V.I. Good Food Executive Director Attends Inaugural White House Climate Summit

Virgin Islands Good Food Executive Director Sommer Sibilly-Brown attended the “Inaugural White House Summit on Building Climate Resilient Communities” Sept. 28 and joined representatives from 25 states, tribal lands and territories to share insights, knowledge, and strategies for mitigating the impacts of climate change on local community’s infrastructure, and ecosystems, the Virgin Islands Good Food Coalition announced in a recent press release.

The summit opened with both sobering and inspirational remarks from Ali Zaidi, assistant to President Biden and National Climate Advisor, who stated, “We have seen the skies turn orange. We have breathed in the smoke into our lungs from fires burning hundreds of miles away. We’ve seen our friends and family members’ property and memories washed away by floods that are unprecedented. We’ve seen our coastlines become greater vectors of risk.”

Zaidi went on to say, “Many people are horrified by the catastrophe, the emergency and the fury of a changing climate, but what this room represents is the proposition that this chapter of our history can be written as a moment of rebirth, repair and revitalization, of coming together and hold the sense of hope and possibility.”

The Inaugural White House Summit on Building Climate Resilient Communities was broken into two streams. The first section was a live-streamed forum where speakers addressed the following topics: