PM Bainimarama Addresses the High Level Roundtable on Climate Action

Thank you, Secretary-General.

Bula Vinaka from Fiji.

Five years post-Paris, the front of the climate emergency is expanding and its impacts are intensifying. Billions of people now share the anxiety Fijians have known for a generation, as they find themselves one super-storm, mega-fire, or flash flood removed from catastrophe.

If we don’t win the race to net-zero emissions, we are headed for three or four degrees of global warming –– an Earth we will not recognise and a climate we cannot survive. Speeches won’t save us; neither will nice tweets or photo-ops. From here on out, our only expectation is action. We need solidarity we can feel; reductions in emissions we can measure; and resources vulnerable nations can afford to access now.

With revenues across the developing world gutted by COVID-19, the resources to fund resilient development are running thin, leaving us exposed to trillions of dollars in climate-driven losses. Without urgent reform to climate finance, we will struggle to fund our very survival.

And in advanced economies, rather than compounding the climate crisis by looking backwards to coal and fossil fuels, Leaders must view post-pandemic recoveries through the lens of opportunity, heed what the market is telling us, harness renewables, and return people to work in green and blue industries. Governments and the private sector must lead a transparent transition to a more climate-resilient financial sector, beginning with regular reporting of corporate climate risks. Google and Microsoft are doing it, so can others. And Fiji intends to make climate-risk reporting mandatory across every Government Ministry.

Friends, this is still our decade of action. It hasn’t started as we imagined, but it must finish as we planned, and press onwards to a future of net-zero emissions; the only “new normal” worth fighting for.

Vinaka vakalevu. Thank you.