JAMAICA HAS welcomed the United Kingdom’s (UK’s) investment of £1.7 million in the Caribbean on climate change programmes as a major boost to protect critical economic infrastructure.

Speaking at the launch of the ‘Regional Climate Finance Programme: Small Island Developing States Capacity and Resilience (SIDAR) Programme for the Caribbean’, yesterday, at the ROK Hotel in downtown Kingston, Minister without Portfolio in the Ministry of Economic Growth and Job Creation, Senator Matthew Samuda, said work needs to be done in building “our institutional capacity”.

“The scope of what we need to do is significant and the financial support will help to meet the critical gap of project development in our countries,” the minister said, hailing the UK as a country that has “established leadership on the climate change issue”.

The SIDAR programme aims to respond to disadvantages small island developing states face through small population sizes, remoteness, vulnerability to economic shocks and natural disasters, and limited capacity. It seeks to scale up access and speed to climate finance and support programmatic acceleration of climate-resilient actions in seven member states of CARICOM.

“You will have the committed support and the action behind it to ensure that these projects are successfully deployed, because we are in a race against time, and we are happy to be a beneficiary,” Samuda said.

The other countries benefiting from the programme are Belize, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Suriname.

For her part, British High Commissioner to Jamaica, Judith Slater, said they are “looking hard” at how the Jamaica Systemic Risk Assessment Tool can influence support to “guide decision-making on public-private sector investments within this region”.

She noted that the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) stands as the premier institution for coordinating responses to climate change, and for maintaining the depository on climate issues.

Through its role as a Centre of Excellence, the CCCCC supports the people of the Caribbean as they address the impact of climate variability and changes on all aspects of economic development, through the provision of timely forecasts and analyses of potentially hazardous impacts on both natural and man-made climate changes on the environment and the development of special programmes that create opportunities for sustainable development.