The current international financial architecture is failing small island developing states (SIDS), and the window for transformative action is closing fast, is the message from global climate finance leaders pulled together by the regional Caribbean Development Bank (CDB).

The tone of the statement coming out of the recent meeting might be a tad sensational, but the substance of the dialogue and the climate experts huddled together in Nassau, The Bahamas, left no doubt about the seriousness of the issue.

Since the advent of the Paris Agreement on climate change, four out of every five dollars invested in clean energy has gone to advanced economies, leaving just one dollar in five for the two-thirds of the global population living in developing countries.

“The biggest failure in the current global financial architecture is that the system continues to reward the drivers of the climate crisis while penalising those that are vulnerable and contributed the least [to the problem],” argued Ambassador Selwin Hart, special adviser to the UN secretary-general on climate action and assistant secretary-general of the United Nations.

Dubbed The Breakfast Exchange: A Climate Talk on the Global Economy, the meeting brought together some of the world’s most prominent voices on climate action and development finance, moderated by CDB President Daniel M Best.

Panellists included Mr Ibrahima Cheikh Diong, executive director of the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD); Ambassador Hart; and Ms Racquel Moses, CEO of the Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator (CCSA) and chair of Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) Caribbean.

The consequential conversation was a frank, evidence-driven reckoning with what must fundamentally change to protect the Caribbean and other vulnerable regions, CDB said at the end of the deliberations.

Mr Diong of the FRLD charged that pledges announced at global summits are meaningless until they reach countries in usable, affordable form. Capitalised at US$820 million in voluntary contributions, the fund is working to change that. With its first disbursement window offering grant-only funding, at least 50 per cent has been “ring-fenced for SIDS and least developed countries”, which include Jamaica, with no new debt burden on recipients.

President Best emphasised that the Caribbean region was caught between the climate crisis and a fragmenting global financial order, adding that “development financing delayed is development financing denied”.

Seeking for urgent solutions, Ambassador Hart called for a fundamental reorientation of how the region accesses global finance and advocated that the CDB should be the region’s climate bank.

We believe he is right in saying that small states of 30,000 or 40,000 people should not be expected to individually navigate accreditation to multiple global funds, something he described as a structural absurdity.

For example, countries like the Bahamas, Barbados, and Antigua and Barbuda remain excluded from grant and concessional finance on the basis of a single indicator — per capita income — while bearing disproportionate climate risk. Vulnerability, he insisted, must replace income as the defining criterion.

We could not agree more.