Sea Change:

Alyssa-Amor Gibbons and Avinash Persaud on Imperialism, Designing for Disaster, and How the Caribbean Is Leading Climate Finance Reform

Moderated by Nu Goteh

Photography by Kyle Babb

NU GOTEH:

Avinash—you’ve stated, to put it simply, that the rich caused global warming. Can you explain how imperialism is both the originator and ongoing culprit of the climate crisis? This historical throughline is critical in helping us to better understand how we got here, and the correlation between racial capitalism and climate change.

AVINASH PERSAUD:

The statement that the rich caused global warming operates on multiple levels. One pertains to the fact that global warming is not caused by current emissions. It’s caused by the stock of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. When those gasses go up into the atmosphere, they stay there for a very long time. In some cases, a thousand years, in others, fifteen, but it’s this stock that is causing the warming. The very small number of countries that industrialized first—the United States, the United Kingdom, parts of Europe, the Soviet Union, and Japan—contributed 75-80% of the stock of greenhouse gasses. The industrialization process through which they got rich created these emissions; none of this is accidental. So when these same countries ask developing nations today to behave differently, a natural question is: well, that’s how you got rich, how are we going to get rich in this new world? Another level is the issue of imperialism, which is an extractive economic system. These countries were also plundering natural resources and people—of course—and bringing both to the center of the industrialized processes which then contributed to greenhouse gasses. The current state of the world is inextricably linked to these historical inequities.

Nu

Beautifully said.

ALYSSA-AMOR GIBBONS:

I always love hearing Professor Persaud speak because there’s an underlying current of passion. From my point of view as a Barbadian, our location alone has made us a linchpin of world economic history. These conversations are so important because they bestow us the dignity to reframe and rewrite our stories. Traditionally, we’ve always been extracted from and imposed upon. I want to know how we can leverage our identity as such an important part of the past. How do we tell that story? Can we reshape what it looks like for a place so small to have such an outsized global impact? We now have the chance to offer our unique perspective as the champions of our own solutions, rather than waiting for someone else to prescribe them for us.

Nu:

At Deem, we try not to focus on design through the lens of manufacturing or creating objects, but rather as the process of adding value. It’s also important to us not necessarily to think about designers as the ones to solve the problems, but about design as a way of creating the conditions for anyone to contribute to figuring out solutions. For this reason, it excites me to talk about policy, and particularly about the Bridgetown Initiative, as a means of creating those conditions. The Bridgetown Initiative, authored and led by the Caribbean nation of Barbados, calls for a radical reimagination of the global economic system that was established in the wake of World War II. So, in short, it redesigns the relationship between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the governments of developing nations, and the people living and working in those nations. Can you speak to why it is necessary to revise that dynamic?

Avinash:

Let’s start from a climate perspective. We’ve been living with grave moral imperatives for a long time, but those were not strong enough to change behavior. Now we have a physical imperative: to stay below the key tipping point of the climate crisis—the so-called 1.5 degrees of average warming. We have already used 85% of the threshold of emissions that we can put into the atmosphere and, of course, the vast majority of that percentage was created by rich countries. But as developing countries catch up, we’re becoming the big emitters. As a group, developing countries are now the source of over 63% of all emissions. In other words, the rich countries caused the problem, but if we’re going to stop it from getting worse, developing nations have to play a critical role. There’s no pathway to accounting for that remaining 15% without engaging those responsible for the 63% of current emissions. In a few years, that will be 73% and then, soon after, 80%. There’s no pathway for life on this planet to continue if we don’t engage this group, even though it’s not their fault we’re here to begin with. 

I was sitting at this very desk, wondering, how are we going to do this? We need to create bridges between the Global North and Global South. The South needs to be fully engaged in the goal to curtail emissions moving forward and the only way this will happen is if the North makes a major contribution. That is the linchpin of the Bridgetown Initiative: that the Global South must be transformed at a pace and scale never achieved before, even by rich countries, and that the rich countries must facilitate that happening. The Bridgetown Initiative outlines four or five specific things the North will need to provide in order to allow the South to save our planet.

Nu:

Could you speak a bit more about those four or five things?

