Building a more integrated, private sector driven approach to access climate finance across a shared regional system

The Caribbean did not create the climate crisis, yet it remains among the regions most exposed to its consequences. Nearly 70% of the population lives and works in coastal zones, and core sectors including tourism, agriculture, fisheries, and construction are directly exposed to climate shocks. Hurricanes, sea level rise, and ecosystem degradation do not recognise political boundaries or institutional arrangements. In practical terms, the Caribbean functions as a single climate system, defined by shared exposure and deeply interconnected economic vulnerabilities.

It is within this context that Caribbean Export’s recent accreditation to the Green Climate Fund marks an important shift for the region. As a regional institution working directly with businesses, this accreditation creates a practical pathway to bring climate finance closer to the private sector actors that are central to building resilience, and that have historically remained beyond the reach of global financing structures.

The current climate finance architecture is increasingly taking into account regional realities, including the Caribbean’s position as a shared and interconnected climate system, yet its structures remain in transition.

Access to major funding pools, including multilateral climate funds, blended finance facilities, and technical assistance instruments, continues to be shaped by institutional categories such as Small Island Developing States (SIDS), Least Developed Countries (LDCs), and sovereign eligibility. While these distinctions reflect the legacy architecture of the international system, they do not always align with how climate risk is experienced across the region. The Caribbean’s shared vulnerabilities point to a single climate zone, yet financing flows often remain fragmented. The result is not a lack of commitment, but a system in which resources do not consistently reach the full range of actors responsible for building resilience.

This fragmentation is most evident in the private sector. Micro, small and medium sized enterprises account for over 90% of firms and a substantial share of employment across the Caribbean, yet many remain structurally excluded from climate finance. The constraint is not simply the availability of capital. It is the difficulty of connecting it to investment-ready opportunities at a scale, structure, and risk profile that international financiers can support.

In that sense, Caribbean Export’s accreditation is not an endpoint, but an inflection point. It signals a shift towards a more active role for regional institutions in translating global capital into investable opportunities on the ground.

Global analysis reinforces both the scale of the challenge and the opportunity ahead. The UNEP Adaptation Gap Report 2025 estimates that developing countries will need between USD 310 billion and USD 365 billion annually for climate adaptation by 2035. At the same time, international public finance flows from developed to developing countries declined from USD 28 billion in 2022 to USD 26 billion in 2023. For Caribbean SIDS, the ambition is clear, with adaptation integrated into national development frameworks, but financing continues to fall far short of what is required.

These figures do not yet fully reflect the evolving global context. The 2025 shock to the international cooperation system, including the dismantling of USAID and the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, has removed one of the largest sources of development finance at a moment of increasing need.

The UNEP report also highlights a significant private sector opportunity. Potential investment in national adaptation priorities is estimated at approximately USD 50 billion per year, compared to current private sector flows of roughly USD 5 billion globally. When combined with more than USD 250 billion annually in private sector climate proofing of business assets, the scale of the opportunity becomes clear. The challenge is not solely one of financing. It is one of intermediation. Capital must be connected to viable projects in markets that remain unfamiliar to global investors and where perceived risk remains high.

Diverse Regional Realities, Unified by Climate Needs

The Caribbean’s climate finance challenge does not map neatly onto its political geography. At the level of international donors and multilateral organisations, engagement with the region is often fragmented. In some cases, the Caribbean is treated as an extension of Latin America, limiting focus and scale. In others, engagement is confined to CARICOM, excluding economies such as Cuba and the Dominican Republic, despite their size, investment activity, and climate finance potential.

Alongside these dynamics, Haiti presents a distinct and more complex reality. Its private sector operates under extreme constraints, shaped by political fragility, institutional disruption, and acute climate vulnerability. While its status as an LDC provides theoretical access to certain financing windows, the operational environment often prevents this support from materialising in practice, limiting the extent to which available resources can be effectively deployed.

