Excerpt from our.today
Decision-makers from the world’s islands alongside expert stakeholders from civil society, academia, and the private sector have highlighted the outsized impact that island communities have in global sustainable development goals throughout the week-long 2024 Virtual Island Summit (VIS).
Hundreds of speakers and thousands of attendees participated in the VIS discussing key topics for island communities including sustainable tourism, the blue economy, climate adaptation, and financing. Sponsors for the summit included clean transportation non-profit CALSTART, conservation finance organisation the Caribbean Biodiversity Fund, education policy institution the Edge Foundation, ocean thermal energy conversion consortium PLOTEC, and the Cayman Islands Government.
During the summit, President of the Canary Islands Fernando Clavijo Batlle highlighted the need for knowledge-sharing and capacity-building between island stakeholders in his keynote address.
“We need forums like this one to share successful experiences and for islands together to move forward,” he noted, adding: “Forums like this are essential, they are necessary. We must share our problems and our solutions, our successful projects because of course, as you well know, islands are never given anything for free – we have to achieve through our effort.”
