 The Prime Minister of St. Lucia continues to advocate for equitable access to climate finance for small island developing states. The issue was brought to the fore by the recent passage of Hurricane Elsa, which battered the island living in her wake one death and millions of dollars in damages. We get details in this report. The passage of Hurricane Elsa has once again brought to the fore how paramount it is that countries have equitable access to climate financing. Climate finance refers to local, national or transnational financing, which may be drawn from public, private and alternative sources of financing. It is critical to addressing climate change because large-scale investments are required to drastically reduce emissions, notably in sectors that emit large quantities of greenhouse gases. Climate finance is equally important for adaptation, for which significant financial resources will be similarly required to allow societies and economies to adapt to the adverse effects and reduce the impacts of climate change. Prime Minister St. Lucia, the Honourable Alan Sharsney says it is proving especially difficult for small island developing states, SIDS, to access climate financing. The difficulty is you run a very fine line because the indicators that the global international agencies use to determine your solvency, your capability, is debt to GDP and also per capita GDP. These are two things that are used on a regular basis. St. Lucia still is not determined to be a high-level income country or a middle income country and we still have access to some concessional financing. And because of your debt to GDP, you're restricted on how much you can borrow. So even though it may be on a very concessional terms, it can affect your credit rating if you have too high of a debt to GDP number. What we've been working with the development agencies with is to reclassify small island developing states. St. Lucia is one of the 43 small island developing states around the world using what we called a different indicator, one that is based on vulnerability. So it takes into other things in the consideration. So we saw in the Bahamas, even though they have a very high per capita GDP, they still have not recovered from the hurricane in 2019. And that's because it's a lot of money to make that happen. So we would like the international agencies to either lend this money or more importantly to give us grant funds because climate change is not our fault to put in plain English. Even if we were to become net neutral, it's not going to change our situation. It requires America, Canada, Europe, China to address these situations. The Prime Minister opined that funding should be made available to SIDS to enable these countries to build resilience against climate change. Honourable Shasne described the situation as an ongoing battle. He explained that the affected countries are confronting the challenges using a collaborative approach. We're speaking as one voice. There is the COP meeting coming up in the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson and now having carried the former Secretary of State in the United States as well as Prime Minister Trudeau and the Commonwealth Secretary at working with us to get this message across. The World Economic Forum, as you know, St. Lucia is one of the two countries in the world that was included to help design the new World Economic Order as it pertains to climate change. These papers are going to be presented and I'm very hopeful that persons will understand our plight. So even before COVID came, it was a difficult situation. COVID only exasperated the situation and I would say this to you, the work that we did leading up to COVID on climate change really helped make the case very fast because if you see the World Bank and the IMF and CDB all responded in record time in providing resources to us to deal with COVID. So I'm encouraged and I think that we are arguing this not from a begging perspective but certainly reminding the world that if you limit the economic output of these countries you're minimizing the opportunities for your own countries. The UK will host the 26 United Nations Climate Change Conference of the parties COP 26 in Glasgow on the 31st of October to the 12th of November 2021.