When small island developing states grapple with escalating climate-driven extreme weather, the president of Dominica has delivered a clear, urgent call to the global community: shift the current reactive approach to climate crisis response and invest in climate resilience before catastrophic events strike. Speaking from the podium of the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York, Sylvanie Burton highlighted that the existing model leaves highly vulnerable nations like hers saddled with new debt to rebuild critical infrastructure that could have been protected through proactive investment.
Burton pointed to the 2017 Hurricane Maria, a storm that leveled much of Dominica’s critical infrastructure, as a stark lesson for global climate action. The widespread destruction caused by that hurricane, she emphasized, proved that building adaptive capacity must happen long before a storm makes landfall. This means engineering more robust roads, constructing climate-resilient buildings, upgrading reliable water systems, reinforcing health facilities, and strengthening public institutions to withstand extreme weather events. “The best time to build resilience is before disaster. The best time to finance transformation is before crisis,” Burton told assembled global leaders during her address.
To make this proactive shift possible, Burton laid out three core demands for the international financial system. First, she pushed for far broader access to low-interest concessional loans and outright grants earmarked specifically for climate adaptation projects in vulnerable nations. Second, she called for mandatory, strong disaster relief clauses to be embedded in all sovereign debt agreements, allowing countries to pause debt repayments in the aftermath of climate catastrophes. Third, she advocated for pre-positioned climate financing that can be disbursed rapidly immediately after a disaster strikes, cutting down on critical response time.
Burton also threw her support behind a longstanding push from small island states to incorporate multidimensional vulnerability metrics into global development finance decision-making. Traditional criteria for accessing favorable financing, she argued, routinely fail to account for the disproportionate climate risks that small island developing states face, locking many out of the support they need to build resilience.
Rejecting the framing of vulnerable states as passive victims, Burton made clear that Dominica is not seeking pity at the United Nations. Instead, the country is positioning itself as an active partner in global climate transformation. “Dominica does not come to the United Nations asking to be treated as a victim of vulnerability. We come asking to be recognised as a partner in transformation,” she said.
The Dominican president stressed that proactive measures to prevent the destruction of core public assets—from schools and hospitals to drinking water systems—should be classified and treated as productive investments in long-term development, rather than discretionary climate spending. To back up her call for a new approach, Burton confirmed that Dominica stands ready to serve as a proof of concept, demonstrating the tangible results that a resilience-centered climate financing model can deliver for vulnerable nations.