BRIDGETOWN, Barbados — Invasive brown algae is destroying their sandy coastlines, emanating toxic gasses that are killing corals and turning hotel guests away, while increasingly deadly tropical storms and uncharacteristic hurricanes are threatening to sink their already vulnerable economies.

But as governments across the Caribbean region find themselves grappling with the destructive impact of climate change, their closest and once most reliable neighbor, the United States, is moving in the opposite direction.

In the month he’s been in office, President Donald Trump has quickly moved to erase references to climate change from federal policies and withdraw the U.S. from global commitments like the Paris Agreement focused on getting countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions to help limit global warming and mitigate against the impacts of climate change. Trump has called the Paris climate agreement “unfair” and “a rip off” to which he won’t subject American industry.

It is under this dramatic shift in U.S. foreign policy — along with freezes by Trump to foreign aid, the gutting of the U.S.’s leading humanitarian agency, withdrawals from global agencies and the ramp up in deportations of undocumented migrants — that prime ministers and presidents representing the 15-member Caribbean Community regional bloc known as CARICOM are meeting in this eastern Caribbean island.

“CARICOM has to engage the Trump administration,” St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves told the Miami Herald. “They are our neighbor, the United States, and we are theirs. Historically we have had links; geographically, we are close; a lot of Caribbean people inside the U.S., lots of persons come from the U.S. as tourists. They trade, we sent a lot of stuff to them, goods and services. We have to talk.”

Denzil Douglas, the foreign minister of St. Kitts and Nevis, agrees.

“One of the immediate things that i think needs to be done is for us as Caribbean leaders, Caribbean governments to seek an early opportunity to speak with the administration at the highest level,” said Douglas, a former prime minister who held the post from 1995 to 2015.

While there are no shortage of concerns for the region about its ally’s withdrawal and what that means for them domestically, Douglas said the climate crisis is at the top of the list.

“The region has come to recognize that we could not advance the livelihoods of our people unless we become conscious and work with the appropriate climate action that is needed,” he said.

As the summit opened on Wednesday, Trump and his dramatic shifts away from traditional shared values that have guided U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II loomed large amid the colorful display of Caribbean culture featuring African drumming, steel pan playing and dance.

No one mentioned the new man in the White House by name, but the references to him and the emerging world order were loud and clear. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres mentioned “geopolitical tensions fueling uncertainty” and checked off a list of issues, the climate crisis being among them, that requires Caribbean nations to stand united.

“You face deplorable injustice,” Guterres said. “A crisis you have done next to nothing to create is wrecking economies, ruining lives and threatening your very existence.”

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union Commission, reassured leaders that “Europe will always be ready to listen and to engage with you.”

The two entities need each other, she said, as she reminded countries like Barbados, the meeting host, of how they struggled during the COVID-19 pandemic to procure life-saving vaccines. Europe and the region, now risk “being squeezed but cut off from global supply chains,” Von der Leyen said.

“We need to join forces,” she said. “In this world where there is a clear attempt by some to build spheres of influence, where competing visions of the world order are leading to a more transactional approach to global affairs, where the disruptive potential of intense competition is rising, where ... there is no win-win situation but a win-lose situation, Europe’s offer is clear. Let’s have a look for shared values, for mutual interests, and work together.”

Ivelaw Lloyd Griffith, a Caribbean expert, said the region’s quandary over the new policies in Washington extend beyond the climate crisis. There are unresolved questions, he said, about trade, relationships with China and of course Haiti, a member state.

“There are anxieties, lots of justifiable anxieties in Bridgetown and other Caribbean capitals,” said Griffith, founding fellow of the Caribbean Policy Consortium and senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “There is no escaping the American presence.“

In his first presidential term, which unfolded during the pandemic, Trump disdain of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro led to his inviting the leaders of The Bahamas, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Jamaica and Saint Lucia to his home in Mar-a-Lago after they agreed to break the region’s consensus on support for Venezuela.

He wooed Jamaica Prime Minister Andew Holness while shunning Barbados’ Mia Mottley, and supported Haiti’s Jovenel Moïse while ignoring the rising tide of gang rule in the unstable country after he helped sever Haiti’s longstanding historical ties with Venezuela. Griffith said Caribbean countries need to employ certain strategies this time around, including “collective engagement.”