Avinash:

First, we need to change the way our financial system works so that it is much more shock absorbent. Today, when a developing country faces a major setback, climate-related or otherwise, we quickly tumble from a short-term crisis into a long-term, deep default situation, which has domino impacts on all aspects of society. In order to avoid the compounding of debts, maybe we need to, for example, be able to press pause on principals and interest for a few years while we recover. It’s not that we won’t be expected to pay a loan back, as obviously then no one will ever lend to us, but it’s a way of reimagining the terms and timing of the payment. Yet that is a fairly radical thing. Twelve months ago, this policy didn’t exist, but World Bank president Ajay Banga recently stood shoulder to shoulder with Barbados’s Prime Minister Mia Mottley and agreed to implement this idea. Still, we haven’t fully won that argument. We have to spread it across the world, not just to the big development banks. 

Second, we need investors to be working with developing countries, which currently they don’t. They invest in developed countries. They say that the uncertainty and risk of foreign exchange markets is too much. A big part of Bridgetown is suggesting that instead of investing in that solar farm in Germany, why don’t you invest in a solar farm in South Africa? It’s the same technology, but the latter presents a perceived risk. We’re going to provide a guarantee for firms investing in green transformation projects in developing countries that the foreign exchange market won’t turn their project into a loss. That alone will help move trillions of dollars into developing countries. It’s going to be our industrial revolution—the green industrial revolution.

Third, we have to consider that there are some things investors won’t do. They’ll do stuff that makes money. Solar farms make money. Wind turbines make money. Hydroelectric power makes money. But what about building a stronger sea wall? That doesn’t make money. Building better flood defenses, drainage defenses, and a more resilient healthcare system doesn’t earn money for private investors. That’s where we need the development banks to lend us long-term, low-cost funding. Currently, they lend a tiny amount. If they can lend us more, that will also transform the global financial system by putting development banks at its center: public instead of private finance. 

Number four, there are some things we shouldn’t be borrowing for at all. When a hurricane rips the roof off of every low-income home on your island, you’re expected to borrow money to fix them. You’ll hear me say time and again that we’ll drown in the ocean of debt long before the sea levels rise. Why should we borrow to pay for damages from a problem that our lenders have caused? The rest of the world needs to come together with a pot of money for dealing with damages caused by climate disaster. What we can borrow for is funds to make our infrastructures more climate resilient, because that will save us money in the future. 

Finally, if we get all these things right, there are going to be massive flows of money from developed countries to developing countries alongside massive flows of renewable energy from developing countries to developed countries. We need a trading system to make that two-way exchange work. Our current trading system tends to be quite unfair. It puts restrictions and limits on what developing countries can do. It’s not enough to change the financial system, we need to change the trading system to match it.

Nu:

Alyssa, I can see you nodding. How did your experience growing up in Barbados inform your priorities as an architectural designer? What perspectives do you bring to designing the built environment in relation to the natural world, as well as how the natural world is changing?

Alyssa-Amor:

Growing up on an island, you’d be hard-pressed not to be impacted by a deep reverence for nature. Your life and livelihood are so interconnected with it. I’m an avid diver and have spent a lot of time underwater exploring the ocean bed. I’ve seen changes in my natural environments firsthand: the beaches, the ocean bed, the reefs. It’s hard to miss. We’re living it. We feel how much hotter it is. We can see the beaches erode. We know that every other day the water may go off. What used to be the bare minimum is now becoming a luxury. As a designer, I’m asking myself—what do we get to think about making once we’ve simply been able to make ends meet? What if we’re not just concerned about having shelter, but about preparing to survive the next major climate event? What does it look like to move from the bottom of the hierarchy of needs to the top? What kinds of spaces could we dream in, think critically in, and advance ourselves as a community in? I believe that you can dream at the same time that you solve problems. These two ways of designing don’t need to be mutually exclusive. While we’re working through issues of housing security and food and water scarcity, we can also think about public spaces where we might come together to self-actualize. While we’re making sure a house stands up, let’s also think about the quality and richness of life that a home can provide.

