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Speech: COP president highlights urgency of climate action at the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat in Fiji

Cabinet Office

July 27
15:58 2022

Friends, Bula and good morning.

Now some of you will know

that my team and I have tried on a number of occasions to come out to the Pacific during last year but unfortunately the pandemic made it impossible.

And I can therefore appreciate just how challenging it must have been for those of you who did actually come to Glasgow and make that arduous journey.

And by doing so what you did was to add to the voices at COP26 calling for ambitious climate action.

So I am delighted to finally be here.

To indeed meet you in person, face to face, to hear about your lived experiences, and to try and understand what it is like to inhabit an island like this.

Which is at the front line of climate change.

You are forced to deal with the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions generated largely by the biggest emitting countries, a long way from here.

And lets be frank, this is not a crisis of your making.

As your Prime Minister said ahead of COP23 when Fiji held the presidency, Frank said:

We have not caused this crisis, your nations have.

We have trodden lightly on the earth whereas you have trodden heavily.

And those comments friends should weigh very heavily on all world leaders, many as you know who came to COP26 in Glasgow and made impassioned statements about tackling climate change.

The leaders of many of the biggest emitting countries, of course they talk the right talk.

But you know this, they havent yet walked the walk on the level of climate action required.

Frankly, you have spent years trying to educate the world on the dangerous predicament faced by the smallest, low-lying island states due to a changing climate.

You will have seen this yourselves on the television that in my country in the United Kingdom, some are only finally waking up to the long-term dangers of global warming.

As the mercury in the thermostats topped forty degrees centigrade last week, we were hit by wildfires,

Destroying property, torching grassland and damaging train tracks.

In fact, we are starting to experience, more acutely, the consequences of rising temperatures that you have here in Fiji, and indeed other Pacific Islands, were forced to start adapting to a long time ago.

At the recent Pacific Island Forum you reinforced this reality, declaring a Climate Emergency that reflects the threat that you face to your livelihoods, your security and indeed the overall wellbeing of Pacific Islanders and ecosystems.

You face this lived reality literally everyday.

That is why I have prioritised visiting and working closely with Small Island Developing States during the UKs COP26 Presidency.

And it has been humbling.

When I visited the island of Barbuda last year, I met communities who are experiencing first-hand the devastating consequences of extreme weather, as they still struggle to recover from Hurricane Irma five years on.

The communities I met in Jamaica and Antigua were grappling with the challenges of rising seas, and forced migration, both equally prevalent here in the Pacific.

And on the boardwalk in Barbados, I saw the urgent adaptation work being done on the frontline of the fight to hold back the ever encroaching seas.

And whilst the pandemic prevented me from visiting the Pacific before we met in Glasgow,

I was honoured to speak with Pacific leaders at the UK-Pacific High Level Dialogue in July last year, at the United Nations last September, and at the Foreign Ministers Meeting last month.

Now turning to COP26, the Glasgow Climate Pact, which was agreed by almost 200 countries, is a historic agreement.

But, you know this as well as I do that it involved making difficult and sometimes painful compromises.

But thanks in no small part to the tireless leadership of representatives from the Pacific,

the Pact was an agreement forged in the understanding that it is in our collective self-interest to tackle climate change, and to do that urgently.

And whilst I am sure many of you will have heard me championing the Pact in the months since COP26,

I understand how difficult it was for your representatives to swallow some of the compromises we reached, including at the very end,

We know that in these multilateral discussions, the final result often involves no one getting everything they want.

And I know that in areas such as finance and loss and damage, we didnt go as far as you would have liked.

But I also think that it is worth reiterating some of the key commitments that we did garner from every nation.

We concluded the Paris Rulebook.

We bolstered the rules on mitigation, calling on countries to revisit and strengthen their emissions reductions targets, by the end of this year.

And we made progress on consigning coal power and fossil fuel finance to history.

But, crucially, the Pact also began to address many of the other important issues for negotiations.

The Glasgow Sharm-el Sheikh work programme, on the Global Goal on Adaptation,

underlined the imperative of all countries to prepare and respond to climate risks.

For the first time ever, we secured significant language on loss and damage in the cover decisions.

We set up the Glasgow Dialogue to discuss how funding arrangements can be enhanced.

We agreed to operationalize the Santiago Network to deliver technical assistance.

Glasgow also endorsed the need for integrated action,

bringing together work on adaptation, disaster response and recovery.

And we affirmed that developed countries must double the finance for adaptation by 2025.

The Pact also directly addressed the participation of young people and women, and the vital role of Indigenous Peoples.

And it notes the importance of ensuring the integrity of all ecosystems, including the oceans, an issue that has been so effectively championed by the Pacific Island Nations.

All of this meant that yes, we left Glasgow with a large programme of work, and with tough compromises to allow us to achieve that global agreement, but I believe we also left with a sense of genuine momentum.

We were able to say with credibility that we had kept 1.5 alive.

Now as you know, the keeping 1.5 alive mantra originated from the SIDs.

It was given resonance in the Paris Agreement.

And we the UK recognised its vital importance and that is why we took it on as a central objective for our COP presidency in Glasgow.

But, I also know that 1.5 is not some dream result for those of you living on the frontline of climate change,

We are already at 1.1 degrees warming above pre-industrial levels and we can see the enormous impacts it is having everywhere.

I know that for many people 1.5 degrees is not about thriving,

It is literally about surviving.

And therefore it makes it even tougher when the richest countries, the biggest economies, those belching out the bulk of the emissions are still not doing enough.

Yes, we have seen 16 new NDCs submitted since COP26.

Five new long-term strategies.

Nine new adaptation communications.

And work to scale up finance.

You know that we have a deadline of September for revised NDCs to be submitted and I know that other countries, because I have these conversations, including some of the biggest economies, have pledged to publish revised NDCs by the end of this year.

But friends, the worlds progress since Glasgow has been too limited, and too slow.

And the fragile trust that we all generated amongst nations, large and small alike, is beginning to fray.

Since COP26 I have continued to urge governments to deliver on their commitments. I have made 23 international visits bringing the total to 65 visits to 45 countries since I took on the COP role.

Over the past eight months I have held bilateral discussions with 48 governments to press the case.

Now of course, the world has changed in the eight months since COP26. The global geopolitical and economic situation is perilous.

The Putin regimes illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine has unleashed and exacerbated a series of global challenges, rising inflation, an energy crisis, food insecurity and rising debt levels. People around the world are struggling to make ends meet.

But the chronic threat of climate change has not gone away, in fact it is getting worse.

And just as the Pacific declared climate change its primary collective security risk years ago,

many now recognise that climate and environmental security are completely inter-linked with energy and national security.

The rest of the world is now waking up to what the Pacific has been warning about for decades.

So, I am going to be frank with you.

We have seen some productive conversations as part of the Glasgow Dialogue, and the Santiago Network.

Workshops on the Global Goal on Adaptation.

And as a G7 nation, the UK recognises our responsibility to take the lead.

Our own NDC is ambitious, committing to reduce emissions by 68 percent compared to 1990 levels.

And we are revisiting that NDC, to ensure it remains aligned with the Paris temperature goal.

That is the sort of action we must see from all the major emitters, and particularly the G20 countries, which are responsible for 80 percent of total global emissions.

The bright lights of the COP26 stage in Glasgow have long faded, but we need all G20 countries to live up to their words and promises. We need the substance behind the soundbites.

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