well for islands? Yeah, I mean, I think they're certainly part of the solution. In the Caribbean they have a pooled sovereign risk insurance mechanism called crif. And basically what that does, it's a parametric insurance mechanism, which, what that means is that you can get the the payout when the wind speed reaches a certain level for hurricanes or the level of rainfall reaches a certain threshold for flooding. You don't have to wait until that's, caused a significant impact. And then you have, you go around and assess the damage and then pay out on, on the basis of what that damage looks like, which could take months. If not, if a year. So they do it on the basis of these parametric tip triggers. It reaches a certain threshold. The money comes in to governments that the, all those that are part of the scheme that have been paying their premiums which means that they get money quickly into the government fund and can use that to begin to rehabilitate damaged infrastructure and get kind of services up and running again, which is really important because that you have the immediate impact of a, a storm or a flood. That's, you know, that's part of the disaster. But if you can't repair, water pipes that have been damaged or electricity cables that have been knocked down. You're gonna have a whole series of other humanitarian impacts and problems with disease, in the case of you haven't got running water, and so on. So that quick rehabilitation is really important. You've gotta get the money in to do that unless the government is able to set money aside and have a its own kind of contingency fund, but that's very difficult to do because they don't really have that sort of space in the budget because they're paying back loans. So these insurance instruments can work really well for that, like providing that liquidity when it's needed and they, it is very quick, gets the money in quickly. The problem with insurance and I know I'm, we're supposed to be talking about solutions, but there's always a, but there's always a, but is that, the size of the payout is in relation to the size of the premium of, you know, how much you're paying annually so that, you know, the more you pay the larger the coverage you have, the larger the payout will be. And. That's just not gonna be possible for lots of countries to, you know, really be paying much higher premiums than they currently are. So the payout tends to be small amounts, really relative to the level of damage. It'd be less than 10% of the total damage would be covered by whatever you're getting from the insurance company or scheme. So it's only part of the solution. And then the other problem is that the premiums are going up. Because insurance only works well when you are insuring against something that is fairly unlikely to happen, or it doesn't happen very often. If it happens very often and as I was mentioning before, these storms are becoming more frequent and more intense. Then of course the risk modelers, the people you know, inside the insurance company working out how much it's gonna cost, you are gonna have to put up the cost every year. And, insurance contracts like your, probably your car insurance or your home contents insurance is only a yearly contract. There's no guarantee that it will cost you the same amount next year as it did this year. And if, you know, there's more storms, the cost is gonna go up. So, you know, there's a part of this that's not going to be, entirely sustainable, but it's important to have these instruments and insurance and these debt contracts. And, and ways of kind of making it easier to respond to these events are really important. But ultimately we've got to, find ways of investing more significant amounts and bringing in the private sector to really strengthen resilience and, and make sure that there's less damage in the first place. And we should be placing just as much attention on that as making sure that the response is is quick and that we're able to kind of avoid those indirect impacts after an event. So yeah, needs to be an ecosystem really of, financial solutions. You know, one instrument on its own is not gonna solve the problem. We need to look at all of these things, but there have been huge advances in recent years. We went from maybe 15 years ago just having to sort of set aside some money and hope it was enough and it never was. And then having to then go into sort of, after a disaster, just appeal to the international community to get, aid agencies to come in and help and, you know, just basically being a bit of seeing it as charity really. Please come and help us. What can you do? And not being really sure that it was ever going to be enough, to countries now being in a lot more control of putting things in place so that they know that they will be getting some assistance if there is a disaster. And you mentioned in passing a couple of times, Dominica. And Dominica has a vision to become the world's first climate resilient nation. So. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Yeah, sure. So it's, it's very ambitious, obviously. But ambition is important. Hurricane Maria, which is this big hurricane in 2017. The island was devastated. Like there wasn't a roof that remained on and intact. It really wiped out housing, severe damage to infrastructure, roads, bridges even the trees like were completely stripped of all of their leaves. And much of that hasn't yet recovered, but after this absolutely devastating impact the Prime Minister, we have to do something differently and he went to the UN and made this very impressive speech talking about the complete destruction to the island and the need to kind of rebuild in a different way to, to now be entirely focused on this kind of resilience ambition. And the country set about to develop a strategy to do that. Went to different donors and financial institutions to get the resources set up a that climate resilience. Execution agency to for Dominica Creed which I worked with for about four years as an advisor to fast track recovery and to develop this new way of thinking about resilience and really embedding it across all of government and society and, and, businesses. And, it cuts across all sectors really. Building resilience is not just literally building more robust or stronger infrastructure. It's also thinking about education and what are children learning at school about the natural environment and the risks in the natural environment and how to prepare for a hurricane and what to do