 Good morning, everyone. Dr. Salim Haq, senior fellow I.I.E.D., Dr. Ibrahim Thio, Deputy Executive Director, UNEP, Dr. Jean Pascar, Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Vincent Goneel, Ambassador of the Republic of Ireland to Kenya, Dr. Ati Kraman, Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies, Dr. Cosmos Achie, E.D. Ants, Dr. Tom Owingo, African Development Bank, Dr. Simon Carter, I.D.R.C., High Commissioners and Ambassador's Present Development Partners, Distinguished Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen. I wish to take this opportunity to warmly welcome all delegates to this important conference on measuring and enhancing effective adaptation. I am informed that several of the delegates arrived in the 23rd of April and have had a chance to tour different parts of the country to have a firsthand impression of what communities here in Kenya are doing to adapt to real-life challenges brought about by climate change. The areas you visited form only a small part of Kenya and I would encourage you to take more time after the conference to see more of our beautiful country. Kenya, just like other developing countries, is seriously impacted by changing climate, be it in terms of extreme climate events like droughts and flooding, whose severity and frequency have apparently increased in recent years. Climate-driven disasters like landslides and slow onset of events like sea level rise, just to mention a few. All these have significant impacts on the key sectors of our economy. For example, agriculture, water, human health, energy, infrastructure and tourism and the livelihoods of communities, thereby slowing down economic development and the general well-being of our people. In response to these challenges, Kenya has chosen a low-carbon climate resilient development pathway, not only to address the unavoidable impacts, but also ensure development going forward does not aggregate the climate change problem. This also ensures the constitutional requirement of a clean and healthy environment for all Canadians. Distinguished delegates, Kenya puts a lot of focus on adaptation as we are already feeling the impacts of climate change. In this respect, we have ratified the relevant international conventions and agreements and continue to be actively engaged in climate change forums under the auspices of the UNFCCC. At the national level, we in 2010 launched a national climate change strategy to guide actions on both adaptation and mitigation. In 2013, we developed a national climate change action plan to operationalize the strategy. In preparing the action plan, the government ensured that all stakeholders, including communities, media, research institutions, and academia, private sector, the civil society, and development partners, were not only consulted, but were part and parcel of a team that prepared the national climate change action plan 2013-2017. This was to ensure that we address real needs of our people in a coordinated and effective manner. The adaptation chapter in the national climate change action plan is currently being developed further into a national adaptation plan. The full implementation of the national climate change action plan and the national adaptation plan will result in a more resilient Kenyan people, systems, and economy. We have gone a step higher and prepared a national climate change framework policy and a climate change bill. The climate change bill has successfully sailed through the National Assembly and is currently under consideration by the Senate. The bill and policy will, among others, enhance the institutional capacity for climate change coordination, in addition to providing a regulatory framework for enhanced response to climate change and proving mechanisms and measures to achieve low-climate carbon resilient development. Distinguished delegates, as you may have observed during your field visits, communities are not waiting for the development of perfect legislations and strategies to start addressing the impacts. They have to do something now because it touches on their ideas. The best we can do, therefore, is to support what they are doing by creating an enabling environment, mobilizing resources, and facilitating access to relevant information, among others. We may not be very certain about the results of our efforts towards building adaptive capacity of the most vulnerable households and communities amongst us because not much attention has been paid to tracking progress with our own adaptation locally and internationally. We are, however, piloting the approach of tracking adaptation and measuring development in some counties based on the recommendation of the National Climate Change Action Plan. We do this because we are convinced that work on adaptation needs to keep development on track. As CDA practitioners gathered here, we need to pause and ask the question, where are we and where do we need to be in the next one year, five years, 10 years, or even 50 years? And what do we need to do differently to reach there? The degree of change we are seeing also calls for change in the targets we may have set for ourselves before. As you all know, adaptive to climate change is a process and processes need not only clear strategies, but they also need patience. As we prepare to stay long enough with vulnerable groups until such a time that they can bounce back on their own, can that be reflected in our programming and support going forward? The CDA-9 comes at an opportune time for Kenya, the Global Climate Change and Development Agenda. Nationally, Kenya is in the process of enacting climate change legislation on which climate change activities will be anchored. Globally, the CDA-9 falls in the same year as the 21st UNFCCCC Conference of the Parties, COP21, to be held in Paris in December this year. COP21 is expected to come up with a new climate agreement to take effect from 2020. It also falls in the year that marks the transition from the Millennium Development Goals to the forced 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. The CDA will thus provide an opportunity for Kenya and indeed all the countries and institutions gathered here to not only share their experiences on measuring and enhancing adaptation effectiveness, but also to inform the COP21 and SDGs by January. I would like to thank three institutions that are very formal. These are ACT, IIED and BCAS for co-hosting the CDA-9 conference together with my ministry and the National Organizing Committee for their hard work in ensuring that this workshop is a success. In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to wish you productive deliberations over the next four days and look forward to receiving key messages that we may carry with us in COP21 in December. It is now my honor and privilege to declare this midpoint of the conference. Officially over. Thank you very much.