UN Secretary-General's Press Encounter in Sandy Bay, St. Vincent and the Grenadines

I am extremely impressed on the way it was possible, after the volcano [eruption], to so quickly clean all these areas and rebuild.

And at the same time, I'm looking into these extremely important projects of protection against climate change, because of the floods, because of the sea level rise, and it is clear that the government is doing an enormous effort to protect the island.

But we must have stronger support from the international community - what we call climate justice - which means adequate financing at low cost, quickly decided, in order to allow for all these works that we have been seeing to protect the island against the sea and against the floods and storms.

We absolutely need much more solidarity and much more efficiency from the international community, giving the possibility to have access to quick decisions on low-cost finance.

Question: We now have the Loss and Damage Fund but how do we ensure that countries that absolutely need that money get the assistance that they need? Because since COP28 many different countries have been saying, well, we deserve that more than that country deserves it. How do we ensure that small island development countries like Saint Vincent, get the assistance that we need?

Secretary-General: We need to have very expedited decisions on projects that are so small, as the ones we are seeing.

Projects of this dimension cannot be dealt with the same bureaucracy of projects of billions of dollars at another scale. This requires quick decisions and quick operationalization of the money available and much more funding because the people of the small island developing states are on the frontlines of climate change.

They did not contribute to global warming but they are paying the price of global world.