Caribbean Com­mu­ni­ty (Cari­com) lead­ers have used the on­go­ing flood­ing across the re­gion to press home their case for cli­mate fi­nance as the third day of COP29 closed yes­ter­day in Baku, Azer­bai­jan.

Sev­er­al Cari­com lead­ers, in­clud­ing Grena­da Prime Min­is­ter Dick­on Mitchell, Cari­com Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al Dr Car­la Bar­nett and Do­mini­ca’s En­vi­ron­ment Min­is­ter Co­zi­er Fred­er­ick, all weighed in on the is­sue.

It came a day af­ter storms wreaked hav­oc across Trinidad. A yel­low-lev­el lo­calised flood alert was is­sued by the T&T Me­te­o­ro­log­i­cal Ser­vice (TTMS) at 10.15 am Tues­day, high­light­ing low-ly­ing and flood-prone ar­eas of Trinidad. The alert was even­tu­al­ly dis­con­tin­ued at 4 pm, once con­di­tions set­tled.

How­ev­er, Trinidad wasn’t the on­ly coun­try in the re­gion to be dev­as­tat­ed by flood­ing on Tues­day. Ma­jor flood­ing was al­so re­port­ed in Grena­da, in­clud­ing Riv­er Road, West­er­hall, Wood­lands, and in the vicin­i­ty of the Na­tion­al Sta­di­um.

Videos post­ed to so­cial me­dia showed ve­hi­cles be­ing washed away on the streets, while an­oth­er vi­ral video showed stu­dents of a sec­ondary school climb­ing on top of ta­bles to avoid ris­ing wa­ter lev­els.

Flood­ing was al­so re­port­ed in Be­lize, where some roads were re­port­ed­ly im­pass­able.

As cit­i­zens from these Caribbean coun­tries grap­pled with the ex­treme weath­er, re­gion­al lead­er­ship was mak­ing a case for ur­gent cli­mate fi­nance at COP29.

Re­act­ing to the ram­pant lev­els of flood­ing, Mitchell, who is al­so the sit­ting chair of Cari­com, told Guardian Me­dia, “It is just tes­ti­mo­ny to what we are talk­ing about. You can have high, un­pre­dictable, and er­rat­ic, but al­so high­ly dan­ger­ous weath­er pat­terns that are sig­nif­i­cant that we have to pre­pare for and re­spond. Again, we have to be do­ing our best in those cir­cum­stances to treat and man­age with this on an on­go­ing ba­sis. So it’s just the new re­al­i­ty, the new norm that we have to live it.”

Mitchell added that flood­ing in parts of the Caribbean ties back to the need for fi­nanc­ing at this COP so na­tions can pre­pare for such cir­cum­stances.

Bar­nett al­so point­ed to cli­mate fi­nance as a means of help­ing the re­gion stave off the ef­fects of cli­mate change. The Cari­com Sec­re­tary-Gen­er­al, who al­so spoke with Guardian Me­dia, said, “For us to ad­dress the im­pact of cli­mate change, there is a need for fi­nanc­ing that we don’t have. Every sin­gle one of our coun­tries in Cari­com but in the wider SIDS have very large debt bur­dens al­ready—much of this debt re­lat­ed to deal­ing with the im­pact of cli­mate change. We don’t know that’s what it is, but now it’s cost­ing more to build a road be­cause you are en­gi­neer­ing for the im­pact of cli­mate change.”

Bar­nett said it is im­por­tant that Cari­com na­tions do what they have to do, but al­so the Glob­al North coun­tries that are trig­ger­ing the emis­sions “need to do the right thing as well.”

Fred­er­ick said there is a great need to en­sure the pol­luters pay. He was speak­ing to Guardian Me­dia a month af­ter his coun­try, Do­mini­ca, was placed un­der a flood warn­ing with an es­ti­mat­ed two to four inch­es of rain­fall ex­pect­ed.

The Min­is­ter of the En­vi­ron­ment, Rur­al Mod­erni­sa­tion, and Kali­na­go Up­lift­ment said, “It high­lights to us that it is so im­por­tant to keep the Paris Agree­ment alive and the 1.5 (lim­it glob­al warm­ing to 1.5°C by the end of this cen­tu­ry) and keep­ing tem­per­a­tures at that lev­el. So we have to put more pres­sure on the de­vel­oped coun­tries to play their part. We are do­ing our part by keep­ing our forests in­tact but we have lit­tle con­trol of what’s hap­pen­ing in the gen­er­al scheme of things. When these weath­er events hap­pen, it costs us some mon­ey. When towns are flood­ed across our re­gion peo­ple can’t get to work and chil­dren can’t get to school and liveli­hoods are af­fect­ed. We have to take a step back and see how we treat in a more frontal way those such cli­mate con­di­tions and how do we put some more pres­sure on ma­jor emit­ters.”

Fred­er­ick called on Cari­com to have a com­mon mes­sage when it comes to the is­sue of re­gion­al flood­ing.

“Yes, we do bare dif­fer­ent flags and yes we do bare dif­fer­ent ju­ris­dic­tions but the com­mon­al­i­ties in cli­mate change are so pro­found and we have to deal with it as a re­gion,” he added.

Ear­li­er yes­ter­day, An­tigua and Bar­bu­da Prime Min­is­ter Gas­ton Browne de­liv­ered his na­tion­al state­ment at the sum­mit call­ing for more grants and di­rect in­vest­ment for SIDS as op­posed to loans which, he said, added to the debt bur­dens of small na­tions.

Browne said, “Every year of in­ac­tion com­pounds our vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and deep­ens the in­jus­tice that we en­joy. We can­not wait any longer for emp­ty pledges to be­come mean­ing­ful ac­tion. For decades, wealthy na­tions pledged $100 bil­lion an­nu­al­ly to sup­port vul­ner­a­ble coun­tries. Yet, these promis­es have large­ly gone un­ful­filled. Now, as we dis­cuss a new col­lec­tive quan­ti­fied goal, we again see pro­pos­als that com­pli­cate rather than com­mit.”

He added, “To those who bear the great­est re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for cli­mate change, I say this—the time for moral re­spon­si­bil­i­ty is now. The time for in­creased cli­mate am­bi­tions is now. If promis­es of sup­port re­main un­ful­filled, then jus­tice must de­mand that those promis­es are en­forced.”

Browne said, for these rea­sons, his coun­try will ap­pear be­fore the In­ter­na­tion­al Court of Jus­tice (ICJ) in De­cem­ber in sol­i­dar­i­ty with Van­u­atu, a South Pa­cif­ic Ocean na­tion seek­ing an ad­vi­so­ry opin­ion on coun­tries’ cli­mate change oblig­a­tions, “as cham­pi­ons of their case.”