BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC) – Caribbean Community (Caricom) leaders Thursday presented a shopping list to Dr Sultan Al Jaber, the president-designate of the 28th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP28) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

COP 28 will take place in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) from November 30 to December 12 this year and Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit, who is also chairman of the 15-member regional integration grouping, presented the shopping list during a meeting here with Al Jaber and other regional leaders.

Skerrit told the president-designate that even as Caricom is celebrating its 50th anniversary, it was doing so in the face of its “biggest challenge to date. The Caribbean is one of the most vulnerable regions of the world; climate change, for us in the Caribbean, is an existential threat. We are on the front lines of the climate crisis, suffering from the ravages of climate change that is not of our making,” he said.

Skerrit said that the scientific imperative is clear and the global community needs to cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 and reach net zero by 2050.

“The political leadership required, however, to deliver at the scale and speed necessary, is lagging. Despite the geopolitical challenges being experienced across the globe, we cannot let up on pursuing ambitious climate actions.

“As the COP28 president-designate, we in the Caribbean will count on your leadership to ensure that COP28 is a COP of action. COP28 must deliver actions that are commensurate with ensuring that we keep 1.5 alive. Our lives and that of our children and their children depend on it.”

Skerrit said that regional countries expect that COP28 will deliver, at the very least, several major political outcomes, including an ambitious mitigation work programme that will see developed countries and major economies submit enhanced Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) aligned to the 1.5 pathway.

He said the region also wants a global stocktake that will provide an opportunity to ensure that “we keep the promise of Paris alive as well as assess the adequacy of adaptation efforts and the financing, capacity-building, and technology transfer that the Paris Agreement is to deliver”.