Saint Lucia Loss and Damage Needs Assessment and Strategy and Action Plan

Government of Saint Lucia / IISD / NAP Global Network: 2025 - Ongoing

Saint Lucia faces growing climate risks, including rising land and sea temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, stronger hurricanes, and worsening sargassum influxes that together increase landslides, coastal erosion, water stress, and threats to food security. Like many small island developing states, the country must address these impacts to safeguard its long‑term survival and development.​

Adapt40 is working with the Government of Saint Lucia, IISD, and the NAP Global Network to develop a comprehensive Loss and Damage Needs Assessment and a companion Strategy and Action Plan. These documents will be embedded within Saint Lucia’s broader National Adaptation Plan and its suite of Sectoral Adaptation Strategies and Action Plans.

The Needs Assessment draws on academic literature and grey publications to identify realised loss and damage across the country and to highlight institutional and sectoral barriers that limit effective adaptation responses.​ Building on these findings, the Strategy and Action Plan maps a pathway for integrating loss and damage considerations into government planning and decision‑making, and sets out eight actionable project briefs aligned with Saint Lucia’s priority NAP sectors and the five thematic loss and damage focus areas under the Warsaw International Mechanism.

This work is grounded in a highly participatory process that balances the perspectives of stakeholders from many sectors and multiple public, private, and civil society institutions, while recognising the capacity constraints of a small island government.​

Saint Lucia was an early pioneer in the Caribbean in explicitly addressing limits to adaptation in its NAP, and is now poised to be among the first in the region to develop a dedicated national strategy on Loss and Damage, demonstrating leadership for other climate‑vulnerable countries. Adapt40 is honoured to support this pioneering government as it advances an integrated, forward‑looking approach to managing loss and damage and protecting communities, ecosystems, and livelihoods.