For Pacific and Caribbean island states, coastal ecosystems are not conservation priorities — they are seawalls, fisheries, and tourism economies simultaneously. This panel brings together a UN Ambassador on the frontlines of sea-level rise, a development leader building community-scale resilience programs, and SDG News to examine what actually works when adaptation budgets are a rounding error in donor balance sheets. Mangroves and reefs as sovereign infrastructure; parametric insurance and blended finance as connective tissue; and the hard question of how frontline nations set terms rather than accept them.