Chair, colleagues, friends.
We are asked this morning what our priorities should be for COP31, for the first BBNJ Conference of the Parties, for the SDG Summit and for whatever comes after 2030. Before I answer, I want to name the real enemy. Because I believe we have misdiagnosed it for thirty years.
We have told ourselves that the problem is political will. That if we could only persuade enough leaders, in enough capitals, the world would act.
I no longer believe that. Political will is not our biggest threat. Political change is.
Think about it honestly. There has never been a shortage of willing leaders. Every COP produces them. They stand at the podium, they make the pledge, and they mean it. Then there is an election. A coalition collapses. A budget is cut. A new government arrives with a new set of priorities and a different memory. And the pledge evaporates, not because anyone opposed it, but because nobody who made it is still in the room.
We have been building a global response on the goodwill of individuals. Individuals leave. That is the flaw at the heart of everything we have done.
If you want proof, look at Nepal.
Four weeks ago, a glacier collapsed in the high Himalayas. A wall of ice, rock and water came down a river valley in the dark. More than a thousand people are confirmed dead. Thousands more are still missing. Whole settlements, roads and power plants are gone. The damage is close to five billion dollars in a country that cannot afford a fraction of it.
Here is the part that should stop every one of us cold. A year before, in July 2025, a smaller flood had struck the very same valley. Two governments stood up and promised to share real-time data on glacial risk so that the next time, people would have warning. Then Nepal’s government changed. Priorities moved. More than a year passed. The agreement was never signed. And the next time came.
That is not a failure of will. Everyone was willing. It was a failure of continuity. The promise did not survive the people who made it.
Nepal is a screaming warning to the world, and to this Alliance most of all. Because the ice that fell on Nepal is the same ice that is rising in our lagoons. The mountains and the sea are one system. And forty-seven more glacial lakes in that region are classified as dangerous right now, while the world debates who will be in office when the next one bursts.
So here is my answer to the guiding questions. Our priority for the next phase must be a single word. Permanence.
Every outcome we pursue at COP31, at the BBNJ COP, at the SDG Summit, must be built to survive an election. That means four things.
First, finance that is automatic, not pledged. A pledge is a promise made by a person. An entitlement is a right held by a nation. The Multidimensional Vulnerability Index is our instrument for this. Once vulnerability is measured, it can no longer be negotiated away by whoever holds the pen next. Operationalising the MVI is not a technical exercise. It is how we take our fate out of the hands of political cycles.
Second, commitments written into law and treaty, not communiqués. The BBNJ Agreement is a treaty. It will bind governments that have not yet been elected. That is why it matters. We should demand the same durability for adaptation and loss and damage finance.
Third, coherence. AOSIS must stop arriving at climate, ocean and development negotiations as three separate delegations. One Alliance, one agenda, one set of asks, so that when a friendly government falls, the architecture we built with it does not fall too.
Fourth, for the post-2030 framework, we must embed the special circumstances of SIDS as a structural fact, not a category that has to be re-argued every decade.
Colleagues, we have spent thirty years persuading people. The people keep changing. It is time to build things that do not. Let the next phase of AOSIS be remembered not for the leaders it convinced, but for the institutions it made permanent.
Thank you.