In response, the Green Climate Fund has committed to strengthening Haiti’s National Designated Authority through the United Nations Development Programme. Within this evolving framework, Caribbean Export’s accreditation creates scope to support business associations and MSMEs through technical assistance, project preparation, and regional financing linkages, helping bridge the gap between available finance and the realities on the ground. Building climate resilient enterprises in Haiti is therefore inseparable from the country’s broader recovery.

Beyond this, several Caribbean territories, including Aruba, Curaçao, Martinique, Guadeloupe, the Cayman Islands, Turks and Caicos, and the British Virgin Islands, remain outside the CARIFORUM framework while sharing the same climate exposure. Their access to multilateral climate finance is often constrained by their political status, and the funding mechanisms available to them are not always aligned with the realities of Caribbean private sector development, being primarily designed for continental European contexts.

Taken together, these dynamics point to a clear conclusion. Climate finance in the Caribbean is not only a question of how much capital exists, but how effectively it can be intermediated.

From Fragmentation to Delivery

Advancing climate finance in the Caribbean will depend on translating this evolving landscape into practical outcomes for businesses and communities. For Caribbean Export, the recent accreditation to the Green Climate Fund provides a platform to do precisely this, acting as a regional intermediary to unlock climate finance and channel it towards private sector actors. This builds on existing efforts, including the Caribbean Investment Forum, which has positioned itself as a key platform to attract foreign direct investment into transformational sectors, including the transition to a green economy. The following priorities outline a practical pathway to operationalise this role.

A central priority is the development of a robust pipeline of private sector climate projects. This requires coordinated engagement between governments, financial institutions, development partners, and business organisations to identify and structure opportunities across renewable energy, climate smart agriculture, resilient infrastructure, sustainable tourism, and the blue economy. These projects must be technically sound, financially viable, and aligned with international standards, while remaining grounded in local realities.

Expanding access to finance for small and medium sized enterprises is equally important. Many firms operate below the thresholds of traditional development finance and require tailored instruments to participate meaningfully. Blended finance approaches, combining concessional capital with risk sharing mechanisms, offer a practical pathway to lowering barriers, crowding in private investment, and enabling firms to invest in resilience and low carbon growth.

In complex environments such as Haiti, strengthening the capacity of business associations and enterprises to engage with climate finance will be essential. This includes support for project preparation, climate risk assessment, and access to regional financing mechanisms, ensuring that available resources translate into sustained impact.

At the institutional level, continued investment in readiness remains critical. Strengthening proposal development capabilities, enhancing coordination with National Designated Authorities, and aligning regional initiatives will help ensure that efforts are mutually reinforcing rather than duplicative.

Greater coordination across institutions will further support this process. The Caribbean benefits from a wide range of development partners, and the opportunity lies in ensuring that these actors operate in a more integrated and complementary manner. The objective is not to create new structures, but to ensure that existing ones function as part of a coherent system.

A Strategic Inflection Point

The Caribbean is a region of extraordinary diversity, spanning different languages, political systems, and economic structures. What it shares, however, is geography, vulnerability, and a common need for a climate finance architecture that serves the region, rather than one the region must continuously adapt itself to fit.

Within this context, regional intermediaries have an increasingly important role to play. Caribbean Export’s accreditation to the Green Climate Fund provides a platform to strengthen the connection between international capital and Caribbean businesses. It does not resolve every structural barrier, nor is it intended to. Rather, it establishes a practical mechanism through which, in partnership with regional and international actors, bankable projects can be developed, access to finance expanded, and the persistent gap between global capital and Caribbean enterprise more effectively bridged.

Climate finance is gradually evolving towards a more integrated model that recognises the importance of regional systems and local actors in delivering resilience on the ground. The question is not whether this shift will occur, but whether the Caribbean can move with sufficient speed, coordination, and clarity of purpose to shape it.

Because ultimately, the measure of climate finance will not be the volume of capital committed, but how effectively it reaches the businesses and communities already carrying the burden of the region’s resilience.