More Islands Learn How to Go 100% Renewable

The tiny island of Dominica has an inconsequential impact on global greenhouse gas emissions, but is demonstrating tremendous leadership far above its size. Last September at the United Nations, during the annual General Assembly, the country’s Prime Minister, Roosevelt Skerrit, proclaimed that his Small Island Developing State (SIDS) in the Caribbean would be the world’s first climate-resilient nation.

In the first week of May this year, Dominica will continue to pursue this goal by sending four representatives — from the legislature, regulatory agency, utility, and civil society — to Hawaii to take part in the second convening of the Blue Planet Alliance (BPA) Fellowship Program. For that initiative, BPA hosts four such representatives from eight to 10 island countries and territories at the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii, and puts them through a week of workshops to help each come up with and develop a plan to transition to 100% renewable energy. Guests include high-level legislators and public sector officials, business leaders, regulatory executives, utility officers, and influential members of Hawaiian civil society — a cross-section of Hawaiian leadership.

BPA has great familiarity with leading a renewable-energy push, as it helped lead the way for Hawaii becoming the first U.S. state to legislatively mandate a transition to 100% renewable energy by 2045. Now, with its Fellowship program, the plan is to bring cohorts of island nations and territories — the most vulnerable to the negative impacts of climate change and the least responsible for them — to Hawaii to both learn from the speakers and experts we’ve assembled, as well as to learn from each other. (Of course, BPA will learn a lot along the way from each island, as well, in this collaboration that is designed to be symbiotic.)

The first cohort of our Fellowship program took place last October, also in Hawaii, just before the UN’s annual COP conference in November and December. The first cohort comprised the Kingdom of Tonga, the Government of Tuvalu, Guam, Pohnpei State (Federated States of Micronesia), the Republic of Palau, the Cayman Islands, the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands, and American Samoa.

For the second cohort in May, Dominica will be joined by Bermuda, Fiji, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, Puerto Rico, Seychelles, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu.

Learn more about BPA's Fellowship program here.