Organization of American States

The Caribbean region faces a unique and challenging situation with respect to energy for sustainable development. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the Fourth Assessment Report, Climate Change 2007, indicated that Climate Change is expected to have great environmental and socio-economic consequences for the Caribbean countries, where changes in temperature and precipitation patterns and changes in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events are already being observed. Some of these effects have tangible and increasing implications for the region’s energy security, particularly with regard to energy production and use. Currently there is a clear consensus that fossil fuel based energy production systems are among the main causes of climate change. Ongoing discussions in the scientific community (IPCC 2001 and 2007) are focused on how to drive the energy sector towards the use of cleaner or renewable energy production, however, little reference is made of the potential effect of climate change on existing and/or future conventional and non-conventional energy production systems. This paper discusses some of the concerns surrounding the effects of climate change on the performance of current and future energy production systems in Caribbean countries, with particular emphasis on the impact of climate change on Renewable Energy (RE) project appraisal and development