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- Implement a Green New Deal
By creating self-sustaining energy and relying less on imports, the islands could become much more self-sufficient. This would both protect the island during a future pandemic as well as aid the environment.
The argument
In a post COVID-19 existence, a Green New Deal would further guarantee the safety of small island nations, because it addresses the single condition that leaves them exposed to both of the crises they face. Smaller island nations are among the most vulnerable in society, and a vast majority of them already faced risks from climate change, dealing with rising sea levels as well as severe weather events. Those risks were understood as environmental long before the pandemic. What the pandemic revealed is that they are structural. Coronavirus has only underscored that vulnerability, because these island nations often do not have the infrastructure to battle severe bouts of COVID-19. Some, like Hong Kong and Singapore, possess that ability; islands in the Southeast Pacific and Caribbean face a variety of dilemmas regarding both climate change and coronavirus at once. The pattern is the same in each case. An island that depends on what arrives by sea and air is at the mercy of supply chains it does not control, and when those chains are interrupted — by a storm or by a border closure — the shortage arrives immediately and there is no hinterland to fall back on. Climate vulnerability and pandemic vulnerability are, for these states, two expressions of a single dependency. That is why a Green New Deal type plan benefits these island nations, the more and less developed alike, rather than only the poorest of them. By creating self-sustaining energy and relying less on imports, the islands could become much more self-sufficient. Energy generated locally cannot be cut off by a blockade or a cancelled shipment, and a state that keeps its own lights and hospitals running is a state that can absorb a shock rather than be overwhelmed by it. That self-sufficiency would both protect the islands during a future pandemic and aid the environment, which is the reason a climate programme should be understood as a safety programme as well.
Premises
Counter-arguments
A Green New Deal does not guarantee the protection of smaller island nations following the coronavirus pandemic. This is largely due to the fact that smaller island nations can never be fully self-sufficient and will always rely on larger countries and economy. City-states like Hong Kong and Singapore may be hugely wealthy and populated, but that stems from being an international port of call rather than their own individual infrastructure or success. Less developed islands in the Caribbean like Jamaica, for example, simply do not have the power to change their fate alone. Even if these island nations become carbon neutral, it will not stop oceans from swallowing them whole if other countries continue on a path detrimental to the planet.
Rejecting the premises
[Rejecting P1] The two vulnerabilities have different causes — sea-level exposure and geography on one side, health-system capacity and import dependence on the other — so a programme addressing the first does not follow for the second. [Rejecting P2] Small island states cannot become self-sufficient in the relevant sense: their economies rest on trade, tourism and transit, as Hong Kong and Singapore illustrate, and less developed islands lack the capital to build the energy systems the premise assumes. [Rejecting P3] Local self-sufficiency does not address the driver of the risk, since sea-level rise is set by global emissions — an island that reaches carbon neutrality alone is not thereby protected.