Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre has used the COP31 climate summit in Türkiye to press wealthy countries to deliver on climate promises already made, warning that small island states cannot keep paying for a crisis they did little to create.
Speaking on behalf of Saint Lucia and CARICOM, Pierre said the Caribbean’s fight to keep global warming below 1.5°C has become even more urgent as temperatures continue to climb.
“In Paris, Saint Lucia stood with the Caribbean and fellow small island developing states to fight to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” he said. “Eleven years later, progress has been too slow.”
That concern comes as 2026 heads towards becoming the second-warmest year ever recorded. Copernicus data also shows that the average global temperature between 2023 and 2026 is expected to exceed 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, pointing to a sustained period of exceptional global heat.
Pierre sought to bring those numbers closer to everyday life.
“Climate change does not need a headline grabbing hurricane to devastate an island,” he said, pointing instead to farmers losing crops to drought, households struggling with unreliable water and fishers facing warming seas and deteriorating marine ecosystems.
For small countries, he argued, every climate disaster also takes money away from other priorities.
“Every dollar we spend repairing climate related damage is a dollar diverted from education, healthcare, housing, poverty reduction and other critical national development priorities,” Pierre said.
Climate finance has long been one of the biggest sticking points in global negotiations.
According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, developed countries had committed to mobilising US$100 billion a year in climate finance for developing nations by 2020, but that target was only reached for the first time in 2022.
At COP29 in 2024, countries agreed to a new goal of at least US $300 billion annually for developing countries by 2035, while also calling for wider public and private climate finance to reach US$1.3 trillion a year by then.
For Pierre, the issue is not simply how much money is announced, but whether vulnerable countries can actually access it without taking on even more debt.
“Major emitters must move beyond the usual promises,” he said. “They must deliver finance with more grants, affordable financing and simple access.”
He also repeated a long-standing Caribbean argument that access to support should reflect a country’s vulnerability, rather than being based mainly on income levels.
Saint Lucia, he said, is doing its part through renewable energy, cleaner transport and efforts to build stronger communities. But he stressed that small countries cannot meet the scale of the climate challenge using national resources alone.
“We cannot build resilience on promises,” Pierre said. “We need finance, technology and partnerships that reach our communities.”
His message at COP31 was ultimately one of delivery.
“The people of Saint Lucia and Caribbean cannot afford another decade of lengthy negotiations and inadequate responses,” Pierre said.
“In Paris, we fought to put 1.5 degrees at the heart of the global response. In Antalya, we must put delivery at its heart.”
