SUMMARY OF THE STATEMENT MADE BY MOHAMED NASHEED, PRESIDENT OF MALDIVES TODAY TO THE SUMMIT ON CLIMATE CHANGE.!!!
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Mohamed Nasheed , the President of Maldives spoke after the speech given by Barrack Obama, The President of the United states of America.
MOHAMED NASHEED, President of the Republic of the Maldives, said that, as a small island nation, the Maldives desperately wanted to believe that one day its repeated warnings over the past 20 years concerning the threat of climate change would have an effect. The country would continue to shout about the dangers of climate change, even though, deep down, it knew that the international community was not really listening. Today, the Maldives would play its allotted role as the world’s conscience on global warming, but it would allay that role with an equally determined effort to explain why it was in the interest of all nations to move forward.
The solution to the current political deadlock on climate change was very simple, he continued. Developed nations had to acknowledge their historic responsibility for global warming and accept binding emission reduction targets. The developing world had to be ready to accept binding emission reduction targets under the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, as long as the rich nations provided the tools, the technology and finance, to reform the developing world’s economic base and pursue carbon-neutral development, he said.
“If it is so simple, then why are we not doing it?” he asked. The absence of action was caused by three principal reasons. First, Governments still believed that climate change had to incur an economic cost, or a relative disadvantage. Yet, the reverse was true, as oil ran out and became more expensive and clean technologies and renewable energy became more efficient. The second reason was the lack of trust between the countries, especially between developed and developing countries. But, the threat posed by climate change was so acute and the science so clear that horse-trading and brinkmanship had to be left in the past. The third reason for the absence of action was that the Kyoto Protocol was primarily about what countries cannot do, rather than what they could do. A positive agenda focusing on the actions nations could take might provide a better alternative, he said. That was why the Maldives recently announced its intention to become carbon neutral by 2020, and was creating a national strategy to put the political commitment into practice.
The Maldives was determined to break old habits and would no longer be content to shout about the perils of climate change. Instead, its acute vulnerability provided a clarity of vision to understand how the problem could be solved and the courage to lead by example. He asked the assembled world leaders to discard the habits that had led to 20 years of complacency and broken promises on climate change, and seize the historic opportunity waiting in Copenhagen.
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