Small island developing States have valuable resources, including oceans, Coastal environments, biodiversity and, most importantly, human resources?. also have their own peculiar vulnerabilities and characteristics, so that the difficulties they face in the pursuit of sustainable development are particularly severe and complex.
* Preamble, Programme of Action for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States, Barbados, 1994

The Global Conference on the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States was convened in Barbados in 1994. This Conference resulted in adoption of the Declaration of Barbados and the Programme of Action (BPoA) for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and recommended to the General Assembly of the United Nations at its forty-ninth session endorsement of the texts of the Declaration and the BPoA.

Ten years later, on 14 January 2005, in Port Louis, Mauritius, the second International Conference convened by the United Nations and attended by 129 Member States adopted by consensus the "Mauritius Strategy for the further implementation of the Programme of Action for the Sustainable Development of Small Island Developing States" (MSI) subsequently endorsed by the General Assembly of the United Nations in its resolution A/RES/60/194. The Mauritius Strategy is therefore the current United Nations sustainable development strategy for Small Island Developing States for the period 2005 to 2015. It is the only global strategy to address specifically and exclusively the problems of island states.

The BPoA was reviewed in 2009 and the MSI was reviewed in 2010 (MSI+5) and both documents reflected the limited progress made by Caribbean SIDS in implementation of the thematic areas of the programmes.

ECLAC has been working in support of Caribbean SIDS in implementation of the BPoA and the MSI and is currently focusing on two broad areas, namely climate change and energy and the green economy.