Against a backdrop of decades of uneven development and escalating climate risk, the leader of a leading Caribbean policy think tank has issued a forceful call for sweeping, immediate reform of the global financial system, arguing that long-standing structural inequalities and unaddressed historical harms remain the single greatest barrier to the region’s economic growth and climate resilience.
Speaking at the regional launch of new initiatives from the Caribbean Policy Development Centre (CPDC), Executive Director Richard Jones delivered a clear call to major global economic powers: dismantle the discriminatory financial architectures that perpetuate colonial-era legacies holding small island states back.
Jones’s remarks opened the premiere of *Tides of Debt*, a new CPDC documentary that unpacks the overlapping realities of sovereign debt burdens, climate vulnerability, and uneven economic resilience across 12 Caribbean nations. He pushed back against the common narrative that frames the region’s economic and environmental struggles as unavoidable consequences of geography, instead framing them as the direct, lasting outcome of centuries of systemic exploitation.
For modern Caribbean nations, Jones stressed, remaining silent in the face of crises the region did nothing to create is no longer an option. “This launch comes at a moment when the Caribbean must speak with great clarity and confidence about the development future we deserve,” Jones told assembled delegates. “For too long our region has been asked to carry burdens we did not create. We did not create the climate vulnerability, but we are among those most exposed to its consequences. We did not create the global debt architecture, but we are constrained by it.”
He pushed for a fundamental shift in how global actors approach climate action, arguing that international bodies cannot continue to treat climate change as purely an environmental challenge. Instead, Jones said, climate justice and historical reparations are two inseparable components of the same systemic failure. “Climate justice is not only about storms, sea level rise, droughts, floods, coral reefs, and rising temperatures—it’s about power,” Jones said. “It is about responsibility. It’s about who caused the crisis, who’s paying the price, and who has the resources to respond.” He added that demands for reparations are not merely a reckoning with the past: they are a necessary correction to current and future harms, addressing the deep, persistent damage inflicted by centuries of enslavement, colonial occupation, resource extraction, racial exploitation, and intentionally enforced economic dependency.
A core focus of Jones’s address was the crippling, self-reinforcing cycle of climate-induced debt that traps many Caribbean nations. He delivered sharp criticism of international financial systems that systematically disregard the unique vulnerabilities of small island developing states, forcing governments to take on high-interest loans just to recover from climate-fueled natural disasters, locking them in perpetual debt cycles. “The Caribbean cannot accept a global climate model where those least responsible for the crisis are forced to borrow to survive it,” he argued. “Loans cannot be the main answer to climate loss and damage. Debt cannot be the price of resilience. And small island developing states cannot continue to be told to become more resilient while the international financial system denies us the resources to do so fairly.”
Jones outlined the severe domestic damage caused by this systemic financial strain: when governments are forced to allocate more public funding to debt servicing than to core public priorities like healthcare, education, housing, and social protection, what begins as a fiscal issue expands into a profound crisis of development and justice. This inherent fragility, he noted, has been further exacerbated by recent external shocks, including spiking global oil prices and inflation driven by ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
To shift the global conversation from the outdated model of “development charity” to a framework of “development justice,” Jones laid out three urgent priorities for CPDC, its network of regional non-governmental organizations, and global civil society more broadly: first, build stronger, data-backed evidence to document the full scale of climate and historical vulnerabilities across the region; second, expand public education to help ordinary Caribbean citizens understand how global financial systems directly shape their daily lives; and third, build organized, sustained policy advocacy to push for systemic change.
Drawing on the Caribbean’s long history of grassroots resistance to oppression, Jones called on civil society to bridge the gap between high-level global diplomatic negotiations—including the Barbados-led Bridgetown Initiative and the work of the CARICOM Reparations Commission—and the on-the-ground lived experiences of everyday people, from small-scale farmers and artisanal fisherfolk to the region’s growing youth population.
“Our history is one of survival, resistance, creativity, and transformation,” Jones said. “From slavery to emancipation, from colonialism to independence, from disaster to recovery, Caribbean people have always found ways to organise, rebuild, and imagine a better future for ourselves. Now, we must do so again. The struggle for climate justice and historical reparations is a struggle for the right of Caribbean people to develop with dignity.”