Excellencies, friends. Good evening.
As I speak tonight, the Atlantic has not recorded a single hurricane this season. Not one. As I speak tonight, the Atlantic has not recorded a single hurricane this season. Not one. At the very peak of the season, the Atlantic lies as still as a sleeping giant.
I wish I could call that good news. I cannot.
Because the same force that has quieted my ocean has set another on fire. The winds that shield The Bahamas tonight are feeding the storms of the Pacific. Two Category 5 hurricanes. The Northern Marianas struck by super typhoons, twice. Hawaii hit head on.
So let us be honest about what this quiet is. The hurricane season is not over and to date we have been spared. Others have not. And many of them are sitting in this room.
No policy spared us. No treaty. No fund. No sea wall.
Mother Nature chose.
To date this year, she chose the Pacific.
Next year she may choose the Caribbean.
We remember what that feels like.
In 2019, Hurricane Dorian sat over Abaco and Grand Bahama and would not leave. Families watched the sea take the only land they had ever known.
That is life in a small island state. We do not decide whether our year is kind or cruel. We wait to learn whose turn it is.
And while we wait, the sea keeps rising. It does not take turns. It rises on all of us, every year, in silence.
Friends, no nation’s survival should depend on luck. And no nation should take comfort in a mercy that is paid for by someone else’s suffering.
Yet that is the temptation of our time. We live in a fragmented world. Nations are turning inward. Promises are made loudly and kept quietly, if at all. Each country is tempted to say: it is not my storm, not my coastline, not my problem.
The ocean does not recognise that thinking. It is one body of water. What warms in one hemisphere breaks upon another. The sea has never been fragmented.
Only we are.
That is why the Declaration we honour tonight matters so deeply. In a divided world, the nations of the world agreed. It is proof that we can still act as one. Now we must make it real.
Real means this. Climate mobility is the human face of this crisis. By 2050, up to 8.2 million people across the Greater Caribbean could be on the move.
Our people do not want to leave. So, protect their right to stay, with adaptation finance that is larger, faster, and placed in the hands of communities themselves.
Some cannot leave, even when they must. The poor. The rural. Too often, women. Do not abandon them on the front line.
And where people must move, let them move with dignity, with rights, and with their culture intact.
This is the work of the Rising Nations Institute and the Communities Climate Adaptation Facility. The Bahamas stands fully behind them.
In a moment we will honour my friend, Prime Minister Teo. Tuvalu has taught the world that a nation is more than its coastline. It is its people, its memory, and its right to endure.
So tonight, from a Caribbean that has been spared, to a Pacific that has not: we see you. We stand with you. Your storm is our storm.
One day the Atlantic will wake again. When it does, let it find a world that did not look away.
Thank you.