Emily Wilkinson is Principal Research Fellow at ODI and Director of the Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative (RESI)

With winds of up to 240 km/h, Hurricane Beryl ripped through the Caribbean in July earlier this year, causing catastrophic damage to Grenada’s northern islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique, as well as on several islands in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

Union Island saw 90% of houses severely damaged or destroyed and the island’s secondary school was turned into a shelter for the displaced. Many residents have been plunged into acute poverty, unable to reopen businesses or return to paid work.

Storms, floods and droughts are buffeting Small Island Developing States (SIDS) with increasing severity. After the immediate news reports die down however, populations of these places may face weeks, months or years living like this, deprived of essential needs whilst safe drinking water, electricity, permanent housing and other critical infrastructure is being restored.

Whole regions or islands and even people on previously good incomes end up tipped into crisis and deprived of essential material needs – what is known as multidimensional vulnerability in policy circles.

Sign up to get our weekly newsletter straight to your inbox, plus breaking news, investigations and extra bulletins from key events

A study by ODI, published today found that 20 million people, about one-third of those living in the world’s small island developing nations, are in this category – at severe risk of climate change-induced poverty that would deprive them of life’s essentials.

Our research also found that hidden brunt of climate-related disasters is borne more heavily by poorer households and individuals regardless of a nation’s development status. This reinforces the idea that we should be wary of assuming even small countries with high- or middle-income status can contend with these frequent shocks and often unsustainable public debt burden.

Whilst island nations face a multitude of challenges here, there is some hope that with a combination of money, and clever financial instruments borrowed from the insurance industry, we can make some progress in averting this poverty-climate trap that SIDS and other vulnerable countries face.

A little-known idea called a parametic trigger could hold the key. Parametric triggers are used by the insurance industry for floods, tropical cyclones and other hazards, where a threshold for compensation to be paid out is set in advance.

If the level of rainfall or wind speed goes beyond a trigger threshold, payment occurs without the need to go round assessing what the damage was. The loss and damage fund could use a similar mechanism.

COP16 confronts “huge” challenge of protecting 30% of world’s land and sea

We already know that climate funding can be painfully slow to arrive, as can debt relief. But parametric triggers are one way o