‘Nature And What It Brings With It Was Our Greatest Threat'

Growing up in Barbados, MIA MOTTLEY lived through the effects of climate change. As prime minister, she’s devising ways of shielding the island’s finances from weather-related ruin

- By Ezra Fieser

Mia Mottley’s gravelly voice rang with urgency. Standing at the podium at the United Nations, the prime minister of Barbados was warning of the dangers her island faced as storms swollen by warmer oceans tore through the Caribbean. “This is a matter of life or death for us,” she said.

It was late September 2018—hurricane season—and Barbados was flooding. A tropical storm threatened neighboring St. Lucia. On the other side of the globe, a typhoon took aim at Japan. The confluence of disasters was almost unthinkable. Almost. “This is not a science fiction movie,” Mottley said. “This is not a cartoon. And if I ever thought that it was a fantasy, what transpired in the last 24 hours across the different poles of the world has reminded me that it is not.”

Mottley had won office only four months earlier, becoming her nation’s first woman leader. This was her inaugural address to the UN, but she spoke with conviction, her words charged by decades of pent-up concern about a changing climate. She had seen for herself how flying fish, a once plentiful delicacy, were avoiding warming coastal waters, how rising seas were eating away at the wide white-sand beaches she’d known growing up, and how droughts were drying up aquifers that provide the islanders’ drinking water.