As the Pre-COP31 opens in Nadi tomorrow, Fiji and Pacific leaders are calling for urgent and meaningful climate action.
This afternoon, while addressing a gathering of people of faith during a church service ahead of the Pre-COP, Prime Minister Honourable Sitiveni Rabuka said the Pacific’s experience of climate change must be understood not simply through statistics and targets, but through the lives, homes, cultures and communities that are being affected.
“Climate change is not only a scientific problem, or an economic one. It is a moral one,” Hon. Rabuka said.
The Prime Minister, at the outset, called for greater recognition of the human cost of climate change, including the loss of homes and livelihoods, degradation of reefs and the displacement of communities.
“This week, I ask the leaders who come to our shores to do three things. We ask them to, come, see, and listen with an open heart to those on the front line. We ask them to come ready to accelerate and deliver the effort needed to keep our promise – to honour our shared moral and legal obligation, to limit global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees,” he stated.
“Every fraction of a degree of human-driven warming moves us beyond the balance set by God’s creation, and inflicts further harm on homes, villages, and livelihoods. We ask them to come with the courage to face down the fossil fuel addictions and greed that continue to fuel this crisis, for we cannot in good faith allow it to unfold and grow any further.”
During this conference, Fiji and Pacific leaders are also expected to reinforce the call for climate finance to reach communities in need.
The Pacific’s call is also grounded in the vision of an Ocean of Peace, recognising that peace extends beyond the absence of conflict to include harmony among people and with the natural environment that sustains them.
“Peace is more than the absence of conflict. It is peace with one another, and peace with the creation that sustains us. That is the reality we pray for.
“Let us go from here not with fear, but with hope, and with work to do,” Prime Minister Rabuka concluded.
The church service was hosted by the Pacific Conference of Churches.
