James Ellsmoor | From Barbados to Baku: Supporting island solutions to climate change

The destruction caused by Hurricane Beryl underscores the need for concerted climate action by the world’s leading economies as well as increased collaboration towards resilience building, adaptation, and mitigation projects in vulnerable communities. Beyond the SIDS conference, which happens once a decade, and the yearly UN COPs, where negotiations and policymaking is top of the agenda, there are few opportunities for large-scale knowledge-sharing events that involve civil society, youth, academia, and other key stakeholders. One of the events filling this gap is the Virtual Island Summit, a yearly event heading into its’ sixth iteration that brings together 10,000 attendees and over 160 speakers from around the world.

An open-access event with a weeklong agenda discussing the challenges and solutions being developed by island communities, the VIS has begun to serve as a primer for COP, with past addresses from the likes of Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, Marshall Islands President David Kabua, and Chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Pa’olelei Luteru. Set between September 9-13, early speaker announcements include high-level government representatives from the Canary Islands, Madagascar, Tuvalu, and Sint Eustatius, with more to be announced in the lead up to the event.