Fiji will chair the 27th Governor’s Meeting of the Pacific Developing Member Countries of the Asian Development Bank when the ADB holds its next annual gathering in Japan next year.
The position of chair will be assumed by the Attorney-General and Minister for Finance, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, who has been attending the current 26th PDMC Governor’s Meeting in Frankfurt, Germany.
The AG led a discussion by finance ministers of the ADB Pacific Member Countries on how they can gain better access to finance to build their resilience to the extreme weather events and rising sea levels caused by climate change.
The AG stressed the need for climate financing to be mainstreamed into all development financing including national budgets. And he said that because extreme weather events were likely to be more frequent and more intense, it was vital that all future infrastructure investments in the region be climate resilient.
The AG called for Pacific Island countries to collaborate on formulating bankable projects to build resilience and access funding. He said that because island nations were relatively small and had limited economic bases, they needed to work closely together to confront the challenge of climate change. And this could be achieved by countries with similar economic needs collaborating on a regional or sub regional basis.
There was general consensus among the Pacific delegates that Fiji’s proposal was the appropriate way forward and the AG will chair the PDMC's next gathering during the 50th ADB annual meeting in Yokohama, Japan, in 2017.