THE focus of leaders should be to empower communities and individuals to be able to take care of themselves in times of crisis.
This was part of the message that was disseminated by the Pacific Islands Development Forum (PIDF) secretary-general François Martel during a side event held on building national, regional and international partnerships on island resilience held at the Pacific and Koronivia pavilion at COP24 in Poland.
“From a green–blue economy perspective, when we speak of resilience, we do not simply imply resilience to climate change although this is an important factor, particularly in the Pacific,” Mr Martel said.
“When we speak of resilience, we speak of island or community resilience because a community, when resilient, can better absorb or deal with a disaster or crisis of any sort, whether climate-induced or not, whether natural or man-made,” he said.
Mr Martel said one could be empowered through education, health, better communication and energy services, better income, water and food security, keeping safer and cleaner environments.
“These are development goals. Hence, the close link between sustainable development that goes beyond the single SDG 13 and resilience therefore brings together all the SDGs and climate action into a single focus.
“Let’s remember that at the end of the day, people do not really care about agreements or treaties, frameworks and plans, strategies and great glossy documents that promise a lot but deliver little, what they do care about is that they find the support needed to plan and prepare for climate-induced disasters, to reduce damage to properties and livelihoods and alleviate their conditions during disasters while fostering faster recovery.”
He highlighted that ultimately, there was a need to develop a mind-set of what the partnership called “precovery” — where a long-term “precovery” mind-set was a combination of networking and scaling data, solutions, planning and investments while removing silos and weaving together practices in mitigation, adaptation, community planning, sustainability, recovery, resilience and maintain our tradition of Pacific storytelling.
