Going Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic: Climate Change Remains the Biggest Threat for Small Island Developing States

Abstract

Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic are complex and have multifaceted effects on countries in an unpredictable and unprecedented manner. While both COVID-19 and the climate crisis share similarities, they also have some notable differences. Being both systemic in nature with knock-on and cascading effects that propagate due to high connectedness of countries, COVID-19, however, presents imminent and directly visible dangers, while the risks from climate change are gradual, cumulative and often distributed dangers. Climate change has more significant medium and long-term impacts which are likely to worsen over time. There is no vaccine for climate change compared to COVID-19. In addition, those most affected by extreme climatic conditions have usually contributed the least to the root causes of the crisis. This is in fact the case of island economies. The chapter thus investigates into the vulnerability and resilience of 38 Small Islands Developing States (SIDs) to both shocks. Adopting a comprehensive conceptual framework and data on various indices from the literature and global databases, we assess the COVID-19 and climate change vulnerabilities of SIDs on multiple fronts. The results first reveal a higher vulnerability across all dimensions for the Pacific islands compared to the other islands in the sample. There is also evidence of a weak correlation between climate change risk and the COVID-19 pandemic confirming our premise that there are marked differences between these two shocks and their impacts on island communities.

Citation

Tandrayen-Ragoobur, V. (2023), "Going Beyond the COVID-19 Pandemic: Climate Change Remains the Biggest Threat for Small Island Developing States", Crowther, D. and Seifi, S. (Ed.) Achieving Net Zero (Developments in Corporate Governance and Responsibility, Vol. 20), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 71-94. https://doi.org/10.1108/S2043-052320230000020004