By NEIL HARTNELL

Tribune Business Editor

nhartnell@tribunemedia.net

Caribbean governments and private companies have increased their pursuit of sustainable and climate resilient financing by hundreds of millions of dollars, a senior CIBC FirstCaribbean executive has revealed.

Adam Carter, the bank’s managing director and head of investment banking, foreign exchange and derivatives, told the seventh Annual Caribbean Infrastructure Forum (CARIF) that the increased demand is driven by Caribbean countries needing to become better prepared to mitigate climate disasters.

“We’re seeing an increase in governments, particularly, looking to access blue financing, and we’ve seen a massive increase in renewable energy applications, resilient project applications, utilities looking to be more resilient, hospitals looking to do upgrades, roads, cruise ports... Just across the board we’re seeing the increase,” Mr Carter added.

“It’s certainly in the hundreds of millions over the last few years where sustainable was not the theme. Resilience was always a theme in the Caribbean. But now we’re seeing resiliency fit under sustainability, which I think is more fitting. So, under that umbrella or title, we’re seeing a markable increase in appetite for projects that fit those criteria.

“We’re in a hurricane-impacted region. Designing for Category three, four or five is now the thing where you kind of have no other choice but to.” Mr Carter explained that funding for such projects, at a time when the world’s focus is now on supporting measures that protect the environment and addressing climate change, is available.

“The funding is generally there,” he said. “Financing is absolutely available. It’s prudent to get the right projects in place with the right parameters and frameworks. Once those are established, and you’ve got the political and community buy-in, lenders and financial institutions are ready to go.”

Therese Turner-Jones, the Caribbean Development Bank’s (CDB) director of projects, said that while the demand for funding exceeds the supply of capital for all countries with these needs, multilateral institutions such as the World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) offer alternative sources. However, she added that countries need to get a better grasp of their exact needs.

“First of all, I think there’s a bit of a deficit in countries recognising what they need,” Ms Turner-Jones explained. “Because of how fast the external environment is changing, not just in terms of availability of finance but also climate change and how the world is changing, we can’t expect that our member countries are always up-to-date.

“But this is why we’re here. To provide those advisory services to help them do the technical work. This is not to say that the capacity doesn’t exist in-country, but to say that multilateral banks are in a better position to offer that advice. So, what I say to clients is to come to the MDBs (multilateral development banks) first.”

Ms Turner-Jones continued: “Explore the options with CDB, the IDB, the World Bank first. Because, firstly, that money is cheaper and it always comes with technical assistance. They just need to ask. I would say that because we’re at such a critical juncture in terms of the needs of the region, we need to now think about what resilience means.

“You heard about renewable energy projects being important, roads and whether they’d be able to sustain a significant amount of rainfall, hurricanes, etc. So, there’s a lot of new information out in the infrastructure domain that the multilateral development banks have at their fingertips that the countries may not have. It’s best to work with us [MDBs].”

This year’s CARIF conference gathered some of the region’s leaders in policy, finance and infrastructure development for two days of solution-building and networking. It was sponsored by CIBC FirstCaribbean and KPMG.