President Wavel Ramkalawan addresses United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow |02 November 2021
President Ramkalawan addressing fellow world leaders yesterday
‘Let us save our planet and ensure the survival of our beautiful mother earth’
“Let us not disappoint them (our children), but rather, as one human race, let us save our habitat and by doing so, let us save our planet and ensure the survival of our beautiful mother earth.”
This is how President Wavel Ramkalawan ended his speech on day two, yesterday, at the ongoing 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow from October 31 – November 12, 2021 at the Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow.
The summit began on Sunday with world leaders facing calls for urgent action to limit dangerous temperature rises. The overarching goal of the summit is to put the world on a path to aggressively cut greenhouse gas emissions and slow Earth’s warming.
The COP26 was postponed from 2020.
“The time to act is YESTERDAY,” said President Ramkalawan who described himself as “an island boy facing reality” and “neither a scientist nor an environmental expert”.
“What I experience in my beautiful islands that most visitors describe as paradise, is the destruction of our environment and livelihood. This, I am sure is what we all see in the various parts of the world we come from. Be it flooding, forest fires, extreme temperatures, delayed rainy seasons, coastal erosion, destruction of wildlife, cutting down of forests, fewer and smaller fish and many more. These, unfortunately, are all part of the destruction process of planet earth and the self-imposed eventual extinction of the planet’s most intelligent species, the human being,” he said.
The President added: “We must all look at the mandate bestowed on us and allow our decisions to surpass political considerations and repose on only one agenda: the survival of our planet. Our people want a better life and this starts by being alive.”
He noted that “Seychelles is a victim. So are other small island developing states.”
“We suffer the effects and consequences of industrialisation and climate change. We are already gasping for survival. When I hear the expression ‘rise in sea level’, I am scared because it brings home the awareness that my country’s granitic islands will lose all the economic activities happening around the coast and I also realise that the beautiful archipelago of 115 islands that we are today, may be reduced to less than 50 as coral islands disappear, including the Aldabra atoll, our gift to humanity as a world heritage site,” he told the world leaders, before calling on them to act immediately.
With leaders of more than 120 countries gathered for the summit, President Ramkalawan underscored the urgency of the moment, saying “the environment partnership to save our planet must happen here in Glasgow 2021. Let COP26 be the determining point. Let the change be a real one. Let the paradigm shift happen. May the industrialised nations understand that they cannot continue polluting without reserve, may those who exploit without thinking of tomorrow stop, may the corrupt poachers of our planet change their ways and may we realise that in this battle to save our planet, we are not in the proverbial same boat, but that we are indeed in the same boat, big, small, rich or poor. The disaster experienced by Covid-19 will be seen as but a breeze. For Covid, the world came together and developed the vaccine. For the protection of our planet, the only vaccine is our sincere commitment and concrete actions. In other words, we have to be honest and action oriented.”
President Ramkalawan also pleaded with the rich nations to look at the less fortunate ones as equal partners.
He asked: “Can we agree, for example, to put an end to the expression ‘high income earning’ in order to accept a vulnerability index, whereby we will be measured not according to the sacrifice, hard work, proper planning and devotion to serve our people, but on how vulnerable we actually are. Seychelles is considered high income, but overnight it lost 75% of its tourism industry due to Covid-19 and the world stopped for her people. That’s vulnerability,” said President Ramkalawan.
In his opening speech, COP26 president Alok Sharma warned that the window to keep within the 1.5 degree warming target is closing.
Scientists say that keeping global warming below 1.5C ‒ a target world leaders agreed to work towards in 2015 ‒ will avoid the worst climate impacts.
“We know our shared planet is changing for the worse, and we can only address that together,” said Mr Sharma.
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson, welcomed heads of state and government, warning them that humanity has “long since run down the clock on climate change” and must act now to tackle the crisis, with the planet now at “one minute to midnight”.
As for UN chief António Guterres, he sent a stark message to the international community saying “We are digging our own graves”, referring to the addiction to fossil fuels which threatens to push humanity and the planet, to the brink, through unsustainable global heating.
Then, Secretary-General António Guterres took the podium with a blunt opening message:
“The six years since the Paris Climate Agreement have been the six hottest years on record. Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink. We face a stark choice. Either we stop it ‒ or it stops us,” said Mr Guterres.
US president Joe Biden has said his country remains hopeful that the 1.5C target will be reached, saying he will “sprint” to get there by 2030.
That, he told delegates in Glasgow, would be followed by a long-term plan to ensure the US transitions to a net zero economy.
He said: “We are planning for both a short-term sprint to 2030 that will keep 1.5C in reach, and for a marathon that will take us to the finish line and transform the largest economy in the world into a thriving, innovative, equitable and just clean energy engine for a net zero world.”
Meanwhile, climate activist Greta Thunberg was pictured outside the summit’s blue zone protesting with other young campaigners. Ms Thunberg said she was not officially invited to the conference, but was attending to take part in protests in Glasgow.
Yesterday afternoon she was filmed holding up a banner saying: “Enough is enough.”
Gerard Govinden