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All of Jamaica’s financial defenses — insurance, bonds and credit lines — could be deployed to recover from Hurricane Melissa. Will it be enough?
Oct. 30, 2025
Hurricane Melissa was among the worst-case scenarios Jamaica could have imagined. The storm’s winds flattened crop fields, homes and businesses. Its rains washed away trees, roads and cars.
And yet, the Caribbean island appears surprisingly well-placed to weather at least the financial cost of the damages.
In recent years, Jamaica has created a multilayered financial plan to respond to natural disasters. The strategy, which analysts say is uncommonly sophisticated, means the government has an arsenal of financial reserves and other tools ready to deploy, with each designed to handle a different level of disaster.
“We can’t prevent the storms and hurricanes that come at us,” Fayval Williams, the country’s finance minister, said at a news conference on Thursday. “But one thing this government can be credited with is putting together a robust national natural disaster risk financing policy.”
This year, the various tools should amount to about $820 million, Ms. Williams said in June.
Jamaicans typically don’t carry much in the way of property insurance. But with 82 percent of the country’s population living within a few miles from the coast, according to the World Bank, and most industries and services located in flood-prone areas, extreme weather poses immense risks to Jamaicans and their economy. So designing a plan to increase government spending after a natural disaster, analysts say, was needed to keep the economy going.
Keenan Falconer, a Jamaican economist who previously worked as an analyst for the country’s finance ministry, said that during past crises, the government’s hands were tied. The first response would be to rearrange the budget to fund relief efforts.
