PM Bainimarama remarks at the Climate Reality Blue Pacific Event

Vice President Al Gore;
Fellow Leaders;
Excellencies;
Ladies and Gentlemen.

We have less than 30 days until COP26 where leaders will define the next 30 years of our response to the climate crisis.

Everything we have fought for the Paris Agreement, the 1.5-degree target, affordable and accessible climate finance, the very survival of our reefs, islands, and way of life is on the line in Glasgow. And we Pacific Nations the stewards of our Blue Pacific cannot cede an inch in this fight to secure our future.

We have heard the fierce urgency of this moment in the demands of young people around the world. They are angry as they should be. We are wildly off track from leaving them a world worth living in. Yet we know there are leaders who hope to sneak in and out of Glasgow without making a single serious commitment that will save our planet for coming generations. We can’t let them.

Fiji and the Pacific’s demands are clear:

• The developed world must deliver on the 100 billion dollars promised in climate finance and we must begin negotiations on financing commitments from 2025 onwards – with a new floor of 750 billion dollars.
• We must finalise the Paris rulebook including a global blueprint to enable carbon markets that protect environmental integrity and help advance our shared objectives;
• Funding for adaptation must represent 60 percent of overall global climate finance and vulnerable SIDS should access at least 10 percent of global climate flows;
• We need a dedicated financing mechanism for loss and damage that goes beyond insurance-based solutions;
• The ocean’s inextricable link with the climate must be recognised by an Ocean work programme and agenda that is progressed through UNFCCC processes with enhanced financing for ocean resilience and fisheries adaptation.
• And we must ‘keep 1.5 alive’ by securing drastic emissions cut by 2030 that set us towards net-zero global emissions by 2050 or sooner. That is our expectation for every nation, Australia and New Zealand included.

The science has spelled out the disparity between 1.5 and two degrees Celsius of warming. It is the difference between life and death for millions. Our actions will decide whether islands exist or are lost to the rising seas; whether many ecosystems can recover or be irreversibly destroyed; and whether low lying areas around the world, from the Pacific, to the coastal belt of Bangladesh, to cities like New York, Lagos, Miami, and Venice, can be adapted to protect billions of people or whether mass migration will become a global inter-regional crisis.

The Pacific’s leadership secured the Paris Agreement’s ambition for a 1.5-degree guardrail, and that same leadership can turn that aspiration into reality. When we speak the world listens. They see our struggle is real, and they know our warning is genuine. But we are tired of reiterating our people’s suffering and applauding their resilience. We refuse to be the proverbial canaries in the world’s coal mine, as we are so often called. We want more for ourselves than to be helpless songbirds whose demise serves as a warning to others. That is why we need far greater access to affordable climate finance than we have today.

I want the children of the Pacific to be the poster-children for development, not disasters. We too have grand aspirations for sustainable progress. We want to create strong economies and expand essential services to our people. We believe we can do that without putting the planet in jeopardy. We are already showing how that can be done.

Vice President Gore, you will recall it was American president John F. Kennedy who once said, “Ask not what your country can do for you ask what you can do for your country.”

We have asked what Fiji can do for the world to take on this crisis, and we are answering with concrete actions. Through our Climate Change Act just passed in our Parliament last month Fiji has enshrined our 2050 net-zero commitment into law, created pathways to build resilience through nature-based solutions and legal requirements to ensure decision-makers address climate risks, and we have mandated the 100 percent sustainable management of our ocean, with 30% as marine protected areas by 2030.

I’ve said before that we are all in the same canoe when it comes to climate change. On the horizon is a future that is green, blue, resilient, and carbon-neutral, but on either side of that safe harbour are winds that will break us and seas that will swallow us all. There is still time to reset course from catastrophe towards the future our descendants deserve. But we have to act now.

My fellow Pacific leaders, Mr Vice President, we will see you in Glasgow.

Other parts of the world that are affected.