Inter-American Court of Human Rights to meet in Barbados to confront climate crisis

The report released by Human Climate Horizons, a collaboration between the United Nations Development Program and the Climate Impact Lab, also noted that sea level rise over the last 20 years has led to an increase in coastal flooding.

By 2100 climate change is expected to cause the submergence of a significant share of land in low-lying regions of the Bahamas, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos and other islands around the world.

Last week, while visiting Chile, U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed sought to rally nations on the need for climate action while speaking at Seventh Meeting of the Sustainable Development Forum of Latin America and the Caribbean on Sustainable Development.

“Small Island Developing States in the Caribbean are extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” Mohammed said.

Saavedra said it’s important for people to understand that climate change isn’t just a phenomenon of adverse weather events, like hurricanes or floods.

“The rising of the sea level in the Caribbean ... is affecting the economy and it’s affecting human rights because it’s affecting the right to life of different people,” he said.

Welcoming the group to Barbados on Monday, Kerrie D. Symmonds, minister of foreign affairs and foreign trade, said when his nation has spoken about the climate crisis and the need for increased climate financing to help nations respond, “we have done so almost exclusively via diplomatic and moral exchanges in the name of climate justice.”

“These hearings will now take us a step further by interrogating, evaluating and establishing the legal obligations which are attendant upon the climate emergency and its consequences for the multiple millions of people whose whose lives and livelihoods are being threatened and, in some cases, decimated,” Symmonds added.

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