“There is also a significant diaspora of the Caribbean in the United States, leaving aside the illegal folks,” Griffith said. “I don’t think Caribbean governments do enough to tap into their diaspora to be a lobbying force.”

In his forthcoming book “Oil and Climate Change Change in Guyana’s Wet Neighborhood: Probing Promise and Potential Peril,” Griffith devotes a chapter to the global portrait of the impact of climate change, including the case of last year’s Hurricane Beryl. But his concerns, he said, for U.S.-Caribbean relations goes beyond Trump’s climate decisions.

“I worry about the funding for the Caribbean Basin Initiative, CBI. I worry about the funding to help deal with the arms trafficking. I worry about the funding to help deal with the youth development projects, knowing that U.S. aid is pulling out,” said Griffith.

Caribbean governments, he stressed, will need to finally take action on issues they’ve long been dragging their feet on. They will also need to build relations elsewhere to find assistance for the issues they consider to be priorities, including financing to deal with climate change, which “is a critical part of what the sustainability of Caribbean countries is all about.”.

Caribbean governments are going to have to look to organizations and foundations, for example, he said, “to pick up the slack on initiatives.” They will also need “to look for financing from the Africa continent. They’re going to have to look for more financing on climate from the Middle East. They’re going to have to look for more financing on climate from the European Union.”

Montserrat Premier Reuben Meade, the newest leader to be elected in the region, said: “We worry too much about the U.S. when in fact there are other players. If the U.S. is giving us problems, let’s look elsewhere. Granted, they are the focal point for our tourist industry, but there are tourists that are available from other parts of the world and we now have to spread our wings, so to speak, and look to other markets and to other regions for what we want.”

Guyana President Mohamed Irfaan Ali said he prefers to see the opportunities that exist with strengthening relations. But he acknowledges that the Trump administration’s recent decisions means Caribbean nations will need to ensure the regional bloc has “a full engagement with the administration, laying out our priorities.”

“I think that our relationship between CARICOM and the U.S., will have to be one that is nurtured, direct discussions with President Trump,” he said. “The U.S. administration cannot receive information from a third hand or a second hand.”

The Trump administration did not send a high-level delegation to the summit, despite being urged to do so by several Democratic leaders of Congress. On Wednesday, the State Department issued a statement saying that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had spoken to Jamaica Prime Minister Andrew Holness “to discuss key regional issues and the strong U.S.-Jamaica partnership.”

St. Lucia Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre said governments of the Caribbean have to unite.

“The U.S. is our neighbor, is our friend. We hope that we can continue in that vein,” he said Thursday as he prepared to attend a signing of one of the latest islands to join the bloc, French-speaking Martinique. “We cannot lie down and die. We have to get together. It’s a time for us to be more united so that we can do what we have to do.”

Leaders have chosen the slogan “Strength in Unity: Forging Caribbean Resilience, Inclusive Growth and Sustainable Development” as this year’s theme. In recent years, both unity and strength have been invaluable as the region found itself grappling with a series of damaging hurricanes and the deadly COVID-19 pandemic that badgered their tourism economies and left them scrambling for access to vaccines.

Hurricane Beryl last year was the earliest deadly storm in recent memory, hitting Grenada and the Grenadines as a Category 4 before slamming other island nations. Aiding the Caribbean’s united response was the U.S. Agency for International Development, the sprawling aid and humanitarian agency that Trump has moved to gut.

“The American people,” Gonsalves said, “have elected a president. He is the president of the United States and we work and talk with whoever is in the White House. Individually, I don’t think we should be running off and talking to the administration.”

On Thursday as leaders were discussing behind closed doors the deteriorating situation in Haiti and trying to decide if general elections were possible this year amid escalating gang violence, the Trump administration provided another reminder of how it is focused on its “America first” policy.

The administration rolled back immigration protections for more than a half million Haitians legally living in the U.S. that puts them in line for deportation. The Biden administration had extended the relief, Temporary Protected Status, to Haitians to offer them some reprieve from the violence that had taken more than 5,600 lives last year and forced over a million people to flee their homes and neighborhoods.

The United States’ recent aid freeze has already forced healthcare clinics to shut down in Haiti, a nation where only 27% of health facilities are functioning nationally, according to the U.N. The U.S. is both the single largest donor to Haiti and to the U.N., whose agencies are trying to respond to the swell of violence.

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