State of SIDS: the islands’ case now rests on value the system does not measure

Side event · 9 July 2026 · UN Headquarters, New York
Session
“State of SIDS Report 2026 Launch: Defending the Special Case,” an HLPF 2026 side event convened by the Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative (RESI, ODI Global) with the governments of Tonga, Ireland, the UK, the Maldives, Antigua and Barbuda, Palau, and UNDRR
Moderator
Emily Wilkinson (Director, Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative, ODI Global)
Report presented by
Matthew Bishop (Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative) and a RESI programme manager (Monash University)
Panel
Kamal Kishore (Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction, head of UNDRR) · Viliami Va’inga Tōnē (Permanent Representative of Tonga) · Helen King (UK Ambassador to ECOSOC) · Walton Webson (Permanent Representative of Antigua and Barbuda)
Also from the floor
Dónal Cronin (Deputy Permanent Representative of Ireland), the Permanent Mission of Portugal, the French Solid Waste Partnership, the World Evangelical Alliance, and Ilana Seid (Permanent Representative of Palau and Chair of AOSIS), who closed

Why this session matters to us

Six days earlier, at the 5th meeting of this Forum, UN DESA presented the first official baseline for the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS, a monitoring framework of 59 targets and 83 indicators whose headline finding was that the data mostly is not there. This side event launched a second baseline of a very different kind: the inaugural State of SIDS Report, an independent synthesis of a year’s academic and policy research produced by ODI Global’s Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative and funded by the governments of Ireland and the UK. Seven chapters, each mapped onto a chapter of the ABAS.

For a project about how the UN counts, the interesting thing is not that the report exists but the argument it is built around. It tries to move the case for small island states off the ground of vulnerability, the thing everyone already agrees is real and still cannot get financed, and onto the ground of value. And in doing so it walks straight into the measurement problem, because the value it wants counted is precisely the value nobody currently counts.

A second baseline, built to sit beside the first

The two baselines are not competitors. The official ABAS framework is the scorecard member states agreed to; the State of SIDS Report is the independent read that can tell them what the scorecard cannot. Antigua and Barbuda’s Permanent Representative, whose country gave the Agenda its name, was clear about how new even the official machinery is, and how deliberately it was kept light.

Walton Webson, Antigua and Barbuda: “We now have, unlike the previous strategies, a mechanism, a tool … so there is some structure that we could measure the progress of SIDS Four. The tool is built very much along the line of the SDGs, so it doesn’t create extra pressure on the islands themselves.”

He expects the report to be updated in 2029, in time for the halfway review of the SIDS decade, which is the cadence RESI has committed to: a new edition every two years. AOSIS’s chair, closing the session, placed the report against the official framework in almost the same words, and drew the line that matters to us.

Ilana Seid, Permanent Representative of Palau and Chair of AOSIS: “It can complement the monitoring and evaluation framework in measuring progress, identify gaps, and strengthen accountability. But reports alone don’t enact change. What will make the difference is whether the international community is prepared to act on the evidence presented.”

Value, not just vulnerability, and the catch inside it

The intellectual spine of the report, laid out from the podium, is a deliberate provocation. The standard framing treats support for SIDS as an act of solidarity with vulnerable states that benefit more than their income would warrant. The report argues the ledger runs the other way.

Matthew Bishop, Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative: “Rather than being viewed as net recipients from a generous multilateral system, SIDS are actually net contributors to a potentially miserly one.”

The claim is that small islands generate a large contribution to global public goods, from ocean stewardship and biodiversity protection to the unpaid domestic care that sustains their societies, and that this contribution is, in the report’s framing, neither captured in the data nor compensated by any financing mechanism. UNDRR’s chief gave it a shape anyone can picture: from Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, you are never out of sight of the sea, yet the ocean that one tiny state stewards for the world is, as he put it, “larger than the size of India.”

This is a genuinely sharper argument than the vulnerability case, and it is also where the measurement trap snaps shut. If the value is real but invisible to the accounts, then the entire strategy depends on making it visible first. The report says so in a single sentence that could serve as SDGCounting’s house motto.

Matthew Bishop: “What is not measured is not financed, and what is not financed is not sustained.”

The policy implication follows directly, and it is a measurement demand, not a spending one: “a radical expansion and rethinking of what actually counts as value, placing natural, social, and care-based contributions on the balance sheet, and linking them to financing mechanisms.” Until that happens, the report warns, SIDS keep being read as low-productivity middle-income economies rather than high-value systems operating under structural constraints. Which is to say: the number decides, and the number is still GDP per capita.

The metric that does not exist

If the value argument is the report’s theory, the sharpest practical version of the same problem came from Kamal Kishore, and it is the most concrete measurement point of the afternoon. Climate finance flows to mitigation, he noted, because mitigation is legible: an investor knows exactly what a dollar buys. Resilience, the thing SIDS most need to finance, has no such yardstick.

Kamal Kishore, UNDRR: “When you attract investment into climate change mitigation, the metrics are very clear. You know what you are financing … That is not so clear cut in the context of resilience investments, because we don’t have commonly accepted resilience metrics, we do not have taxonomies.”

Without agreed resilience metrics and taxonomies, investors cannot price what they are buying, and the capital does not move. That is the same wall the islands hit on the vulnerability side, where the Multidimensional Vulnerability Index has been built and adopted but still binds no lender. Tonga’s Permanent Representative repeated, almost verbatim from his intervention at the main SIDS review the same morning, the demand that keeps going unmet: that the MVI “become an operational tool for concessional finance, debt treatment, climate finance access, and graduation decisions.” A metric that exists but does not bind, and a metric that does not yet exist at all, produce the same result.

The report’s deep-dive chapter on infrastructure, water and energy makes the cost of the data gap vivid at national scale. In a small archipelago a single wrong bet is unrecoverable: one country built an international airport that, the presentation noted, cost more than its entire annual GDP. The chapter’s own line was that gaps matter “not simply because data are incomplete,” but because in small, highly exposed economies the resulting uncertainty magnifies risk. Better evidence was named, alongside integrated planning and easier finance, as one of three things SIDS need most.

Our read

Our read: This is the most analytically ambitious thing said about SIDS at this Forum, and also the riskiest bet. The report does not solve the measurement problem that the official ABAS baseline exposed; it doubles it. It asks the system to finance not only vulnerability, which is at least partly measured and still unfunded, but value, which is not measured at all. The honesty of the framing is that its authors know this: their motto is that what is not measured is not financed. So the report is really a research agenda disguised as a launch, a wager that the next two years can put natural, care and ocean value onto a balance sheet credible enough to price. If that succeeds, the islands get a stronger case than vulnerability ever gave them. If it does not, “value” becomes one more true thing the accounts cannot see, sitting next to GDP exactly as the vulnerability index sits next to the credit rating: real, adopted, and binding on no one.

Why it matters for the SDGs

The report is cross-cutting by design, since its chapters track the ABAS, which in turn tracks the SDGs, but the load falls on SDG 17 (finance, partnerships, and above all the means of implementation and data), SDG 13 (climate action), SDG 7 (the energy transition its infrastructure chapter dissects) and SDG 14 (the ocean stewardship it wants counted as value). It is also a second, independent voice for the “beyond GDP” argument running through this Forum, the same one aired at the Beyond GDP side event and the SIDS review: that a single income number, used as a gate, produces worse decisions than a fuller measure of what a place is worth. The report’s distinctive move is to insist that the missing side of the ledger is not just the harm islands are exposed to, but the value they generate for everyone else.

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. Speakers who intervened only briefly from the floor are cited by role or mission. Figures are as speakers reported them and were not independently verified.