STATEMENT
SOLOMON ISLANDS
COP28 High Level Plenary
by Dr Melchior Mataki, Vice Minister,
Ministry of Environment, Climate Change, Disaster Management and Meteorology (MECDM)
Thank you, Mr. President.
Excellencies. Ladies and gentlemen, I have the honour to speak on behalf of the government and people of Solomon Islands.
Mr President, we congratulate you on your election to the COP Presidency. We acknowledge and appreciate your leadership in the historical early decision on the operationalization of the loss and damage fund. We applaud the leadership of parties that have made pledges to capitalize this fund and call other major emitters to do so Nevertheless, we must address the root cause of climate change and the driver of loss and damage which are greenhouse gas emissions. We need to cut them down and eliminate them if at all possible.
The Solomon Islands wish to express a serious concern with the lack of progress in the first Global Stock take and on the global goal on adaptation. We are clearly off track with respect to the goals of the Paris agreement and the window for meaningful change is closing up really fast. This first GST must be forward looking ambitious, and inform the next NDCs and improved tripling of Renewable Global Energy capacity by 2030, phase out fossil fuels and mobilize finance for adaptation,
mitigation and loss and damage that is consistent with keeping global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees.
We all know that climate finance is a critical enabler of actions to address climate change. And as such, it is also important that we have the same definition for what climate finance is. For highly vulnerable countries such as the Solomon Islands, financial resources mobilized to address adaptation and mitigation must be significantly grant based, predictable, transformational and unencumbered with onerous access processes as we currently experience with the Green Climate Fund, the Global Environment Facility and other multilateral funds.
The Solomon Islands recognizes the inextricable connectivity between climate change and our ocean which defines who we are as a people. As indigenous guardians of our own space, we are deeply concerned with the negative impacts of climate change on our ocean ecosystems, fishery resources islands and also our livelihoods. We therefore urge and call for a more serious treatment of oceans and the UNFCCC bodies and processes. We are also concerned with the lack of substantive decision on agriculture and a lack of serious treatment in the critical work streams, such as in GST, on gender and climate change, we observed and we continue to go around circles on this important work stream.
The Solomon Islands need climate finance to support gender responsive and targeted programs at the community level.
Mr. President, these COPs have been going on for a very long time.
Our children and youths are expecting us to do the right and the needful and that is to arrest, reverse, and stop greenhouse gas emissions, to reign in climate change. We can negotiate here as parties and that we have been doing for the past 28 years. But it is very clear that we cannot negotiate with climate change. And those of us that are disproportionately impacted urge parties with historical responsibilities, and other major emitters for that matter, to emancipate yourself from fossil fuel addiction.
I thank you.
—END
