Excellencies, Heads of State and Government, Ministers, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.
I thank the Government and people of the Republic of Türkiye for their hospitality, and our CARICOM family for welcoming us to this pavilion.
In January, I told our Parliament that no one is coming to save us. I told them that we must save ourselves.
I did not say it in despair. I said it because small island states have learned how the world works.
Nations act in their own interest. They always have. At COP27, I warned that self-interest would drive the decisions of the world’s leaders.
That warning has proved true.
We learned it in 2019. Hurricane Dorian sat over the Northern Bahamas for more than a day – and took more than a quarter of our economy with it.
Friends and partners were generous, and we remain grateful. But the long work of rebuilding fell to us.
We live in a world where others’ self-interest has led us to the discovery of self-reliance.
We have come to that conclusion without bitterness. Every nation comes of age the day it stops waiting for other nations to rescue it.
No small island state can meet this crisis alone, and The Bahamas will not pretend otherwise. Self-reliance means acting before the world arrives, and building something the world will want to join.
For a generation, the world has looked at small islands and seen us as the first to follow.
I invite you to look again, as we prepare to be the first to lead.
I grew up on Cat Island, one of the many islands that make up The Bahamas. Wherever you go in our country, one thing connects us all: our relationship with the sea.
For those of us raised on the islands, we never learned conservation from a textbook. We learned it from our parents and grandparents.
When our fathers and grandfathers went to sea, they did not take more than they needed – they took only what the household required, and occasionally a little more for an elderly neighbour or a widow.
We knew that an immature conch should be left to grow. We knew there was a time and a place to fish. We knew that the reefs and sand banks that fed us today had to feed us tomorrow.
We may not have used words like “conservation,” “sustainability,” or “stewardship.” We simply understood that you take care of what takes care of you.
Over time, that instinct became national policy. In 1993, we banned longline fishing in our waters. In 2009, we ended the harvest of sea turtles. In 2011, we made our waters a national sanctuary for sharks, the first in the Atlantic.
We took those decisions because we valued our Natural Assets and Biodiversity.
Beneath Bahamian waters lie the largest seagrass meadows of any nation on Earth. They cover approximately fifty-three thousand square kilometres of the sandy banks around our islands.
At COP29, I called them the blue heart of our planet.
Those meadows work every day and ask nothing in return. They draw carbon down and store it in the seabed. They shelter the fisheries that feed our families. They soften waves before they reach our shores.
They work for the world as well. Their climate service recognizes no border or man-made lines. Protecting these meadows serves every nation in this room.
The protection and that value existed all along. For too long, it went unmeasured and unpaid.
The question for The Bahamas is no longer simply what we have. The more important question is What are we prepared to do with what has been entrusted to us?
This generation of Bahamians will take responsibility for this inheritance. We will protect it, restore it where necessary, and make sure it keeps providing for our people and the world long after all of us here today are gone.
The Bahamas did not come to the international community with an idea and ask someone else to take the risk.
We wrote our own laws. In 2022, we passed the Climate Change and Carbon Market Initiatives Act and the Carbon Credit Trading Act. Together, they give The Bahamas the legislative framework to govern its carbon assets and cooperate under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement as a sovereign partner. The legislation establishes a Carbon Emission’s Registry, the criteria for validating carbon credits and the options to monetize carbon credits.
My Government has invested 25 million United States dollars in the first phase of this Programme. For a small island developing state, that is a significant sum to risk.
We made that investment because climate leadership must mean more than telling the world what to do.
Leadership means being prepared to act, invest and build the science and institutions that turn ambition into credible action. That is why we have committed an additional 75 million dollars to advance Phase Two.
We are building our own science. Our Climate Change and Environmental Advisory Unit leads this work. Our national seagrass map draws on satellite data and LiDAR, and Bahamian field teams have verified it in the water.
From that work, we are building a national inventory to the Tier 2 standard of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
We are also working to include seagrass in our Nationally Determined Contribution, NDC 3.0A, for the first time.
Phase One lays the groundwork. Phase Two is where measurement must translate into credible action and independently verifiable outcomes.
We are now moving from science to implementation.
The additional funding will sustain our measurement, reporting, verification and implementation of our Programme of Activities. It will support the planning we need to deliver our NDC and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Conservation comes first. Our seagrass does not exist to generate carbon credits.