Avinash:

That’s a wonderful way to think about it. This reminds me of when I was asked to help Dominica respond to Hurricane Maria, which destroyed 226% of their national income in four hours. I remember trying to explain to people how it is possible to lose more than 100%. As an economist, I didn’t think so much about architecture and design. When people spoke about a “resilient” bridge, I might have thought they meant a bigger, heavier bridge. But then a Norwegian engineer suggested that perhaps what we need is a collapsible bridge. Hurricanes don’t happen spontaneously. What if, when the warnings are issued in the hours before, we could put the bridge away, and when the storm passes, we could open it back up? In other words, resilience might not literally be strength. It might be nimbleness. And it’s not just about bridges or buildings; it’s also about people. What policies, practices, and relationships make people more resilient?

Alyssa-Amor:

Growing up in the hurricane belt is quite traumatic. Whether or not the hurricane arrives, that uncertainty stays with you. One of my biggest fears now is that we haven’t learned the same lessons that our brother and sister islands have, because we’ve been very lucky. I fear so deeply that we’re not prepared.

Avinash:

Just to reassure the average citizen—I will say that, because of the experiences of our neighbors, we do have plans in place that we would not have had 10 years ago.

Alyssa-Amor:

Yes, but in the back of my mind, I still think that we tend to hope for the best. I want us to get to a place where we are designing for the worst. It’s not enough to be hopeful anymore. We have to stack the deck in our favor in every way that we can.

Avinash:

We are also seeing a change in our value system. 85% of our national income is on the coast.

The coast is now an extremely fragile and vulnerable place, but that wasn’t always the case. It’s an interesting expression of poetic justice that the freed slaves often ended up on the coast because that was considered the worst land—the least productive, most marginal land. Then, of course, it became the most valuable land. Now we may well see yet another shift, in which we begin to value the interior of our country in a way that we didn’t before.

Alyssa-Amor:

I think we’re beginning to re-figure that out. Our relationship with the coast has always been unusual. Elsewhere, waterfront cities are prime real estate. But because of our history, our coastal area, particularly Bridgetown, was more like back-of-house. That’s where the slaves came off the ship. That was not the area you wanted to focus on. 

I’ve already seen huge physical shifts in terms of development along the coast. With these changes, I am excited about moving away from financial structures that are part of the legacy of imperialism and opening up new pathways for investment in the Caribbean and Barbados. In the past, development has been dictated by who can afford to invest in and develop large parcels of land. While our government has a vested interest in many properties that are highly valued because of their location, it may not have the funds or the ability to prioritize those projects because it is focused on pressing welfare and survival challenges. We need a new kind of fiscal space in order to diversify the pools of money that investments are coming from and bring the civic voice back into conversations about designing public space beyond a myopic focus on tourism and hospitality. With these new and different opportunities for investment, we will also need professionals like myself to create and leverage proposals for developing the spaces that we want to see, and that can serve as much of the population as possible.

Avinash:

I definitely think that the design community has a particular role to play here. There are two reasons why we don’t actually have a vision for what we want our built environment to be…

Alyssa-Amor:

Working on it.

Avinash:

First, we don’t have investors. And when we do, they say, “Well, I’ll only come if it’s for a seven-story hotel because that’s a model the bank will give me money for. They won’t give me money for an experiment.” Second, we have an understandable antipathy about our heritage because of the way it is wrapped up with the horrors of slavery. It’s uncomfortable. There’s this heritage that is part of us, but also not part of us. Like you said, this cycle is a continuation of imperialism. Investors come to a place with a vision of what it should look like. We need to have our own plans, desires, and demands for what our future looks like, or someone else will.

Alyssa-Amor:

That is something I’ve been grappling with for the last couple of months as I’ve been part of a concept project about leveraging emerging technology in urban design. The idea is to create a platform that can start to bridge the gap between civic, financial, and climate tech. So far this has involved a lot of AI-generated interactions with the public as a way to gather thoughts, opinions, stories, etc.—mining a culture- and citizen-centric approach to what defines a city. What are people’s pain points? What are they complaining about?

We’ve been hosting public charrettes, kind of like a town hall, but instead of me giving you a microphone to vent, I’m giving you a pen and paper or a digital tool, sitting down with you to talk about co-designing spaces together, and then using that data to identify trends. Let’s say that 60% of people think that a certain abandoned building should be transformed into a co-working space. Using technology, we can start to generate three or four options for crowdsourced proposals where the carbon footprints have been analyzed and the specs have been optimized for different metrics alongside the traditional developer scope.

