Attorney-General and Minister for Economy, Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum says climate change thinking needs to be mainstreamed into all corners of the government.

Speaking at a high level, first-ever public event as part of this week’s FEMM 2019 program, Sayed-Khaiyum says it’s important for more government ministries other than climate change to take on approaches and disciplines for building resilience.

“It is very interesting. When we were in Washington, there is actually a group of ministers that are Ministers for Finance speaking of the need to sign up to be more sensitive to climate change. For Fiji, it was organic to do that because already the Ministry of Economy has climate change in itself.”

Sayed-Khaiyum highlighted a publication specific to Fiji’s stories of resilience to climate change, prepared by the World Bank.

The Climate Vulnerability Assessment presents handy data, including the fact Fiji loses up to $FJD 500 million annually due to climate impacts.

“We recognized earlier on in the piece that in order to be able to know exactly what we need to spend to build resilience, we need to measure our vulnerability and also map it out.”

He says the assessment can be taken to donors and financiers to step out what Fiji needs.

He says it shows “this is where we will be spending the money coupled with our national development plan, these are the specific targets that we do have.”

The Minister says there needs to be a lot of transparency in the measurements of vulnerability and the more validation there is, the better.