Sustainable Development of SIDS; Introduction

Climate change is a global risk caused by human behavior that was put prominent on the agenda with the Nobel prize in 2007, awarded to Al Gore. This risk needs to be handled by governance. This is a challenge because it is a global issue, it is complex, there is no clear cause and effect sequence, it is a intergenerational problem, and it is not obvious who is responsible for the risky behavior. Governance has also changed. The national scale has decreased in importance but there is no proper substitution for this, despite the progress of globalization and global governance. (Turnheim and Tezcan, 2009).

The research question dealt with in the next blogs is: What governance mechanism can mitigate the effects of climate change?

This blogs are about Small Island Development States (SIDS), governance and coping with climate change. The United Nations classifies 52 countries as SIDS. The focus will be on 23 Caribbean SIDS, the biggest of the three groups of SIDS. The two other groups are: Pacific and AIMS (Africa, Indian Ocean, Mediterranean and South China Sea).

It is interesting to see the results of Rio+20, twenty years after the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, setting the Agenda 21 and after that the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD) in Johannesburg in 2002. And also the annual meetings of the Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD) since 1993 and Rio+5 in 1997 (Karlsson-Vinkhuyzen, 2011).