Avinash:

You also need to engage with the town and country planners. They have a huge role to play and sometimes they’re afraid to. They need the authority and creative freedom to push back on the desires of developers. They don’t have that right now. Their imagination is limited by too many parameters.

Alyssa-Amor:

Yes, that would make for much richer decision-making. Especially in Barbados, you can count on one hand the pool of developers consistently getting all the projects. That’s great for them, but our society could benefit from a greater diversity of ideas and interests. Everyone has an opinion, but when it comes to real decisions about the built environment, only a handful of perspectives are accounted for. Please correct me if this is not the case, but even now as we speak, there is not to my knowledge any single master plan for Bridgetown that carries ongoing development, proposed development, and existing buildings in one place.

Avinash:

There’s a land use plan for the country and for Bridgetown, and there are development plans for Bridgetown, but neither encompass an aesthetic vision.

Alyssa-Amor:

There’s no one narrative.

Avinash:

Right, though I do think that we need to have competing narratives. But right now we have neither competing narratives nor a collective vision. Visioning allows for experimentation and boldness because it provides something to push for and against. On the surface, Bridgetown appears beautiful and quaint. But structurally, it’s full of warehouses. There’s quite literally a lot of space, but not much of it is residential or commercial in a way that’s easy to work with, and our public tends to be a bit fearful of change.

Alyssa-Amor:

It’s a guilty pleasure of mine as a designer to tinker with new business cases and economic models that validate the transformation of spaces like, say—turning a degenerating town into a high-performing, sustainable eco-city. 

Imagine you have a building. It has a heavy carbon footprint. It has a very poorly performing thermal envelope, etc. As a designer, you come in and say, “Okay, if I solve these issues, if I make this more sustainable, resilient, and energy-efficient, we can map the reduction in utility costs and we can show the improved carbon footprint,” as opposed to if we did nothing to enhance any of those things. Extending this analogy to an entire city, one would expect that a similar transformation—from a state of disrepair to a beacon of urban sustainability—would yield comparable benefits that we can quantify and attribute dollar value to, in terms of both economic viability and quality of life enhancement.

Avinash:

The challenge is that most of the benefits of going from one to the other are not accrued to the developer. They’re accrued by the citizens, to the population, to the inhabitants. That’s why the government is incentivized to promote eco-efficiency through modernization. We will all benefit from a building that uses energy intelligently. We will not benefit from buildings that are “sick.”

Nu:

Thinking back to the Bridgetown Initiative, it seems that many of its defining questions get to figuring out how we bring policy directly to communities. What would it look like, or what would it take, for policy and community interests to align in a way that also accounts for climate?

Avinash:

That’s a great question. Ultimately, we have no choice but to align because we’re drowning and we’re burning up. Like I shared in the beginning of this conversation, we need to build a policy bridge between the two key players: the poor developing countries and the rich developed countries—in other words, the future and the past. That’s the first bridge, but then often the key players we’ve just discussed don’t have the same imperatives. There is a huge need to bridge the interests of developers, planners, designers, and community members. We know that finding out what communities actually want and need will guide better development but, for developers, planning and town hall meetings are obstacles to get around, not opportunities for change. Getting it right will depend on those relationships and every player accepting that we have an existential problem to solve. 

Alyssa-Amor:

The conversations we’re having about global systems versus city systems are actually so similar, just at different scales. Above all, we are talking about figuring out pathways to get funds out of the places where they traditionally exist, and into the places where they don’t. Developers tend to shoulder the majority of the burden when it comes to investment and return. How then do I, as a designer, do a better job of quantifying the value in shifting the way that we develop, shifting the way we program buildings, and deciding how we invest? How do I make it make sense to parties with different responsibilities, and therefore different priorities?

Climate is an obvious leverage now because it’s affecting everyone. It’s on every newsfeed. Sustainability is effectively a buzzword. Yes, it’s real and important, but it’s a buzzword as well. How do I quantify for a developer that designing for climate considerations isn’t just about ticking boxes, but will generate real value? How do we make it undeniable that sustainability innovations can be profitable, so that we can advocate to design in this way not just because our hearts bleed, but because it also makes financial sense?

