When Hurricane Melissa tore through the Caribbean in October 2025, it left a trail of destruction. The Category 5 storm damaged buildings in Jamaica, Haiti and Cuba, snapped power lines and cut off entire neighborhoods from hospitals and aid.

Jamaica’s regional tourism, fishing and agriculture industries – still recovering from Hurricane Beryl a year earlier – were crippled.

Melissa’s damage has been estimated at US$6 billion to $7 billion in Jamaica alone, about 30% of the island nation’s gross domestic product. While the country has a disaster risk plan designed to help it quickly raise several hundred million dollars, the damage from Melissa far exceeds that amount.

Whether Caribbean nations can recover from Melissa’s destruction and adapt to future climate change risks without taking on debilitating debt will depend in part on a big global promise: climate finance.

Developed countries that grew wealthy from burning fossil fuels, the leading driver of climate change, have pledged billions of dollars a year to help ecologically vulnerable nations like Jamaica, Cuba and the Philippines, recently hit by a typhoon, adapt to rising seas and stronger storms and rebuild after disasters worsened by climate change.

In 2024, they committed to boost climate finance from $100 billion a year to at least $300 billion a year by 2035, and to work toward $1.3 trillion annually from a wide spectrum of public and private sources.

But if the world is pouring billions into climate finance, why are developing countries still struggling with recovery costs?

I study the dynamics of global environmental and climate politics, including the United Nations........

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