Melissa Shows How Quickly Climate Change Is Outstripping Defenses

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(Bloomberg) — Jamaica has invested tens of millions of dollars in bolstering coastal defenses by planting mangroves, building seawalls and strengthening urban infrastructure. It wasn’t close to enough to withstand Hurricane Melissa’s 185-mile-an-hour winds and 13-foot storm surge that destroyed thousands of homes, washed away roads and bridges, flooded farm fields and took down the electrical grid. 

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“The pace and scale of today’s Category 5 storms are now outstripping what most systems were designed to handle,” Stacy-ann Robinson, an associate professor of environmental sciences at Emory University in Atlanta, said in an email. In Black River, located in the western part of Jamaica, for instance, part of a seawall failed, contributing to the inundation that damaged more than two-thirds of the buildings in the historic town. Estimated insured losses in the country may exceed $4 billion.

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Hurricane Melissa has underscored the financial and practical challenges of adapting to more frequent and destructive climate-driven Caribbean storms that strike randomly and increasingly flood islands’ mountainous interiors as they stall over land.

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As delegates gather this week for the COP30 summit in Brazil, Melissa’s rampage through the Caribbean spotlights the contentious issue of how much industrialized nations responsible for most global warming should pay to help developing countries adapt to climate change and compensate them for growing loss and damage. 

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Commitments from wealthy nations to help developing countries finance climate change adaptation are already faltering. A United Nations Environment Programme report issued last month found that rich countries provided $26 billion for adaptation finance in 2023, far short of the $40 billion goal for annual funding by 2025. And it’s nowhere near the $310 billion to $365 billion that the UN estimates will be needed every year by 2035.

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“This COP needs to agree on an adaptation package with a new finance goal at its heart,” Kalani Kaneko, the Marshall Islands foreign minister, said in Brazil last week. “Because I tell you, in the Marshalls our adaptation needs are overwhelming.”

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The threat from extreme weather, meanwhile, is growing at a time when Caribbean nations are under financial pressure from rising debt that constrains efforts to build resilience to extreme weather, said Robinson, who is Jamaican. 

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“The critical shift is to view adaptation not as a one-off investment, but as a long-term development strategy, one that treats resilience as a public good rather than a private risk,” said Robinson, a coordinating lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that assesses global warming. 

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Billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft Corp. took a similar view recently when he called for a reassessment of climate strategies, saying in a post that “development is adaptation.”

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“Rich and middle-income countries are causing the vast majority of climate change, and we need to be the ones to step up and invest more in adaptation,” Gates wrote.

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Not Enough

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While Melissa triggered the payout of a $150 million catastrophe bond to Jamaica and the country can tap other resources, it still faces a multibillion-dollar shortfall to repair hurricane damage.