Antigua and Barbuda welcomed the launch of the Global Infrastructure Resilience (GIR 2025) Report at COP30, while stressing that its real value will depend on whether countries can actually access the financing and support required to implement resilience on the ground.
Ambassador Ruleta Camacho Thomas noted that without accessible, affordable finance, even the best technical guidance remains out of reach for the people who need it most.
The cost of resilience cannot become the reason families fall into poverty, she said, and global partners must ensure that vulnerable communities are not priced out of safety.
She explained that climate impacts in the Caribbean are already forcing households from stability into hardship. When a roof fails, a coastline erodes, or a home is destroyed, the financial burden often falls entirely on families.
With reinsurers withdrawing from parts of the region and premiums rising beyond reach, many households now face climate impacts without adequate insurance.
Without supportive and affordable financing, individuals struggle to meet the upfront costs of strengthening their homes or rebuilding to resilient standards—leaving them more exposed with each passing season. This is how vulnerability turns into poverty, she warned, and how inequality deepens.
She added that the same dynamic exists at the national level. Each disaster increases debt burdens, undermining a country’s ability to invest in long-term resilience.
The losses from Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica—nearly USD 8–9 billion, compared to roughly USD 1 billion currently available for recovery—illustrate the magnitude of the gap. When recovery finance covers only a fraction of the damage, governments are pushed into new borrowing, and resilience remains stalled.
Ambassador Camacho Thomas stressed that bridging this gap requires direct budget support for highly indebted countries and a rapid scale-up of international financing that can be deployed quickly and equitably.
The GIR 2025 report provides the evidence and tools, she said, but people and governments need real access to finance in order to act.