With preparation in high gear for the World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in Johannesburg, South Africa from August 26 to September 4, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) like Jamaica are trying to put more pressure on the international community to take their concerns seriously.

For many small islands, these international conferences afford the opportunity for much more than diplomatic posturing. They are arenas in which diplomats jostle for the very environmental and economic survival of their small island developing states.

Potentially catastrophic and expensive problems like sea level rise and coastal erosion, declining agricultural production because of climate change, water shortages, the often devastating effects of globalisation on their small economies, are just some of the problems which disproportionately affect the economies of small island states.

One study, for example, estimates that it will cost US$11 million to protect the shorelines of the small states of the Caribbean from coastal erosion and sea level rise.

Those issues were the focus of a global roundtable on the vulnerabilities of small island states held at the Ritz Carlton in Montego Bay from May 9-10.

A team from the University of the West Indies’ Centre for Environment and Development put together working papers for the roundtable detailing the social, economic and environmental vulnerabilities of the small island developing states.

High on the list was the issue of energy.

A significant contributor to the problems of the external indebtedness of SIDS in the 1970s and 80s was due to petroleum volatility, while global warming, climate change and sea level rise will increase the vulnerability of the small island states, the report says.

“Reducing dependence on petroleum through the development of renewable energy and efficient use of energy would reduce vulnerability in SIDS,” the report says.

The university team made several recommendations to address this problem including training additional energy specialists through distance education, and evaluating the feasibility of an international SIDS investment fund to finance projects dealing with energy efficiency or renewable energy.

The team also evaluated other problems affecting small island states like trade, limited natural resources, environmental problems, natural disaster preparedness, investment, human resources development, and made a raft of recommendations to address them.

It’s an approach that SIDS hope will translate into some practical help for their problems, help they have been highlighting for years, notably at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio.

Optimism that those cries were finally being heard heightened in 1994 when the Global Conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island States was held in Barbados. That conference adopted the wide-ranging Barbados Programme of Action.

“We have not seen a fulfilment of those promises,” Barbados’ minister of physical planning and environment, Elizabeth Thompson, told fellow delegates at the roundtable.

“We have to determine how to realise the commitments that have been made.”

As with many other programmes, implementation has been a major problem with the Barbados programme, and other promises made at similar international conferences.

“There has been progress made, but I think the reports we’ve seen at this (roundtable) have made it clear that much of the progress has been carried out by the Small Island Developing States by themselves,” says environmental consultant, Dr David Smith.

“It was hoped that there would be international assistance, technical and financial, to help carry out the work, and with that kind of assistance things would have moved a lot faster,” said Smith.

The cry for more assistance from the international community has been growing louder especially since the recently concluded international conference on financing for development, held in Monterrey, Mexico did not achieve as much as had been hoped.

The Johannesburg Summit, or Rio + 10 as it is also being called, will therefore, be a major opportunity for the global community to evaluate just how much progress has been made over the past decade.

“There was a feeling in Rio that to carry out Agenda 21 … would imply a doubling almost of foreign aid. That definitely didn’t happen,” said Smith.

“What it meant was that the financial resources needed to carry out Agenda 21 activities that were working towards sustainable development, particularly for small island states, that money was not there. There has been some money and some assistance from UNDP and other organisations but not nearly as much as people thought, so where people thought they would be 10 years down the line is definitely not where they are now,” Smith said.

During an address to delegates at the roundtable, UNDP Associate Administrator Zephirin Diabre pointed to the organisation’s programmes like Capacity 21, Technical Cooperation Among Developing Countries and the Global Environmental Facility as among those which have provided special assistance to SIDS. But he admitted that more needs to be done.

“More needs to be done because the reality small islands are faced with today is entirely different to that of the 1990s. Globalisation and the IT revolution have enormously changed our world and our communities. As much as these offer new opportunities we also need to make sure that the most vulnerable countries are well prepared to mitigate the adverse impact of these new phenomena,” Dibare said.

The UNDP will be launching another programme at the Johannesburg conference, Capacity 2015, which the organisation says is a direct response to the call for more rapid implementation of the Barbados Programme of Action.

It is aimed at supporting actions that reduce vulnerability and focus on sustainable development concerns like capacity building, institutional strengthening and training, says UNDP Resident Representative in Jamaica Gillian Lindsay-Nanton.

Some experts have credited better and co-ordinated lobbying by SIDS with a recently increased international presence and credibility, a view echoed by Minister of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Ben Clare.

“We have successfully combated efforts to remove the proposed chapter on SIDS from the draft World Summit for Sustainable Development outcome document, but we dare not rest on our laurels,” Clare said.

He believes part of the answer has to lie in unity of the small island states, especially in the form of a consistent lobbying strategy.

And in the months leading up to Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, and at the high-profile conference itself, it is increasingly clear that the small island developing states will no longer be content to see ambitious programmes of action languish without being implemented.

“We must always insist on two things, availability to adequate financial input, and the question of implementation. Implementation is key. Don’t care how much money you get, if you don’t have implementation, you’re going to get nowhere. We must speak with one voice, and in everything we say we must stress and fight for implementation,” says Ben Clare.