 My name is Salim al-Haqqa. I'm director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development and I'm going to talk about the upcoming 23rd Conference of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is about to start in a few days time in Bonn, Germany. Even though it's being held in Bonn, Germany, it's actually the presidency of Fiji and the Prime Minister of Fiji himself is going to be the president of the COP. As president of the COP, he held a pre-COP meeting very recently in Fiji, where he has already declared his intention to focus particularly on the issue of loss and damage in this COP. In addition to the regular business that has to be undertaken in terms of putting in the rulebook and preparing for the stock take under the Paris Agreement, there's a lot of nitty-gritty details that have to be done under the Paris Agreement, but they're not really of great political significance. What is of much greater political significant is the fact that this year, 2017, represents a major tipping point in terms of the global impacts of climatic events that are now directly and unequivocally attributable to human-induced climate change. While there are quite a few of them around the globe, the most important and perhaps the most illustrative are the four hurricanes that hit the United States and the Caribbean that travel through the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean in the last few months. Initially Harvey hitting Texas and Houston and then Irma hitting Florida and then Porto Rico, where the impacts, particularly loss and damage, are now estimated in the region of well over $300 billion, which they are going to send the bill to the US Congress to pay and the federal government in the United States may have to pay that bill if they want to help their own citizens recover from the damage that has been caused by these hurricanes. And the fact that these hurricanes were of such severe magnitude, the hurricanes themselves are not due to climate change, but the magnitude may well have been due to climate change because the temperatures in the Atlantic and Caribbean were elevated at that time beyond their normal temperature and hence the given intensity of a cyclone or a hurricane is dependent on the sea surface temperature. And since those were elevated, what became category 5 and category 4 storms might have otherwise been only category 1, 2 type of storms and had, might have had much less damage. So the point is that loss and damage from human-induced climate change directly attributable to human-induced elevated temperatures of both the atmosphere and the ocean is now a fact and we need to think about how to deal with it. In the past, we were thinking about this as something that would happen in the future and we have time to talk about it. The time is now over. We need to decide what to do about it. The most important bit will be focusing on how do we finance and support the compensation to those who are affected by the impacts of climate change and suffer the loss and damage. So there will be a lot of interest in developing innovative financing structures and mechanisms. We already have some innovative insurance, index-based insurance schemes. We might look for other examples of innovative finance. So that is my view of what the major issues will be. I'll be reporting back every evening from Bonn, starting from the first week on a progress in the global overall negotiations, but particularly focusing on the issue of loss and damage.