The Prime Minister’s Special Envoy to the 26th Conference of the Parties, anticipates on firmly drawing tangible outcomes from the COP26 Leaders’ Summit, in Scotland.
Minister for Environment & Climate Change Wera Mori made these remarks during the first day of the COP26 Leaders’ Summit (Monday), where he intends to make a bold stand, reiterating Prime Minister James Marape’s country statement on climate change, delivered in New York, during the United Nations General Assembly, in September.
He said our bold statement here will be 'Enough of talking, let's take action - We need to walk the talk’.
“Papua New Guinea, like many small island developing States in the Pacific and the world over suffer the consequences of industrial catastrophes, which we are not responsible for.
“Now, we have our oceans – The Blue Pacific, being destroyed, where our seas have become acidic.
“Rising sea-levels are washing away coastlines on many of our small islands, back home,” Minister Mori said.
He said seas are being destroyed. Food security is being threatened from oversaturation of carbon pollution.
“These are entirely from industrial destruction to our oceans, resulting in the bleaching of our coral reefs affecting spawning grounds for our high-class tuna.
“We experience severe patterns of global warming induced weather variations, basically creating challenges to our infrastructures,” Minister Mori said.
He said by the same token, as a country that is host to seven per cent of global biodiversity, over one per cent of land mass of global landmass, Papua New Guinea feels that it is our objective to see actual actions being taken to address these critical catastrophes.
“From the outcomes of this Climate Summit, PNG and other countries that are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, must know how and when they can access this climate funds, which is supposed to be to the tune of $100 billion per annum.
“And therefore, it is only important and proper that we must have positive outcomes from this climate summit, otherwise we may find there is no benefit from such global meetings,” the Minister said.