The Cost of Recovery: How Climate Change Is Consuming the Caribbean’s Future

The aftermath of Hurricane Melissa, which hit Jamaica in October 2025.

What is the cost of climate change to the Caribbean? There is the economic and physical damage, but what of the lives taken, the people affected and the futures interrupted? Wilkinson and Panwar (2026) reported the figures and they are staggering. 

Between 2000 and 2024, they estimate that the Caribbean accounted for USD53.3 billion of the 57.3 billion in loss affected associated with climate change across 37 SIDS.  This figure translates to 92% of climate-attributable deaths, 85% of affected people, and 93% of estimated economic loss and damage across 37 SIDS.

The full cost of climate change

The Caribbean shares of loss reported suggests that the region bore approximately US$22 billion in economic damages and US$30.9 billion representing the statistical value of lives taken. These figures help lay bare the stark reality that the Caribbean is not merely among the regions exposed to climate change but is carrying a disproportionate share of its human and economic consequences.

Yet even these numbers do not fully reveal what climate change is costing the region.  In addition to Keston Perry (2024) argument that climate losses in the region are woefully undervalued, they also do not tell us what Caribbean countries could have built if their resources had not repeatedly been directed towards response and reconstruction.

They do not measure the businesses that were never established, the public services that were never expanded, the infrastructure that was postponed or the institutional attention consumed by preparing for and recovering from the next disaster. Most importantly, these figures do not tell us what these lives lost could have been and could have built.

The Caribbean is not only losing what it already possesses. It is losing portions of the future it might otherwise have constructed.

This is where a climate crisis becomes a development crisis because the region is losing the future it envisions as enormous national effort is expended to return the country to a condition that was already vulnerable. Discussions of climate finance tend to concentrate on how much money countries can access and how quickly they can access it.

Jamaica and the limits of preparedness

Resilience has become one of the dominant concepts in climate change discourse. The region is encouraged to improve disaster preparedness, expand insurance coverage, and establish emergency financing to recover more quickly following climate attributed events.

These measures are indeed essential to saving lives and protecting livelihoods. However, while Caribbean countries can plan better, establish emergency facilities and improve their capacity to respond they cannot independently finance such huge losses.

Hurricane Melissa’s impact on Jamaica in October 2025 demonstrates what this means in practice. Melissa made landfall in Jamaica’s western parishes as a Category 5 hurricane, and was the most powerful hurricane recorded anywhere in the world in 2025 and the strongest ever registered in Jamaica.

The hurricane killed 45 people , and left behind an estimated US$12.23 billion in total damage and losses which is equivalent to approximately 57% of Jamaica’s 2024 GDP.

Yet as of March 2026, only US$822 million had been pledged to the Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage.

The entire amount pledged to the fund would not have covered even one-tenth of the central estimate of climate-attributable loss and damage caused by Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica.

Jamaica was able to mobilise about US$1 billion for immediate response and recovery through its pre-arranged financing and emergency facilities but this too is woefully inadequate compared to the loss it has experienced.

The central issue is therefore not whether Caribbean states are doing enough to become resilient. It is whether resilience can compensate for an international financial and economic system that leaves them carrying losses of this magnitude.

Reconstruction is also a political economy

The development implications extend beyond how much recovery finance is available.

Reconstruction involves contracts, building materials, engineering expertise, insurance, energy systems, construction companies and financial institutions. It is therefore necessary to ask not only where reconstruction money comes from, but where it eventually goes.

Who supplies the materials required to rebuild? Who receives the major contracts? How much expertise is imported? Where do the profits accumulate? What new capabilities remain within Caribbean economies once reconstruction is complete? Rebuilding that relies primarily on imported materials, external contractors, foreign expertise and finance that must later be repaid, means that much of its economic value leaves the region.

The result is that Caribbean countries regain damaged infrastructure without gaining substantially greater capacity to design, finance and construct future infrastructure for themselves.

Reconstruction must do more than restore what climate change destroyed. It must expand the Caribbean’s capacity to build, produce and retain value.

But what if reconstruction was used to generate greater regional capacity rather than a temporary emergency market? What if we seized it as a pathway to retain more value within Caribbean economies and make a different form of development possible?

Caribbean states could identify the goods, services and expertise repeatedly required after disasters and construct regional capabilities to provide them.

Shared procurement, regional inventories, professional networks and investment in climate-resilient construction could allow more of the value associated with rebuilding to circulate within Caribbean economies. Public procurement could be designed to ensure that smaller domestic firms participate in reconstruction rather than watching large contracts flow elsewhere.

None of this removes the responsibility of high-emitting countries to provide finance at the scale required. Climate finance must increase, become more accessible and be delivered in forms that do not convert climate injustice into additional debt. These figures remind us of the staggering cost the region bears and why we cannot be silent about who is responsible for that loss.

But our demand cannot end with financing the restoration of what existed before. The Caribbean must also insist that reconstruction strengthens its capacity to build, produce and retain value. Otherwise, the region will continue to rebuild its present while surrendering the resources, capabilities and possibilities from which its future might have been made. The deepest cost of climate change is therefore not only what the Caribbean has lost. It is what the region is being prevented from becoming.

References

Perry, K. Keston. (2024) ‘Epistemic silences, subversive politics: Post-disaster economic assessments as technologies of persistent coloniality and route to an emancipatory climate justice agenda in the Caribbean’, Climate and Development, 16(9), pp. 798–810. https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2024.2370926

Wilkinson, Emily. and Panwar, Vikrant. (2026) Climate change is driving up loss and damage in SIDS. RESI Briefing Paper. London: ODI Global. https://doi.org/10.61755/AVYP3068