Comments at the launch of the Indo-Pacific Carbon Offsets Scheme, with PNG Minister for the Environment, Conservation and Climate Change Wera Mori, and Fiji's Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum

ANGUS TAYLOR: Thank you everyone for coming along. It’s wonderful to be here with the Fijian Attorney-General and Minister Mori from PNG for a launch which I think is very important and symbolises the strength of our relationship with Australia with our Pacific family and of course, it is crucial that we work together to bring down emissions across our region. We see it as an absolute priority but we also see an opportunity to work with our partners in Fiji and PNG and elsewhere to invest in their future, to invest in the infrastructure that they need, which is something we feel a responsibility for as a developed country in the region. And that investment we think is absolutely crucial as an issue, because the Indo-Pacific Carbon Offset Scheme, it’s ultimately about us being able to support our Pacific partners, our Pacific neighbours with emissions reduction in their country, but most importantly with investment in PNG and Fiji and elsewhere, that can support not just the reduction in emissions but the establishment of the energy infrastructure and the other infrastructure that is absolutely crucial for the development of our region. So, it’s a real pleasure to launch this today with my colleagues, and thank you all for coming along. And I might turn now to Minister Mori.

WERA MORI: Thank you. Good evening. Today we’ve signed this agreement, this MoU, which basically is a very significant bond going into the future. The challenges of climate change is real, and that it will do something that all countries will have to deal with coming into the future. The Pacific- [indistinct] Australia and New Zealand covers 25 per cent of the surface area of [indistinct]. The Pacific is the largest ocean area in the world and that it has become the agent of sinking carbon dioxide more than any other regions on planet earth but unfortunately, this becomes so that we have suffered the consequences of the impact of climate change. Small island communities are seeing the small jetties and wharves that they depend on are now being washed away. Overheating of our oceans, the greater Pacific. They've seen greater concentrations and over saturations of carbon dioxide that's making our oceans becoming more acidic. We are losing our fish and tuna stock. That is the biggest challenge to the economies of the small island nations of the Pacific, including Fiji and Papua New Guinea. One of the industries that we depend on, which has been the tourism industry where visitors from all around the world would want to go and relax on the sandy beaches and the blue atolls of the Pacific now are gone, beyond right in front of our noses because of sea level rising. I had an opportunity for being the first government minister to- overnight do [inaudible]… which became the first climate victim in the world, and I know what it means and I know what I am saying, and this partnership must go a long way. We have got mitigation process in our respective countries. In Papua New Guinea, we are looking at growing trees and mangroves to increase the capacity of our lungs. To take in carbon dioxide, the fact that we host 30 per cent of the balance of the tropical rainforest in the world, we are now putting in measures to ensure that we stop logging and we would want to play our part to become a singular carbon dioxide and in actual fact, although despite the fact that we only emit a small amount of greenhouse gases, we're sinking more than what we are emitting and in fact, we made one of the very few countries that have met global [indistinct] 2050 in terms of carbon trading.So I would like to basically say I'm thankful for the fact that we have achieved this milestone and that this must be alive  and I look forward into the future. Thank you.

    

AIYAZ SAYED-KHAIYUM: Look, I had a whole speech written for this, Minister, but I’ll be very brief. I think the fact that Australia has now announced 2050 net zero emissions is a great announcement. The fact of the matter is that, you know, as we know, that carbon dioxide affects us all and it’s a global problem. The fact that Australia’s announced this particular initiative is most welcome. We'd like to work with Australia in this respect. We also have to make the point that it's not only about carbon credits, but also about overall carbon production. I think we need to work collaboratively on that basis. Building capacity in the Pacific or the Indian Ocean in this small island state is critically important and I think also affordable finances have been [indistinct] earlier on this morning, where we talked specifically about that. Some of the international financial architecture is very much attuned to the post-World War 2 era immediately after rebuilding Europe. That’s not necessarily relevant now as well and I think the financial instruments that we do develop need to be a lot more responsive and the affordability factor needs to be built into that but similarly, I think, you know, it's the nature based solutions that- we look forward to collaborating with you in that space. We are currently working with the UK government in issuing a blue bond. We launched green bonds a few years ago, listed on the London Stock Exchange. Great optics, terrible interest rates. Six per cent, we don't want to pay that. Similarly, we're looking at collaborating with Australia in the blue bond issue, and I think there's a lot of potential. There's obviously jobs in the climate change space, a lot of specialisation that can be built in, but we look forward to working together with you. I want to use this opportunity to give you a copy of our Climate Change Act. This is one of the first comprehensive climate change acts in the world, ladies and gentlemen.

    

ANGUS TAYLOR: Well, thank you, Attorney-General. Those comments are very well made. I think what we would like to see out of this in terms of our relationship and our partnership is that our commitment to our $100 million to this to this program drives finance. It can support the financing for those initiatives, whether they be blue carbon initiatives, other nature based solutions or indeed renewable energy projects. That this will help to bring forward that finance because it's a revenue stream which you can use to finance. So look, this is absolutely an imperative. It's also alongside obviously the climate finance that we've recently committed in the uptick of that as well, which of course is, from our point of view, must be directed towards our neighbours, we don’t want this scattered all over, all over the world. We do want to focus on the Indo-Pacific. So look, it's wonderful to have you here. Thank you so much for both being here. It was wonderful to sign this this morning and we are most of all looking forward to seeing the results of this because as you rightly point out, Minister Mori, it's the results that count. That's what we need to see, and that's certainly what we look for from this program. So thank you.

    

WERA MORI: We recently have made an amendment to our Climate Change Management Act to basically incorporate every message that we can take going into the future and that I'm very, very excited that as we drive into the future, we all will have a collective ground to basically start thinking.