Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama has made an appeal to more than 150 heads of states and governments for urgent assistance to save Fiji and the Pacific.
Delivering his address at the COP21 meet in Paris today, Bainimarama made a distress call to industrialized nations of the drastic effects of climate change that’s destroying the Pacific.
“Every Small Island Developing State and low-lying area of the world is threatened. Yet we in the Pacific seem destined to suffer the most. This crisis includes the loss of three nations – Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands. Members of the United Nations that will simply slip beneath the wave altogether. Living on only in the memories of their people in climate exile elsewhere and on old maps of a world that no longer exists.”
Bainimarama delivered the SOS from the Pacific at the gathering of the nations in Paris adding that COP21 is the Pacific’s last hope.
The Prime Minister stressed that time is running out.
“Never in the entire sweep of human history has the Pacific been so threatened. Not from the guns and diseases of our colonisers. Not from war in the Pacific nor the testing of nuclear weapons – all of which we endured last century – but from the sea. Rising slowly as the icecaps melt and the average global temperature climbs because of the carbon emissions of the industrialised nations.”
Bainimarama has also asked for help to undertake the massive task of relocating people from Kiribati and Tuvalu to Fiji.
The government has begun the process of relocating 45 Fijian communities and so far identified 830 others that are at risk.
The Prime Minister has also extended an invite to world leaders to visit the Pacific and witness the impacts of climate change that’s already unfolding.
