 Hi, my name is Aaron Atridge. I'm a research fellow with the Stockholm Environment Institute, which is an international independent think tank working on environment and development issues. And in this short presentation today, I'm going to summarize for you a recent analysis we've done of climate finance in the Caribbean small island states. And in particular, zoom in on the 10 member countries of the organization of the Eastern Caribbean states. Under the UNFCCC, there are commitments to provide developing countries and vulnerable countries with financial support to help them deal with climate change, either to transition to a low carbon economy and address greenhouse gas emissions, as well as to prepare for and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Climate finance has been mobilizing for a few years now, so we're in a position to start asking questions about how it's being used, particularly we want to know things like, are we making good decisions with the use of funding? Is it going to address key priorities? Is it addressing a wide range of different sectors? And if not, why not so that we can learn over time and improve our decision making? But to do that, to answer those questions, we first need to know how much finance is flowing. And so that's what we set out to do in this study is to answer for the Caribbean region what has been happening with the delivery of climate finance. It turns out that understanding the answer to this question is quite tricky and it's because of this picture partly, the very complex landscape through which finance is flowing. There are many different donors involved. It tends to come through a very wide range of different intermediary organizations and institutions. And even within recipient countries, it ends up in a very wide array of different entities. And this makes it difficult even for recipient country governments to have a clear oversight of what's been happening and how it's been working. So let me explain then a little bit about how we went about the analysis and how we've arrived at some insight into climate finance in the Caribbean. We began with the 29 member countries of the Caribbean Development and Cooperation Committee. We looked at ODA that has been flowing to the region. So bilateral donors and the Multilateral Climate Funds report to the OECD's Development Assessment Committee. They report not only how much ODA has been provided but also what it's being used for. So we take their most recent data, which is for the period 2010 to 2015, end of 2015. And we are able to see that for the Eastern Caribbean states or the members of the OECS, total ODA for this period up between 2010 and the end of 2015 is 1.1 billion. And that covers eight of the 10 members of the Eastern Caribbean. British Virgin Islands and Martinique have in fact received no ODA in that period. There's a portion of that ODA that is tagged by donors and funds related to climate change. And that actually consists of two things. One is where the principal or primary purpose of the finance was to tackle climate change objectives. And in the OECS region for those member states, this amounts to approximately 101 million US dollars for those six years. And that's the amount that we're primarily interested in here today in looking at what it's being used, where this climate finance is going. There is, as you can see, a secondary amount, which is funding that was not primarily about climate change, but has a climate change co-benefit according to how it's reported in the system. But we concentrate on the 101 million. In terms of where it's coming from, just you can see from this figure that for that principal amount, multilateral sources have provided around 70% of the total funding to date. Both the wider Caribbean and the Pacific Island states have basically the reverse, which is that bilateral sources have tended to have a much higher contribution to climate finance. So that's an interesting finding for the OECS member states themselves. So this picture shows you where it's going, where the climate finance, this 101 million US dollars over the six years is going by country. You can see Dominican Republic, Haiti, Guyana across the wider Caribbean region. These have been the largest recipients. And you can also see down the bottom, there's an amount that is not allocated to individual countries, but to regional programs. And it's not possible for us to see which countries have benefited from that, from the data, but that amounts to 148 million as well. But if we zoom in on the member states of the organization of Eastern Caribbean states, for the 10 member states there, you can see Dominica and St. Lucia have been the largest recipients. St. Vincent and the Grenadines and Tiguan-Barbu have also received some amounts. As I said before, British Virgin Islands and Martinique have not received any ODA. And here you can also see that Anguilla and Montserrat, which have received ODA, have not received any of that principally as targeting climate change objectives. So that means there is, in fact, this climate finance figure is distributed across six OECS member states, which includes St. Kitts and Nevis, for which the amount is very, very small, basically zero. I think another interesting way to look at this is on a per capita basis. So you can see here, we take the total amount of climate finance and divide it by population, and you can see here four of the OECS member