Attorney-General and Minister responsible for Climate Change, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum says the USA can help build a more resilient world with an additional, ambitious pledge to the Green Climate Fund.
While speaking at the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate, Sayed-Khaiyum says the US can do this by backing climate-for-debt swaps and other actions to ease the COVID-driven debt burden on climate-vulnerable nations.
Sayed-Khaiyum says America can support for reforms to guarantee that processes for financing climate adaptation are far less bureaucratic and become more efficient to make finance more accessible and flexible, and by making good on the 100-billion-dollar pledge to mobilise climate finance.
Sayed-Khaiyum adds America still has convening power, it has technology, it has wealth, and it has founding principles that impel it to take on this challenge.
He says Pacific Island states fully support the USA in holding major emitters accountable.
Sayed-Khiyum says even if the global economy became carbon-neutral tomorrow, we would still have to reckon with a range of water-related crises, from super-storms, to the risings seas, to the changing weather patterns that kill-off crops and steal livelihoods of our farmers.
The Minister for Economy says since TC Winston, 12 more cyclones have struck Fiji, each one a devastating reminder of the damage to the climate.
He says today it is Pacific communities on the frontlines of this emergency but tomorrow it will be New York City, Houston, and Miami.