Climate finance, properly structured, is one tool that can help us protect it at the scale and for the length of time that conservation demands.
If we measure that climate service accurately and authorize it properly as a sovereign state, The Bahamas can take part in international carbon markets under Article 6. That includes Internationally Transferred Mitigation Outcomes, known as ITMOs.
Every tonne we authorize for transfer will be adjusted in our own national accounts, so that it is never counted twice.
And no credit that comes from Bahamian waters should ever become an excuse for anyone to keep polluting. That is why The Bahamas will only take part in internationally verified carbon markets to ensure transparency, accountability and the environmental integrity the programme demands.
We intend to do this carefully. We intend to do it credibly. And we intend to keep conservation at the centre of every decision we take.
We want the value created by protecting nature to help finance its continued protection.
So, as we enter Phase Two, The Bahamas will launch the Bahamas Blue Economy Institute, a lasting national institution for the blue economy.
Our aim is for the Institute to set a gold standard for the transparent and credible stewardship of any proceeds from the transfer of ITMOs. Those proceeds would sustain long-term work on our seagrass, and across the full breadth of our nation’s marine biodiversity.
The Institute will fund the science and the programmes that strengthen this work and our wider marine environment. It will bring leading international scientists and environmental experts together, side by side, with Bahamian professionals, emerging and seasoned alike. The capacity we build will outlast any single project cycle.
We welcome partners, and we will need them. But the long-term protection of the Bahamian sea cannot depend on donor cycles, or on the priorities of others. These are our waters. These are our ecosystems. Their future is our responsibility.
Self-reliance must also reach our people, or it will mean very little.
A fisherman on any of our islands should be able to see how a healthy seagrass bed protects his livelihood and his children’s future. A young Bahamian studying marine science, data science or finance should be able to see a career in the blue economy in The Bahamas. Our island communities, the relevant departments of Government and Bahamian NGOs that meet high standards must all be part of this work, and share in what it achieves.
Conservation cannot happen around our communities. They must be built. Additionality must be a call to action!
The institutions will not build themselves. We have legislation to strengthen and, where necessary, to develop. We have policies and guardrails to put in place. We have frameworks to build for governance, for fiduciary oversight and for implementation.
This must become far more than a carbon project.
We have rolled up our sleeves, put on our boots, and committed ourselves to the hard work ahead.
The science has given us a foundation, but the work has only just begun.
We must protect that science and turn this opportunity into lasting environmental, social and economic value for The Bahamas.
Now let me speak directly to our partners and to investors.
For decades, small island states have spoken to the world about our vulnerability, and with good reason.
But I have never accepted that our vulnerability should be how the world views countries like ours.
I will not leave my people’s fate to the political will of other leaders.
Our people cannot wait for the next summit, the next pledge or the next change of government in a distant capital.
Yet The Bahamas does not want to walk this road alone. We cannot.
We come as a country with an extraordinary natural asset. A Government that has invested in understanding and protecting it, and with an invitation to credible partners to collaborate with us.
For years I have told the world’s leaders: do not do it for us, do it for yourselves.
Today, we do not ask anyone to act against their own interest. We offer a partnership in which your interest and ours point in the same direction.
Our seagrass protects the worlds climate. Your partnership can help protect our seagrass, the blue heart of the planet.
We invite governments to explore cooperation with The Bahamas under Article 6.
We invite scientists and international institutions to work alongside Bahamian expertise.
We invite responsible investors to put their capital behind conservation and restoration at national scale.
We invite future purchasers to begin the conversations today that will build high-integrity cooperation tomorrow.
In The Bahamas, you will find a sovereign partner, a clear legal framework, science you can verify, and qualified professionals committed to do the work.
Let me close with the generations of Bahamians who went to sea without satellite maps, without climate models, and certainly without international carbon markets.
They were not the owners of our oceans. They were its custodians.
That responsibility now falls to us.
We must take care of what takes care of us.
The gift that nature has given The Bahamas is extraordinary.
Our task is not merely to calculate its value, or to tell the world how much carbon may lie beneath our waters. Our task is to keep this great marine inheritance healthy and productive.
Others’ self-interest taught us to rely on ourselves. Our grandparents taught us what self-reliance is and Nature taught us to take care of what takes care of us.
That is our responsibility.
That is our opportunity.
And that is the legacy we intend to leave behind.
Thank you.