Natural disasters and climate change are existential threats to Grenada, with annual losses from these events estimated at 1.7 percent of GDP. Grenada has proactively pursued resilience-building, with its Climate Change Policy and National Adaptation Plan providing detailed roadmaps for policymakers. However, the challenges are increasing, including from slow-moving effects owing to the rising sea level, even as implementation capacity and resource constraints remain significant impediments. The COVID-19 pandemic has amplified those challenges by increasing risks and tightening Grenada’s fiscal space.

This paper discusses how countries vulnerable to natural disasters can reduce the associated human and economic cost. Building on earlier work by IMF staff, the paper views disaster risk management through the lens of a three-pillar strategy for building structural, financial, and post-disaster (including social) resilience. A coherent disaster resilience strategy, based on a diagnostic of risks and cost-effective responses, can provide a road map for how to tackle disaster related vulnerabilities. It can also help mobilize much-needed support from the international community.

Investing in Resilience: Ensuring a Disaster-Resistant Future focuses on the steps required to ensure that investment in disaster resilience happens and that it occurs as an integral, systematic part of development. At-risk communities in Asia and the Pacific can apply a wide range of policy, capacity, and investment instruments and mechanisms to ensure that disaster risk is properly assessed, disaster risk is reduced, and residual risk is well managed. Yet, real progress in strengthening resilience has been slow to date and natural hazards continue to cause significant loss of life, damage, and disruption in the region, undermining inclusive, sustainable development. Investing in Resilience offers an approach and ideas for reflection on how to achieve disaster resilience. It does not prescribe specific courses of action but rather establishes a vision of a resilient future. It stresses the interconnectedness and complementarity of possible actions to achieve disaster resilience across a wide range of development policies, plans, legislation, sectors, and themes. The vision shows how resilience can be accomplished through the coordinated action of governments and their development partners in the private sector, civil society, and the international community. The vision encourages “investors” to identify and prioritize bundles of actions that collectively can realize that vision of resilience, breaking away from the current tendency to pursue disparate and fragmented disaster risk management measures that frequently trip and fall at unforeseen hurdles. Investing in Resilience aims to move the disaster risk reduction debate beyond rhetoric and to help channel commitments into investment, incentives, funding, and practical action

Owing to improved policy frameworks and favorable external conditions, Grenada’s economy has been growing rapidly. Policies have remained prudent, helping reduce public debt and financial system vulnerabilities. The domestic policy debate is increasingly focused on using potential fiscal space for spending on public pensions and investment on building resilience to natural disasters.

Grenada’s economy was hit hard by the pandemic, with a decline in real output of 14 percent in 2020 from both a collapse of tourism-related activities and the suspension of in-person classes at Saint George’s University (SGU). Growth in 2021 is estimated to have partly recovered to 5.6 percent, driven by construction and agriculture. The authorities’ policy response helped mitigate the pandemic’s impact through containment measures, increased health and social spending, and an expanded public investment program (including to build resilience to natural disasters). Central government debt rose to 70 percent of GDP in 2021 (from 59 percent in 2019) and the external position has worsened. The financial sector has so far weathered the crisis well.

Grenada has made significant strides to counter climate change but meeting the daunting remaining challenges will require domestic policy actions and sustained international support. Climate change is an existential threat to Grenada. Increasing frequency and intensity of coastal storms threatens infrastructure and livelihoods, as do increased risk of coastal flooding and drought. Notably, Hurricane Ivan in 2004 caused damages of over 200 percent of GDP. Grenada has recognized this by placing climate resilience at the center of its policy making and forging strategic alliances with key global climate finance providers. However, the challenges facing the country remain daunting and will require large increases in international support, both financial and technical, to assist the Grenadian authorities turn their impressive resilience plans into action.