Bahamas PM Urges Caution as Atlantic Hurricane Season Appears to Be Sleeping
NEW YORK, New York - Bahamas Prime Minister Philip Davis says while the Caribbean has so far not recorded a single hurricane this season “the Atlantic lies as still as a sleeping giant”.
The Atlantic hurricane season ends on November 30 and Prime Minister Davis addressing the “Rising Nations Gala Dinner” on Tuesday night on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), said he wished he could all that good news, but he cannot.
“Because the same force that has quieted my ocean has set another on fire. The winds that shield The Bahamas are feeding the storms of the Pacific. Two Category 5 hurricanes. The Northern Marianas struck by super typhoons, twice. Hawaii hit head on,” Davis told the event that was held under the theme “Celebrating the UN Declaration on Sea Level Rise: From Ambition to Implementation”.
He told the event at which the French President, Emmanuel Macron and the Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Feleti Teo, received the “2026 Rising Nations Leaders Award” that countries needed to be honest “about what this quiet is.
“The hurricane season is not over and to date we have been spared. Others have not. And many of them are sitting in this room. No policy spared us. No treaty. No fund. No sea wall.
“To date this year, she chose the Pacific. Next year she may choose the Caribbean. We remember what that feels like.”
Prime Minister Davis recalled that in 2019, Hurricane Dorian sat over Abaco and Grand Bahama and “would not leave” as families watched the sea take the only land they had ever known.
“That is life in a small island state. We do not decide whether our year is kind or cruel. We wait to learn whose turn it is. And while we wait, the sea keeps rising. It does not take turns. It rises on all of us, every year, in silence.
“Friends, no nation’s survival should depend on luck. And no nation should take comfort in a mercy that is paid for by someone else’s suffering,” Prime Minister Davis said, adding “yet that is the temptation of our time.
“We live in a fragmented world. Nations are turning inward. Promises are made loudly and kept quietly, if at all. Each country is tempted to say: it is not my storm, not my coastline, not my problem.
“The ocean does not recognise that thinking. It is one body of water. What warms in one hemisphere breaks upon another. The sea has never been fragmented. Only we are.”
Prime Minister Davis said that this is why the Declaration being honoured matters so deeply. “In a divided world, the nations of the world agreed. It is proof that we can still act as one. Now we must make it real. Real means this. Climate mobility is the human face of this crisis. “
He said that by 2050, up to 8.2 million people across the Greater Caribbean could be on the move.
“Our people do not want to leave. So, protect their right to stay, with adaptation finance that is larger, faster, and placed in the hands of communities themselves. Some cannot leave, even when they must. The poor. The rural. Too often, women. Do not abandon them on the front line. And where people must move, let them move with dignity, with rights, and with their culture intact.”
He said that this is the work of the Rising Nations Institute and the Communities Climate Adaptation Facility and that The Bahamas stands fully behind them.
“So from a Caribbean that has been spared, to a Pacific that has not: we see you. We stand with you. Your storm is our storm. One day the Atlantic will wake again. When it does, let it find a world that did not look away.”
