In the midst of the cascading emergencies that commentators have termed the polycrisis, two of the most serious, pressing, and apparently intractable components are the impacts of climate change on vulnerable countries and sovereign fiscal distress. Perhaps no world region illustrates the complicated interactions of these crises as clearly as the Caribbean. Damaging colonial legacies and ongoing political economic relations of fiscal extraction are tightly linked to existential threats of intensifying storms, sea level rise, and loss of marine biodiversity. This talk will present quantitative data on how fiscal resources are extracted from Caribbean countries through predatory debt service and tax rules, and how those fiscal flows compare to the projected costs of climate action. We survey existing financial flows designated for climate action and evaluate them against alternative visions of how climate finance could be allocated. Using this comparison, our project assesses “PACC 2030,” the primary US policy framework regarding Caribbean climate action – which largely retreads the failed climate finance approaches of the last 15 years, as opposed to building a more reparative, ‘worldmaking’ mode of climate action. We will conclude with some reflections on the next phase of this project, in particular, engaging with Caribbean civil society to articulate a worldmaking approach to reparative climate finance.
Patrick Bigger Patrick (he/him) is the Research Director at the Climate and Community Project (CCP). Prior to joining CCP he was a Lecturer in Economic Geography at Lancaster University in the UK and holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Kentucky. His scholarly research focused on the creation and regulation of new financial mechanisms by governments, financiers, and NGOs that try to reconcile capitalism’s environmental and economic contradictions. He has written extensively on these issues in academic journals including Science; Nature: Ecology and Evolution; and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, as well as other outlets including The Nation and The Conversation. At CCP his research focuses domestically on Green Industrial Policy, and globally on fiscal justice and reparations for climate action.