countries are, in fact, up in the highest region on a per capita basis when you compare with the wider Caribbean countries, which is interesting. So where is this money coming from? The largest source to date has been the climate investment funds, primarily the World Bank's pilot program for climate resilience, PPCR, followed by the Global Environment Facility, the EU, France, and Italy. The French contribution here is to Dominica, and it's actually a loan. And if we look at the use of different instruments for OECS countries more broadly, you can actually see that around 32% of the total climate finance to date has, in fact, been ODA loans. That mirrors the wider Caribbean pattern, but it's, in fact, quite different to Pacific Island SIDs where all of the funding to date has been grant-based. We can also see in the data how the funding has been distributed across different sectors. And this figure will show you that it's been quite narrowly concentrated for OECS countries in the disaster sector, either disaster preparedness, DRR, or in relief and rehabilitation. In fact, the only other sector to have received any substantial amount is energy. And that's quite a narrow pattern and something that I think I'll come back to a little bit later. It's also important to think about how this finance is being delivered on the ground. And this picture shows you for the wider Caribbean region, the only important thing here is in the top left, you can see that the bulk of this funding is coming as project type interventions, which means short, fixed finance packages. And that's the same for OECS countries when you zoom in. In fact, 99% of all of their climate finance has come as project-based interventions. And this has implications for the ability of countries to really program that funding and align it with their long-term development priorities. Another key issue when you look at the data for OECS countries is this picture. The red bars show how much of the committed amounts of climate finance have not yet been spent on the ground. And as you can see for the four OECS countries in the picture, which is the yellow box at the top, disbursements of climate finance are very, very low, much lower than the wider Caribbean region, lower even than also than the Pacific region. And this suggests there's some real structural challenges with programming the finance in the region. And we don't know from the data why that is, but it's definitely worth thinking about and exploring in more detail. So just very quickly then, there's a few other things that you can see in the data and you can dig into more in the report. One is how climate finance has changed over time. So this picture shows for the OECS countries that in fact it really only began flowing in 2013. So this is a relatively new way of packaging financial support for OECS countries. You can also see the kinds of intermediaries that are involved in programming that funding between the original source and the final recipients. And this figure on the right-hand side will show you, for instance, the role of multilateral development banks, UN agencies, regional organizations. Some portion flows directly from the donor or the source to the recipient country governments. The other thing you'll notice about this picture is that bilateral sources, although they've been smaller in scale for the OECS countries, are programming through a wider range of first recipients. And that is also mirrors what's happening when you look at the sectoral distribution. Bilateral sources have tended to provide funding for a much wider range of sectors than multilateral sources. And this mirrors what's happening in other regions too. And it's a very important insight to understand something about the flexibility of different funding sources because many different sectors are going to need climate finance and to build resilience for the future. Lastly, as I said, in the OECS countries, most of the funding has come through the climate funds. But as you see here, most of it, that has, in fact, been the PPCR. And there are several funds that have not been tapped at all by OECS countries, including the adaptation fund, for instance. So this kind of analysis helps start a conversation about are we making good decisions? Where is the funding going? It provides some answers, but also some more questions, really. Some of the most interesting insights, as we've covered, is that bilateral sources seem to be underrepresented in the OECS countries compared to other regions, which is interesting given that they tend to be more flexible and have much lower transaction costs than multilateral funds. The multilateral funds also have a very low disbursement ratio in the OECS region, which is highly problematic, especially given the high transaction costs involved. And another key insight is really that some key sectors for Caribbean island countries are not receiving climate finance at all. It's concentrated in quite a small number of sectors. And this is something to think about going forward, things like not only water and agriculture, but also health, education, social welfare, kind of sectors that are key for building resilience. So this work will be published very soon and there's a report that will be publicly available. And if you have any questions about it or you'd like to get in touch and explore some of the data in more detail, we'd be more than happy to discuss it with you. Thank you very much.