YouSaid · the spoken record

Talagi

lines on the record
7
first
2015-07-30
most recent
2015-07-30
sittings or episodes
1
sources
un-security-council

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  1. “Countries need to do that with the minerals that we are looking to develop at the present moment under the sea. We are not poor. We are rich. But Jamaica is poor, some countries are, and my plea for all here today is to rethink that perception of the Pacific and work with us in true partnerships to help us. Exploit and harness sustainably the resources that we have in fish and minerals in the sea. I hope I have not caused too many problems today. Obviously, Mr. President, you have given me two new islands to work from. I thank you very much for the time you have given me to say my little piece about how I perceive it on my coconut in the middle of the Pacific.”

    2015-07-30 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7499 (2015) · source

  2. “Clearly, that is a slightly different approach to what we perceive. Most of the time most of the money is spent on consultants. In fact, I sometimes think, sitting under my coconut tree in Niue, that 80 to 90 per cent of the funds that are provided by countries, by their tax payers, to help us is spent by consultants, with your support. It cannot be right, surely. The final thing that I want to talk about is fish and minerals of the Pacific. We hear ourselves described as being poor - and we are poor. We have got plenty of fish, but we are still poor. We have minerals in the sea now and on land, and we are still poor. Why is that? Because countries represented here are not helping us. Give us a fish here, off the returns from the fish that you catch in our waters. Countries need to do that, to help us.”

    2015-07-30 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7499 (2015) · source

  3. “Some here have to do the same thing within their regions. The question that is asked is: what does this have to do with the Security Council? So far, nothing. We talk a great deal about climate change, but has the Security Council responded to climate change in a manner that it should? I like the example given by Minister Murray McCully. The Government of New Zealand recognized that we needed some support with our energy, to reduce our dependence on energy, and it turned up and installed solar plants, and away we go. Now some of those countries have reduced their imports of oil to virtually nothing. I like that response, and I would like the Council to consider that response. Some States represented here spend lots of money hiring consultants who come and tell us, "This is what we believe you should be doing".”

    2015-07-30 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7499 (2015) · source

  4. “Psychological trauma, debilitating illnesses, lack of hope from loss of lives and livelihoods are the social and human impacts of natural disasters. The funny thing is that it is true not only for small island countries, but also for large countries. Those present here have this effect with their own people. The only other thing that is important with respect to climate change, as far as I can see, at the present time is funding. Unfortunately, we need funds to enable us to continue to rebuild our gross domestic product (GDP) after major disasters. And, as I have already pointed out, they are major in the sense that they have an impact. The President of this Council today just said that 45 per cent of Vanuatu's GDP was affected by a cyclone. For some of us it is almost a 100 per cent, so we have to rebuild again.”

    2015-07-30 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7499 (2015) · source

  5. “Why do we perceive climate change and the disasters that occur differently from how the larger developed countries perceive them? For the larger economies, for the large countries, it is a blip; for small economies, small islands, it is a major disaster. That is why responses to climate change are so vastly different and why we cannot reach agreement on what we should be doing. One of the things that I wanted to raise in this Chamber is that we come here with the information given to us by climate scientists. We are politicians. That is not our role. Our role is to figure out the politics of climate change and determine and make decisions on that basis, using climate science to underpin the information, the decisions and the policies we make in that respect. We all know that there is a commonality in the disasters that occur.”

    2015-07-30 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7499 (2015) · source

  6. “There is also a vast difference in the perception that we have and the responses to the disasters that occur. The larger countries respond regionally, within the country itself. The impacts are considered localized and may or may not impact the whole country a great deal at all. For the small island countries, however, a disaster is not isolated in a region; the whole country is affected. Consequently, national disasters often occur with respect to droughts, cyclones, tsunamis, flooding and other phenomena that are becoming regional disasters. I will now talk about some of the issues that have been raised by members of the Council today, the economic impacts that these will have on our countries. But the way in which we perceive climate change and disasters, or true national disaster, are different. Why is that?”

    2015-07-30 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7499 (2015) · source

  7. “Mr. Talagi: In our discussion with respect to security threats to the Pacific islands, I shall focus my attention and comments on climate change. As we have heard today from all speakers, security in the Pacific is not confined to climate change alone, but I see climate change as the being the most challenging and the most critical to the people of the Pacific and the world. I believe that we should set a visionary target of 1.5 per cent carbon dioxide levels for 2100, and that we should then also set targets on a decade basis to ensure that we can achieve that visionary target. Currently, each country decides its own target. It is a unilateral target based on its own assessment of roughly what the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has set.”

    2015-07-30 · UN Security Council · Security Council, S/PV.7499 (2015) · source