Climate Change, SIDS, and the case of Dominica

• In Event: 1149 - Scorched Earth: Climate Change, Energy, and the Sociology of Development

Abstract

In 2012, the United Nations (UN) Conference on Sustainable Development launched the organization’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) while also placing a spotlight on the specific vulnerabilities and characteristics of Small Island Developing States (SIDS). In particular, it brought to the fore, their small size, remoteness, limited range in natural resources and export base, and their susceptibility to external economic shocks, and global climate change. For SIDS, sustainable development has always been key to their continued stability. However, these vulnerabilities have come to define the world’s perspective of the islands, at once viewing them as unable to escape those limitations yet expected to advance at the global economic and political level. This is all while on the receiving end of the negative effects of global climate change that they have little control over.

The Caribbean is one of the three (along with the Pacific region and the Atlantic, Ocean, Mediterranean and South China Sea (AIMS)) SIDS regions recognized by the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UN-DESA). Many of these islands inherited monoagricultural economies from their colonial past, that are constantly at the mercy of natural disasters (Benson and Clay 2001, 2003). The Commonwealth of Dominica, a former British colony, is a small island developing state in the Caribbean region, notwithstanding its designation by the World Bank as an upper middle-income country. Given its SIDS status, it is vulnerable to the effects of global climate change. No time was this most obvious than September 2017 when Hurricane Maria brought the country to its knees (64 deaths, $1456000 in damages, nearly 100% of total population affected), just two years after Tropical Storm Erica had laid its infrastructure in pieces.

Using the case of Dominica, the paper focuses on SIDS' vulnerability to global climate change, from both a developmental and ecological perspective including an analysis of Dominica's development strategies (particularly its commodified citizenship program) and its response to these global climate changes.

Author

• Marilyn Grell-Brisk, Universite de Neuchatel