Mia Amor Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados, urged world leaders to “use the power of the pen” and impose natural disaster and pandemic clauses in developing countries’ debt, as well as remove the current barriers to accessing financial assistance from multilateral development banks.
A new UN-backed humanitarian logistics hub and training centre in Barbados aims to strengthen emergency preparedness and response across the Caribbean, the World Food Programme (WFP) said in announcing the news on Thursday.
Sargassum seaweed has blighted many of the beaches on Barbados for several years. Joshua Forte, a local entrepreneur, is convinced that it can be turned into a valuable commodity, and turned into highly effective, organic compost.
Since the 1980s, a UN Environment Programme (UNEP) convention has been in place, dealing with pollution issues affecting the wider Caribbean region. Since then, the climate crisis has been added to the risks. Christopher Corbin, the acting coordinator for the UNEP Cartagena Convention Secretariat, told UN News that the focus of the Convention is shifting from policy to local action.
In our third episode looking at ocean-related issues facing the eastern Caribbean island nation of Barbados, released in the run-up to the UN Oceans Conference, we turn to the issue of the coral reef. Barbados’s reef has been declining for decades, hit by decades of pollution and the climate crisis.
This is the second in a four-part mini-series, released in the run-up to the UN Oceans Conference, exploring some of the ocean-related issues facing the eastern Caribbean island nation of Barbados. This episode focuses on the pollutants that, for decades, have poured into the coastal waters, a result of agriculture and the development of the island. In recent years, the government, with the support of the United Nations, has sought to use nature-based solutions to rectify the damage.
In a four-part mini-series, released in the run-up to the UN Oceans Conference, we explore some of the ocean-related issues facing the eastern Caribbean island nation of Barbados.
This episode concentrated on the worrying spread of sargassum seaweed, which arrived unannounced in 2011, and has been a regular fixture on much of the coastline ever since.
There’s no single answer to why the seaweed is clogging up the beaches and waters, but many scientists believe that the climate crisis is at least partly to blame.
The UN Secretary-General on Sunday said he was committed to ensuring that the Organisation is a place where “youth voices are heard, and their ideas lead”, as he spent the day in Barbados which tomorrow hosts a major UN conference on trade and development, focused on the need to build a global green economy and recover equitably from the COVID-19 pandemic.