ATTORNEY-GENERAL AND THE MINISTER RESPONSIBLE FOR CLIMATE CHANGE AIYAZ SAYED-KHAIYUM'S CLOSING REMARKS AT THE CLIMATE INDUCED SECURITY WORKSHOP

Distinguished Workshop Participants 
Ladies and gentlemen 
Good afternoon to you all, and thank you for joining Fiji’s firstever Climate Induced Security Workshop. 
This workshop had three broad objectives: 
 
To help us understand what climate security means to us as a nation; 
 
to reinforce our capacity to work together at every level in response to climate-related challenges; 
 
and to set the scene for us to mainstream the implementation of multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural humanitarian responses to the climate challenges we are facing now and in the future. 
 
In his opening remarks, the Honourable Prime Minister stated clearly that climate change is a grave threat to Fiji and the entire planet—an existential threat. We toss the phrase “existential threat” about a lot, and I fear sometimes that we use it so often that we lose sight of its meaning. But the Prime Minister used it to remind us of the power and destructive force of the enemy we face. But we need to remind ourselves that we are dealing with a threat to our very existence—to the existence of species, of land masses, of life as we know it on this planet. Indeed, climate change presents not only the most serious but the most all-encompassing national security threat we have ever faced.  
 
Even if the world achieves net-zero emissions by the life-ordeath 2050 deadline, the science tells us – due to the damage we’ve already done -- climate impacts will become far more severe before they ever abate. The seas will continue to rise. Storms will become stronger. Droughts will become longer. Weather patterns will change. Unchecked, those impacts will steal the lives and livelihoods of our people. In some cases, the rising seas will steal the very land they’ve called home for generations, leading to an accompanying rise in climate-induced migration from internally displaced persons. That will place pressure on land, it will place pressure on population centres, it will place pressure on resources, and if we do not adapt it will place crushing restrictions on our nation’s economic potential.  
 
We cannot let that happen. We have to adapt. We consider, by the numbers, what Fiji is faced with. Working with the World Bank, we conducted a Climate Vulnerability Assessment of the country. It was determined it will require 9.3 billion dollars to climate-proof Fiji’s development over ten years. That was a daunting figure before the COVID-19 pandemic decimated our tourism industry and brought our economy to a staggering contraction. Now, with government revenues gutted, funding sustainable, resilient development has become a herculean task. But when you consider the alternative is climatic devastation, what choice do we have?  
 
The costs of doing nothing are greater than they appear on the surface. Say a bridge is washed away by a storm. On its face, that represents a major loss of an investment. But what happens next? A community who relied on that bridge is now cut-off from their nation. Their access to food, services, jobs, and essentials could be severed. Through no fault of their own, climate impacts will have pushed them to the fringes of society. Robbed of their jobs, their ways of life, and their access to their nation, we can guess where that road leads. When economic opportunity vanishes, violence and lawlessness too often fill the void, breeding more serious challenges for our nation’s security.  With the costly, compounding nature of this threat in mind, our Prime Minister called us to action. Specifically, for us in government, he directed us to work better among ourselves and together with the rest of Fiji and the world. Of course, that should go without saying, and I am sure that many of us in this room are thinking, “Well, of course we will work together. We always do.” But the Prime Minister was calling on us to do far more than we have ever done, to actively break down the barriers and the rivalries among ministries and other institutions that inhibit full cooperation and can thwart our progress. And to bring on board the specific knowledge and expertise within each Ministry, our statutory bodies, public enterprises, the private sector and at the community level. We have never faced a threat like climate change. Settling for a business-asusual approach would be folly. No one person, ministry, entity, or department holds all of the answers, that is why we must act selflessly and cooperatively for the good of the country and of every Fijian.  
 
