“In our quest to forge a climate resilient development pathway, the Caribbean has been tackling the primary challenge of aligning the comparatively distant time horizons of climate projections with more immediate development objectives and political considerations in a multi-country policy-making context,” says Dr Ulric Trotz, Deputy Director and Science Advisor of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (5Cs), in an opinion column in Climate and Development Outlook this month.

The 5Cs is mandated by the Caribbean Community Heads of State to provide policy guidance on dealing with climate change and steering the Caribbean economies toward a lower-carbon, more resilient future. The agency, with support from CDKN, developed an Implementation Plan that will help countries deliver the 2009 Regional Framework for Achieving Development Resilient to Climate Change.

This plan “specifies [climate] actions and timeframes that complement some of the political time horizons and development objectives” of the Caribbean nations, adds Dr Trotz.

Since 2010, CDKN has been working to enhance the capability and influence of the 5Cs, to strengthen the evidence base and to empower decision-makers from the community to the heads of state level in the Caribbean to adopt climate compatible development.

In this Climate and Development Outlook: Caribbean Special Edition, we discuss:

• Designing and applying decision-making tools to assess climate risks;
• Enhancing resilience in the climate-vulnerable water sector;
• Training communities to monitor climate vulnerability and feed climate information into local decision-making.