High Level "Business Dialogue"
Intervention by:
H.E. Mr Thoriq Ibrahim, Minister of Environment & Energy
New York, 26 September 2015
Thank you co-facilitators. Allow me to thank Government of France and COP21 Presidency H.E Lauran Fabius for convening second session of Business Dialogue for COP21 in Paris. Co-facilitators, Kyoto Protocol was the word’s first treaty committing countries to lower the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for it. One of the mechanisms of KP was to directly reduce carbon emission through market mechanisms, which included taxation and trade. We have experienced success and some failure in generating finance through these mechanisms. The Adaptation Fund itself demonstrated both sides of generating finance through such mechanisms and policies. These lessons from our past experiences could be invested today, in making our future mechanisms, programmes and polices to reduce carbon emissions. As we are developing new climate agreement under the convention, it is just the right time to discuss these lessons to enhance our mechanisms.
Co-facilitators, We are already experiencing adverse impacts of climate change. Developing climate resilient infrastructure puts us additional burden on our investments. Co-facilitators, the core issue of the climate finance is the inadequacy of the provision of adequate, predictable financial resources in addressing climate change. The sustainability of the existing financial instruments such as the Adaptation Fund and the recently established Green Climate Fund depends on the these financial resources. Inadequacy of
the financial resources is causing a significant financial burden on the state budgets of the Small Island Developing countries like ours.Maldives welcomes these initiatives such as market mechanism, carbon trading and taxation. We believe that these could be one of the tools to reduce the greenhouse gases and to assist the transformation into low carbon economies. However, in establishing such tools, there are significant issues that needs to be considered.
Such initiatives should not be an additional burden to developing countries and SIDS, which are already experiencing the impacts of climate change at the forefront. A clear and thorough assessment needs to be done on the impacts due to introduction of market mechanisms, carbon trading and taxation on the main economic sectors in the developing countries such as tourism to avoid the impacts on the small islands countries. These market mechanisms should be linked to the ambitious mitigation commitments by the developed countries. These should be supported by the best available science while indicating a base year with a base line trajectory in closing the ever-widening ambitious
gap. Market mechanisms, carbon trading and taxation systems sometime relates to increase in prices in other areas. Pricing of the carbon should not lead to increase in food
prices or become a barrier to the export import market of the developing countries. Maldives being among one of the least contributors to the global warming and as a country heavily relying on the imported products, this increase in such prices could have a significant implication.We could not underscore any more that carbon tax levied should unconditionally facilitate predictable, adequate and sustainable financing, technology transfer, development, accessibility and affordability within developing countries.
I thank you for the opportunity.
