PRIME Minister Voreqe Bainimarama is disappointed that Pacific Islands Forum leaders could not reach a consensus after 12 hours of talks during the Leaders Retreat on Thursday.
In a statement yesterday, Mr Bainimarama said while there has been a great deal of agreement in Funafuti, it was clear that there were differences of opinion, emphasis and approach between the island nations and New Zealand, on the one hand, and Australia on the other.
“Some of these differences inevitably weaken the strength of our collective position on the climate threat and it is disappointing that we could not achieve a unanimous consensus,” he said.
Mr Bainimarama returned to the forum this year after 10 years. He has vowed to positively engage with Fiji’s Australian friends to try to persuade them to make a more rapid transition from coal to energy sources that did not contribute to climate change.
“I look forward to my first official visit to Australia next month and to seeing, at first hand, some of the advances Australia is making in its energy transformation and renewable energy development.”
Mr Bainimarama also said there was no doubt that holding the forum leaders meeting gathering in one of the Pacific atoll nations, whose very existence was threatened, had focused the minds of Pacific leaders on the scale of the disaster “we face if the world fails to rise to this challenge”.
He, however, acknowledged the commitment by all PIF members to cap global warming at no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above that of the pre-industrial age.
Meanwhile, the forum leaders could not reach an agreement on the Tuvalu Declaration which was strongly endorsed by the Small Island States earlier in the week.
They, however, drafted the Kainaki II Declaration for Urgent Climate Action Now as the basis of the Forum’s leadership and moral authority to engage at the United Nations Secretary General’s Climate Action Summit next month and the COP25 at Santiago, Chile, in December.
The Tuvalu Declaration reiterated the UN SG’s call for an immediate global ban on the construction of new coal fired power plants and coalmines and to rapidly phase out their use of coal in the power sector.