We have made a good start in Fiji by mainstreaming climate considerations into our National Development Plans. We were one of the first countries to bring our climate change unit into our Ministry of Economy to engrain our climate action agenda at the heart of our development. We recently launched the revised draft of our ground-breaking climate change bill, which is now available online after we considered after the first round of consultations, hundreds of submissions from the public, our international partners, climate researchers, and within government. And we are also making great progress in implementing a number of mitigation and adaptation projects that require different parts of the government to work closely together. We can take pride in that. But I think we need to do better, and we need to make that cooperation something we do consciously and assertively. 
 
The recent presidential election in the United States, which elected former Vice President Joseph Biden, signals a renewed commitment by the United States to climate action. With the Americans fully engaged in the fight again, the entire world is back on track. And we were equally pleased that one of President-elect Biden’s first acts was to appoint a friend of Fiji, former Secretary of State John Kerry, to head up the American climate response.  

What does that tell us? It tells us that a full and proper global response to the climate crisis will involve so many moving parts, so many pieces that must interlock and move together, that it needs a single, unified point of leadership and coordination. All elements of government must be in sync, and government must use with great effect all the tools at its disposal. Only then will we be able to hand our children and grandchildren a safer and more resilient nation. Fiji may work on a different scale than the world’s largest economies, but we face the same challenges. 
 
I believe that our Table Top Exercises and the various scenarios we developed in response to a water crisis have shown us that collectively we have the capacity to mobilise an enormous variety of resources that are available to us from across the system. But we need to turn the lessons of those exercises into reality, and we need to keep the need for collective decision-making and collective action at the forefront of our thinking—across government and across society. 
The many fine presentations we have heard have shown us that legislation and regulation can either frustrate or enhance the options at our disposal and consequently our capacity to mobilise resources across the nation or within our institutions. The presence or absence of strategically qualified opportunities will determine the levels of investment and action that we may or may not take.  The machinery of our systems—the cultural norms, policies and procedures— have to work for us in the service of our environmental and human interests.  Finally, at the human level, we need to strive to make sure that our feelings of intrinsic worth, our strengths and values are strengthened when we see them in the context of collective action. The sum of our parts needs to be greater than the whole. 
    
I wish to thank Mr. John Feakes, Australia’s High Commissioner in Fiji, and Professor Meg Keane, director of the Australia Pacific Security College, for their participation. And I want to offer my special thanks to the government of Australia for sponsoring this conference.  
I also would like to thank Australian national university professors Mark Howden and Quentin Grafton, who gave all of us some very graphic insights into the trajectory of climate change and the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions, rising temperatures, rising sea levels and extreme weather conditions. They taught us that an effective response is in fact a matter of will. And the world must muster that will. 
 
It was also privilege to have with us representatives from several regional, civil and non-government organisations, including the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, the Pacific Community, the United Nations Development Program Innovation Hub and Fiji Council of Social Services. These good people have taught us that initiatives being undertaken from the community level to the regional level are making a big difference. Everything from working to develop the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent and coordinating efforts to collectively meet the Paris Agreement, through to implementing strength-based protocols and principles to look after our families and communities.  Thank you for sharing your wisdom and insights. 
 
Finally, I want to commend everyone here from the many parts of the Fijian government that have a role in confronting the challenge of climate change. Your focused and enthusiastic participation tells me that we have both the willpower and the good will to work closely and selflessly together for the good of the nation and our future generations. 
 
I think we may have more questions than answers—and perhaps we always will. But this is a good thing because climate change may require responses that are not within our existing repertoire.  This means we have to learn together and work together in order to rise to the challenge.  We have to shift from telling to listening and learning.  We need to embody the spirit of collaboration and build on institutional engineering to ensure that our systems and processes can meet the aspirations of the Fijian people and protect this nation.  
                                                            
So let us rise to the Prime Minister’s call to action. I know that we can develop the ways to work together to respond to this great threat to our national security, and I know we all want to. When we do, we will be able to hand our Fijian children and grandchildren a safer and more resilient nation. 
 
I hereby declare Fiji’s first ever Climate Induced Security workshop closed. 
 
Vinaka Vakalevu, and thank you. 

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