Good evening Baron Patten, President of Rwanda, Ladies and Gentlemen;
As you all know, I come from the Maldives islands and we face a very challenging future. Another two degrees rise in global temperature and - apparently the science is much certain – we will not be around.
It is very difficult for us to digest this. It is very difficult to come to this assumption and agree with that and stop working on finding another cause of action or another solution.
What we feel is that climate change is not necessarily just a climate issue or a scientific issue - it is a security issue. It is a human right issue. For us it is the freedom to live, the right to life. And we cannot just concede.
We have to find solutions. We have to find ways and means of how we may be able to stop the two degrees that is about to happen. How we do it is of course very difficult to see. We have Copenhagen in front of us and we are hoping that good leaders, all countries, would come to the understanding that we cannot just sit and watch while a fair number of the world’s population vanish and parish.
I am hopeful. I have come here working against odds. Life hasn’t been easy and life of course will not be easy in the few years and months to come. We will -- if all of us work together, I am certain that we can come up with an amicable solution.
When we discuss climate change, we have two main issues to deal with. One is that on mitigation – how we may be able to stop or reduce carbon emission, how countries can come together in Copenhagen and how they can come to an understanding on where we might be able to go.
In my mind, the Kyoto protocol is a list of things that you shouldn’t do. In a sense, it is an inhibition list. It tells countries you cannot produce energy. To developing countries this is very difficult to accept or digest. It is very difficult for them to tell their people that they cannot have electricity, that their villages will not have electricity next year.
Everyday, every year the leaders of developing countries are faced with their citizens who want electricity, who want drainages, who want sewerages, they want transport systems, they want roads. And it is very difficult for us to tell them that they cannot have it because if they have it the world is going to end. This is just almost impossible for big developing countries to go to their people and tell them that you can’t have all the niceties that everyone else is having.
We need to find another narrative where we can tell the people that they can have all these things. In my mind, if we can come up with a list that says country ‘A’ should produce so much renewable energy and country ‘X’ also should produce so much renewable energy. So basically, we still go for 1990 levels of carbon emission and 20 below that and we still try to come up with a solution where we do not end up with the two degree rise.
If developing countries are able to also receive assistance in technology transfers on coming up with renewable energy investments, I have a feeling that this would be easier to sell than what we are now trying to deal in Copenhagen.
If we go in the manner we are going, we probably will not have an agreement in Copenhagen. We will probably come out of it saying we have decided to kill all Maldivians and we have decided to annihilate a fair amount of coastal population. That is really for me very difficult to digest. Therefore, I will always remain hopeful that there must be and there will be another solution.
Next to mitigation, perhaps more than mitigation, it is issues of adaptation that we now have to consider. In many senses the deed is done. The beast is dead. So if we can now find ways, solutions on how we may be able to survive, how we may be able to adapt, perhaps that is as important as mitigation.
Very often we come to think adaptation as physical structures - revetments, embankments. Very often we tend to think adaptation in terms of how much money that the developed world should contribute to the developing world.
I think that a core adaption issue is good governance. It is not physical structures. We have many examples in the Maldives. During the last four years, the previous government spent about two 100 million dollars on adaptation programs in 120 islands. More than 70 percent of all these are now stuck - they are not moving; they are not performing, simply because of governance issues. The contracts were given to the wrong people. When they were given to the right people, they were never monitored, they were never understood. The local community was very rarely consulted. And it is their islands, it is their villages that we are talking about in trying to protect. If we find a way of having conservation with them and then coming up with home-grown adaptation measures perhaps we might be able to do it better.
To have revetments and your standard World Bank adaptation measures is very expensive. Gordon Brown’s 100 billion would probably only save the Maldives. Just one revetment of two kilometres in the Maldives is going to cost us 40 million dollars. This is very expensive.
We have to be able to find cheaper solutions. We have tended to entertain very heavy engineering options. We now feel that there are softer, biologically engineered options that would suite us better in adapting for climate change.
If someone asks me what would the Maldives require, what do we want for adaptation, I would say we want to consolidate democracy. If we again slip back to dictatorship, it is going to be very difficult to proceed with a proper adaptation programme.
So basically, my message is very simple and two fold. It is difficult for developing countries to digest the idea that their villages cannot have electricity and that they cannot have roads and that they cannot be able to have all these good things. So we should come up with a programme where they can have all these things but through renewable energy.
Now that is why we have decided to become carbon neutral in ten years. We decided to do that because it is economically viable and feasible. We have to spread on these new systems – electricity, transport and so on. We don’t have electricity in every village; we don’t have sewerages and water supply and so on. So when we are doing it afresh, in my mind, it is really quite pointless going into yesterday’s diesel and it would be best if we can go for tomorrow’s renewable energy.
The recurrent expenditure of running a genset is very high. For so many schools in the Maldives, more than 50 percent of the school budget is spent on electricity. Because the local islanders have a generator, they produce the electricity for the island and they distribute electricity and they charge the government with very high prices simply to make their ends meet. So electricity is eating into a fair amount of the expenditure of the local communities or the local schools, health centres and many public utilities.
So for us because we feel that we won’t have to import sunshine it is fairly logical for us to find a solution by using the resources that we have. The main reason why we wanted to go carbon neutral is because we feel this is a more viable option. The more we invest on renewable technology, the more viable that it is becoming and hopefully in the not so distant future this would become extremely viable.
We wouldn’t do anything to increase the temperature – there is noting that the Maldives did to bring the world to this situation. What we therefore, feel is we can at least be an example, or at least we can die knowing that we have done the right thing by becoming carbon neutral. So mainly it is economics but also, very much trying to tell others, look this is possible.
We would be going into Copenhagen with these few messages. That it is non-negotiable. We cannot be talking about two degrees and three degrees and four degrees. We can’t at least talk about four degrees. There is no point sticking around in Copenhagen when everyone else is talking about four degrees. We might as well commit suicide. So we will go thee and we hope that countries would come around to this idea that it is really not a negotiating position around anything over two degrees.
We also feel that we should be talking about adaptation and we also feel that good governance stands at the heart of proper adaptation measures.
Thank you very much.
