• first: wedding celebration with a big horse race (no tents or fairground rides)

• turned into the biggest folk festival

• come together comfortly and with the special dress and leather pants

All small island developing states (SIDS), more specifically, the Caribbean region represent some of the most vulnerable regions to climate change due to many factors including remoteness, small population size, extreme vulnerability to external economic shock as well as fragile land and marine ecosystems. Within the last decade, some parts of The Bahamas have suffered immensely at the hand of natural disasters, notably Hurricane Dorian in September 2019 which pummeled The Abacos (island chain) and Grand Bahama as a Category 5 hurricane.  

According to an Inter-American Development Bank report, Dorian caused The Bahamas about $3.4 billion in damages, estimated to be about one-quarter of the country’s GDP.  Some official sources report that the death toll was at least 70 persons while other reports strongly suggest that the death toll might be much higher, as to date, there are still hundreds of persons missing after the catastrophic storm.

The Regional Meeting of the Heads of Government of the Caribbean was successful in that its overall goal was met. The goal set ahead of this meeting was to produce a platform document that would be the uniformed voice of the region on mitigating climate change at the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference - COP27 which was held in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt in November 2022.