Vice President Faisal Naseem has urged developed countries to fully recognize their contributions to climate change and take responsibility to offset the negative impacts of their actions on small developing states through grant aid.

The Maldivian vice president made this remark during his address at the 'Innovative Finance for Climate and Development' high-level roundtable held as part of the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

The roundtable discussion was organized by the government of Egypt.

As such, addressing world leaders and representatives of financial institutions, VP Naseem shed light on the looming economic realities facing the Maldives in the face of climate change and other global catastrophes, including the Covid-19 pandemic and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.

VP Naseem stated that the Maldives is “stretched thin” to take on more and more debt in loans to address the impact of climate change that is “progressively worsening”, with the economic downturn that emerged with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic still lingering in Maldives, and as an import-dependent country currently faced with an energy crisis due to the ongoing war in Ukraine.

With discussions presently underway on the threat of climate change and ways to overcome its effects, the Maldivian VP took the opportunity to state that it was vital to acknowledge the need to strike a balance between mitigation and adaptation in climate finance.

He noted that more than half of the climate finance for countries like the Maldives should be dedicated to adaptation and stressed on the urgent need to scale up ambitions and meet the collective goal of USD 100 billion per year in climate finance.

VP Naseem went on to shed light on the need to remove heavy administrative challenges to accessing climate finance and urged contributors to do more to help climate-vulnerable countries like the archipelago nation access “timely” and “sufficient” climate finance needed for their survival.

To fully implement the Paris Agreement, VP Naseem stated that the globe needs to increase its ambition outside of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Proposing innovative financing solutions that would benefit climate-vulnerable countries, VP Naseem urged international financial institutions to align policies with the Paris Agreement.

Warning that the “time is running short as the existential threat posed by climate change looms ever larger”, VP Naseem stressed that a global crisis of this scale can only be resolve through collective efforts to ensure individual responsibility in concert with one another.