Excerpt and Photo from caribbeannewsservice.com
Decision-makers from the world’s islands alongside expert stakeholders from civil society, academia, and the private sector have highlighted the outsized impact that island communities have in global sustainable development goals throughout the weeklong 2024 Virtual Island Summit (VIS).
Hundreds of speakers and thousands of attendees participated in the VIS, which discussed key topics for island communities including sustainable tourism, the blue economy, climate adaptation, and financing.
The summit was sponsored by clean transportation non-profit CALSTART, conservation finance organization the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund, education policy institution the Edge Foundation, ocean thermal energy conversion consortium PLOTEC, and the Cayman Islands Government.
The need for knowledge-sharing and capacity-building between island stakeholders was highlighted by President of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo Batlle, in his keynote address at the VIS: “We need forums like this one to share successful experiences and for islands together to move forward,” he noted, “Forums like this are essential, they are necessary. We must share our problems and our solutions, our successful projects because of course, as you well know, islands are never given anything for free – we have to achieve through our effort.”