when there is a disaster. Thinking about you know, what kinds of, windows do you want to have on your house? And how tie down the roof, to put on hurricane straps if there's a storm approaching or at the start of hurricane season, thinking about, living with this seasonality as part of your everyday life and not in a constant state of preparedness, but certainly having that quite at the forefront of your mind that these, will not be rare events that we can just forget about and pick up the pieces next time it happens. But it has to really become part of the, psyche and the way that people live. And, that doesn't happen overnight. We're in 2025. The hurricane happened at the end of 2017. So that's seven years later. Seven and a half years later. And there's still a lot to do, but for the first time I went to Dominica and I was started working with Creed was towards the end of 2018. And remember landing at the airport and the taxi driver saying, oh, first time in Dominica. Yes. What are you doing here? And I said, I'm working with this climate resilience agency creed and the no idea. Hadn't heard, didn't know what that was. Same like six months later. same conversation. Probably a year later, a year and a half later. By the time I'd been working in Dominica for about three years and, landed in the airport, got in a taxi, first time in Dominica. No, I come here quite a bit. Oh, what are you doing? Working with Creed? Oh, I know Creed. And they could tell you about some activity, some resilience initiative or activity that was going on, whether it was workshops or training for small businesses or community risk assessments that were happening. Or yeah, some campaign or something. They could name something that was happening around the country about. And all around this vision of building climate resilience. So I really felt like, well, you know, if taxi drivers know about it, then it's happening. Something is happening. And it's not just, you know, this thing that, that government is working on, but no one has any idea what that's all about. So, so that's how long it takes, you know, it takes like three, four plus years. And, you know, hopefully it carries on because these are things you can't just let go because you know, the memory of the disaster fades and it becomes less important. I don't think that will happen because every year there's heavy rainfall, every year some, you know, road or a community gets cut off by trees falling or a kind of boulder coming down a river or something. So, you know, there's all these like small reminders happening all the time. But there's been a really important step change and a lot of work has gone into rebuilding housing making it stronger, making sure that buildings are comply with the local regulations to make sure that they are hurricane proof. That's not to say that there couldn't be another hurricane that would cause some damage, but hopefully it would never be on the scale that it was with Hurricane Maria. And I think that that's the proof that the, strategy and the commitment work. It's the proof you never want to see, you never want it to be tested like that. But hopefully that is the case. And I, and I do think that at least, people will be better prepared and understand what to do. And that's the most important thing really. Fair. Fair. Left field. Question for you, Emily. If you could have any person or character, alive or dead, real or fictional, as a champion for small island developing nations, who would it be and why? That's a good question. I mean, I think, you know, we have really great champions. We have fantastic champions for small developing states. I'm not sure, like, do we need more like a celebrity to get behind this issue? I'm gonna kind of slightly avoid the question because I actually think that, that we have the right champions and they are people that have like, you know, grown up and lived in small island developing states their whole life and they they don't need somebody else to be talking on their behalf. So I've been really impressed by Prime Minister Mia Motley, and I think, you know, she, she is, she's my hero. So that's the best, that's the best kind of leadership we can have. Really, and I, you know, I wish that many other countries would have the same quality and level of leadership and commitment and passion for their, the, the prosperity and sustainability of their country and their people. So, is that okay? Can I say that we already have the hero, the champion that we need? Tremendous. Tremendous. Yep. Yep. We're coming towards the end of the podcast now. Emily, is there any question I haven't asked that you wish I had or any aspect of this we haven't covered off that you think it's important for people to be aware of? Well, one thing I'd like to share is that we have a podcast, Small Island's, Big Picture which is all about these issues. We go into detail about different issues that affect small island, developing states, social issues, environmental issues, and the global leadership. And also have a documentary Climate Blueprint Dominica, which really picks up on some of the, what we've been talking about Dominica's vision and journey towards climate resilience. So you know, I encourage people to have a look for those and I could provide details of those. Or we can rerecord that or put it in show notes or, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, exactly that 'cause that, that's my next question is if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the things we discussed in the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? So we have a webpage with all of our publications and links to blogs and the podcast, and that's odi.org/resilient-Islands. Right, and I'll put, I'll put the links to that and the podcast, et cetera, in the show notes so everyone has access to them. So Emily, that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming in the podcast today. Thanks very much, Tom. It was great to speak to you. Okay, we've come to the end of the show. Thanks everyone for listening. If you'd like to know more about the Climate Confident podcast, feel free to drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com or message me on LinkedIn or Twitter. If you like the show, please don't forget to click follow on it in your podcast application of choice to get new episodes as soon as they're published. Also, please don't forget to rate and review the podcast. It really does help new people to find the show. Thanks. Catch you all next time.