Avinash:

As an economist, I’m naturally thinking—can we tax this, or can we create an incentive? We already have a process that was made to assess just that: town hall meetings, environmental and social impact assessments, etc. But, like Alyssa said, these steps have become boxes to tick rather than to meaningfully engage with. If you don’t care about the process, can I make you care about the outcome? At this point, our investments are so marginal that it’s hard even to threaten taxation for a poor outcome, because developers will say, “Now you’ve created an additional uncertainty and a drag; I’ll go to Grenada instead.” We need to find a way to express that the outcome actually matters.

Alyssa-Amor:

I made a statement during the Future City project that Bridgetown has the potential to lead the future of the Global South, and that stuck with a lot of people. We’ve been talking about using the city as a digital asset, which is basically a virtual representation of the world that serves as a platform for problem solving. What if there is a way to design, test, and validate the performance of buildings in these spaces? What if there is a way to quantify the carbon footprint and sequestration of new projects and create carbon offset credits based on that? Could we then give fractional ownership opportunities to the average citizen? We’ve been thinking in broad strokes. I’m not an economist, but I’d love to speak further with you, Avinash.

Avinash:

The carbon and sustainability bits are actually the easy part. We could do that. There are already some measures in place. The much more difficult bit to me is making development work for the community in terms of social outcomes, economic outcomes, and physical and safety outcomes. That’s where I wonder if a reward system is the only way.

Alyssa-Amor:

It’s like we need to find the built environment version of social capital. 

Nu:

Design, by nature, is inherently optimistic, right? You wouldn’t be a designer if you didn’t believe that you could make or change something. Let’s take a moment to step beyond our current reality and dream: what would it look like for Barbados to “get it right” in terms of climate?

Avinash:

Like I said, becoming completely renewable, becoming net-zero—that’s the easy bit for us. It will be much harder for countries like India, Brazil, and China. We’re going to be near net-zero by 2030. That’s one of our most seemingly aggressive targets in terms of national climate mitigation, but it’s still not our biggest problem. Our problem is making sure we’re resilient in the face of upcoming climate changes, as that requires investing a huge amount of money in system-level redesign. It will also require asking ourselves what resilience functionally means. Does being resilient mean that your power never goes off, which is almost impossible, or does it mean that when the power goes off, it comes back within 24 hours?

Dominica did some great thinking about building for resilience. That’s what we’re doing at the moment in Barbados and we’re calling it Roofs to Reefs. In summary, there’s no point in having a resilient bridge if the two roads connecting the bridge are not also resilient. We need to think about resilience as a system and identify the key nodes of vulnerability and weakness within that system. This is very expensive. It probably costs 20% of our entire national income just to maintain a resilient water system, and that’s only one of the things we need to get right. Resilience is often the things you don’t see. 

Alyssa-Amor:

I would like to add that, if we’re going to wait 24 hours for the lights to come back on, we should then consider the quality of life over those 24 hours and find ways to make it not just livable but actually good. Yes, there’s climate mitigation but, in parallel, we can be working on ways to enhance our quality of life. Resilience is not just about survival. Getting it right—truly good design—demands the oversight and the vision to stack a different, additional kind of programming atop the bare minimum.

Avinash:

Thank you for helping me, as a non-designer, think in design terms. Ultimately, the Bridgetown Initiative is a design. It’s a design for a collaborative system. One of the things we were trying to get at is that climate justice is critical, it’s vital, but if that’s all we think about, we are not going to solve the problem.●

Alyssa-Amor Gibbons is an architectural designer from Barbados. She has worked on a wide variety of projects throughout the Caribbean and UK and is a champion of net-zero building practices and virtual architectural modeling, which allows designers to drill down to the tiniest details before laying a single brick.

Avinash Persaud’s career spans finance, academia, and public policy. At the time of this conversation, he was Special Envoy on investment and financial services to Prime Minister Mia Mottley of Barbados, advocating for the role of finance in climate protection. He was instrumental to the development of Mottley's Bridgetown Initiative, an ambitious proposal to boost investment in climate action and transform the financial system, and his pragmatic solutions have received significant global support from both the developed and the developing world. Today he is the inaugural Special Advisor on climate change to the President of the IDB—the multilateral development bank serving Latin America and the Caribbean—and emeritus professor at Gresham College in London.