The small island developing states review

5th meeting · 9 July 2026 · UN Headquarters, New York
Session
“Small Island Developing States: Strategies for SDG Success,” an interactive panel of the 2026 HLPF (Conference Room 4, 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM)
Chair
A Vice-President of ECOSOC
Moderator
Vynnette Frederick (Permanent Representative of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to the UN)
Video message
Surangel Whipps Jr. (President of the Republic of Palau)
Panellists
Li Junhua (Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, UN DESA), Viliami Va’inga Tōnē (Permanent Representative of Tonga), the Permanent Mission of Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Matthew Bishop (Co-Director, Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative, ODI)
Lead discussants
Jotika Sharma (Fiji Trades Union Congress) and David Smith (Centre for Environmental Management, The University of the West Indies)

The first baseline, and it is sobering

2026 is the first year that progress on the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS (ABAS) is measured through a dedicated monitoring and evaluation framework, built on 59 targets and 83 indicators. Presenting the Secretary-General’s report, Li Junhua delivered the baseline and the reason it is so hard to read: the data mostly is not there. On climate action, the priority that SIDS themselves rank first, fewer than ten have reported any data since 2015. Upper-secondary completion sits near 43% against a global average of 61%, and annual disaster losses run at more than double the global average.

Li Junhua, UN DESA: “Data availability is the single biggest barrier to implementation. For example, on climate action, that is the key priority for all SIDS members, fewer than 10 have reported any data since 2015.”

The measurement problem is the development problem. A monitoring framework designed around indicators that are globally well established still cannot see most of the islands it was built for, because the national statistical systems behind it were never resourced to produce the data.

Vulnerability, not income

The session’s central demand was almost unanimous and entirely technical: stop using GDP per capita to decide who gets affordable money. Because most SIDS are classified as middle-income, the income test locks them out of concessional finance even as a single storm erases a decade of progress. The proposed replacement, the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index, already exists. What it lacks is operational force.

Viliami Va’inga Tōnē, Permanent Representative of Tonga: “The multidimensional vulnerability index, or MVI, should become an operational tool for concessional finance, debt treatment, climate finance access, and graduation decisions.”

The numbers behind the grievance were laid out from the floor: small island states draw roughly 0.6% of global foreign direct investment, and while they hold close to 19% of the membership of the World Bank and the IMF, they carry about 2.5% of the voting rights. Belize pressed for a system in which, as its delegate put it, vulnerability is legible in finance decision-making.

Building back to zero

Matthew Bishop of ODI reframed island debt as a structural condition rather than a fiscal failing, and it was the sharpest analytical move of the morning. Jamaica cut its debt from roughly 150% of GDP to almost 60%, a genuine achievement, and then a hurricane inflicted an estimated $9 billion to $12 billion in damage. Recovery consumes the capital that development was supposed to use.

Matthew Bishop, Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative: “SIDS are continually having to build back to get to zero rather than being able to build from zero and move forward.”

His conclusion followed directly. The goal, he argued, should not simply be to help islands manage debt better but to redesign the system so that investing in resilience becomes cheaper than repeatedly paying for disasters.

Matthew Bishop: “SIDS are not indebted because they are fiscally profligate. By and large, they are indebted because they face exogenous shocks that are no fault of their own.”

Double fragility

Saint Kitts and Nevis brought the most useful piece of evidence: a Vulnerability and Resilience Country Profile, piloted with UN DESA under the MVI. Its finding is a warning about what national averages conceal. At the macro level the country looks stable, with functioning institutions and secure government systems. Go down to the household level and the picture inverts.

Saint Kitts and Nevis: “There is a striking finding. It is what we call double fragility. At the macro level our institutions are stable, secure, government systems are functioning, but when you go deeper into the household level the picture changes vastly.”

The delegation drew the distinction that matters for anyone building these instruments: the monitoring framework gives you the what, the country profile gives you the why and the where, and the two have to work together.

Our read

Our read: The islands have done what the system asked of them. They built the monitoring framework, piloted the vulnerability diagnostics, and integrated ABAS into national strategy. The finance still keys off GDP per capita. The unresolved question of this session was not whether SIDS can measure their own vulnerability, but whether anyone lending money intends to use the measurement.

President Whipps put the same point without the machinery, in a video message that the moderator returned to twice.

Surangel Whipps Jr., President of Palau: “Our people back home cannot eat commitments. They cannot build sea walls out of outcome documents. Progress isn’t measured by the PDFs we generate in New York.”

Why it matters for the SDGs

The session is cross-cutting by construction, since ABAS maps most of its indicators onto the SDGs, but the load falls on SDG 17 (finance, partnerships and, above all, data), SDG 13 (climate action) and SDG 14 (oceans). It is also the clearest statement at this Forum of the “beyond GDP” argument that runs through the measurement debate: that a single income number, used as a gate, produces worse decisions than a vulnerability profile would. Roughly 65 million people live in small island developing states, and the review made the case that the statistics describing them are the thinnest in the system.

Watch & read

Quotations are lightly edited from an automated (Otter.ai) transcript of the UN Web TV recording and should be read as close paraphrase. Speaker names and titles were reconciled against the official HLPF annotated programme and public records. The transcript garbled several delegates’ names, and interventions delivered in Arabic, French and Spanish were not usable, so some speakers are cited by country or role. The panellist listed for Saint Kitts and Nevis in the official programme did not deliver the intervention summarised here, so it is attributed to the delegation.