SIDS4

Dominica is described as highly disaster-vulnerable: the country is regularly hit by hurricanes and, when the last one swept through in 2017, it caused huge devastation across the island.

The government, led by President Sylvanie Burton, the first woman and the first member of the indigenous Kalinago community to be the country’s Head of State, wants to make Dominica the world’s first ‘climate resilient country’. But, as the climate crisis threatens to lead to increasingly intense and frequent hurricanes, is this feasible?

The vast majority of small island developing States (SIDS) are heavily dependent on polluting, and expensive, fossil fuels for their energy needs: some spend around a quarter of their national budgets on imported fuel. 

On the first episode of UN Weekly, Conor Lennon and Myra Lopes focus on the effect of the climate crisis on small island developing States (SIDS), which are struggling to cope with hurricanes, flooding and wildfires. Island nations are also drowning in plastic, which is washing up on beaches, clogging rivers and, for the most part, is not recyclable and takes hundreds of years to break down.

Like many island economies, Dominica experiences high youth unemployment, and recent events, in particular Hurricane Maria and the COVID-19 pandemic, have combined to make the search for work even harder.

A UN-backed initiative designed to improve the employment options for young Dominicans, Work Online Dominica, has been successful in helping them to overcome the barriers they face on a small, remote island.

Dominica may have found a solution to cover all of its electricity needs, and even sell electricity abroad, without burning fossil fuels: geothermal energy. This power source is 100 per cent clean, cheap and practically limitless.

Conor Lennon from UN News meets Vince Henderson, Dominica’s Minister for Economic Development and Sustainable Energy, and Fred John, CEO of the Dominica Geothermal Development Company to find out if the country really is on its way to a clean energy future.

Small Island Developing States are particularly vulnerable to plastic pollution. As well as coping with a tsunami of waste washes up on their beaches every day, these countries – which are generally highly dependent on imports – generate a large amount of plastic waste of their own, and often struggle to manage it.