Transcript of the Opening Remarks
By the Honourable Mia Amor Mottley, Q.C., M.P.
Prime Minister of Barbados
At the Global Climate Action Summit
San Francisco
September 13, 2018
Good morning everyone.
The very existence of my island nation and that of my brothers and sisters in the Caribbean, their nations, is threatened as we speak today.
I almost didn’t make it here today. Indeed, as we speak, Tropical Storm Isaac is landing upon Dominica, St. Lucia, Guadeloupe, and Martinique. This is the fourth storm or hurricane in three years that is hitting Dominica…as we speak.
Barbados escaped the ravages of the 2017 hurricane season. The costliest on record in the Caribbean. A season with multiple category 5 hurricanes in the same year.
Unprecedented. It caused the utter devastation and complete evacuation of an island that has been inhabited for thousands of years. I refer to Barbuda. Unprecedented.
And that is at 1 degree of warming. The world is currently on a path to well over 3 degrees of warming by the time a child born today reaches old age. Even if the countries meet the commitments made in the first round of the nationally determined contributions.
We were lucky in 2017. Barbados that is. We were lucky today. But is it fair and is it equitable that the livelihoods of our people, are dependent now upon us staying lucky? Even if we avoid an extreme weather event, our ports, our hotels, our restaurants, our electricity generating stations, our main hospital – the only one – along with the majority of our other coastal infrastructure, are threatened by the insidious and accelerating rate of sea level rise.
Coral reefs, our greatest economic asset after our human capital, are already dying. Things that I saw as a child, cobblers, sea eggs, we no longer see. Our reefs will dissolve as the oceans become more acidic and even as we do that we are facing and confronting daily now as I speak, the threat of sargassum weed which threatens the livelihood of our hotels, our workers, and our coasts.
Our dry seasons are getting longer. Our droughts are more common. Three years ago, seven of the eleven parishes in my nation had difficulty accessing water. Access to fresh water is becoming a constraint on further economic development for a country that is already defined as water stressed. Indeed the cost of desalination water is more than ten times that of our current cost of water and we seek to do so as the third most indebted country in the entire world.
Dengue, chickinguna bearing mosquitoes are breeding faster and regrettably biting more people. Barbados like many other countries around the world is already experiencing the adverse impacts of climate change.
And we are not content to wait for others to act. Barbados is a proud nation, long respected for punching way above its weight. We have been a world leader in solar hot water technology for almost 50 years. And now we intend to be one of the first examples of how carbon neutrality and climate resilience can be achieved across an entire economy. We intend to reassert ourselves on every international front we can engage to combat climate change because we are in a fight for our own existence.
Indeed, it is for that reason that we have set 2030 as the target for us to have a fossil fuel-free economy.
The world has lost all of us, have lost momentum since Paris in 2015. And although the rate of increase has slowed, we have not yet peaked our global emissions but we must do so by 2020. We really cannot afford to wait any longer. There is much work to be done and affordable and predictable climate finance believe you me, is greatly needed especially for small island states whose vulnerability is in front of you today as I speak.
The green climate fund must be adequately replenished for it is our only hope in many instances. And access to these funds needs to be streamlined. Our country Barbados is graduated from borrowing from the World Bank because we are deemed to be a middle income country because of our per capita income and yet had that hurricane hit us today, our conversation and our reality would be completely different but we relish simply to wallow in definitions made in rooms thousands of miles away from our reality.
The agreements and goals that arose out of the week in Paris cannot be forgotten or cast aside. Not any more. The next round of nationally determined contributions will seal our fate for better or for worse. And to the citizens of the world I speak now, not to the Governments. This is our battle. You see the evidence before our very eyes. We see it, we feel it, we don’t have the power to change the small things that we do…always but there are some things that we can change.
We can change how we save water, we can turn off the tap each time we brush our teeth. We can change how we save energy. We can turn off the lights and the air conditioners as we leave rooms. We can change our oceans. That which we put in it is not to pollute it like straws and plastics. And if each one does this, then we can save our world because many hands make light work.
With the technology today, we can see each other whenever and wherever we choose across borders, across regions, across races. For our climate knows no boundaries and respects no class. But it will respect numbers as politicians do. It will respect numbers acting in concert. It will respect thousands and millions of people acting together; not just to change our minds but to transform how we live to save our world.
I look to everyone in this room to act but I look to everyone who hears my voice to act for my country, for our region, for our island nations in the Caribbean and the Pacific, for vulnerable communities everywhere. Our future and the future of generations yet to come is at stake. And if we wait any longer it will be far too late to save it.
My friends, my friends across the world, the time for talk is past. This is truly the time for action; not just the action of leaders and Governments but the actions of you, and you, and you, and you, and you, and me.
Thank you.