 Prime Minister Shri Goyala, Secondary Ministry of Science, Technology and Environment, Dr. Krishnabaldi, Prakash Kutema, Joint Secretary of the Ministry, Navarri Ramaji as Chair of the Adaptation Fund, I think Ramaji is the Executive Director of the Center for Science and Business. I am the CEO of the Climate Development Knowledge Network and Valaral Kappa as the Head of Library. Ladies and gentlemen, good morning. On behalf of the International Institute for Environment and Development, who are one of the organizers of this series of now annual events called the Community-Based Adaptation International Conferences, it's my great privilege and honor to welcome you at this enormous session. Thank you, Honorable Prime Minister, for bracing us with this presence and to say a few words of welcome. As you heard, this is the eighth in a series. We have been doing this now for a number of years. Last year we did it in Bangladesh, where the theme of the conference was on mainstreaming climate change community-based adaptation into national planning. A year before that we were in Vietnam and the year before that in Tanzania, so we go around. One of our earlier themes a couple of years ago was on scaling up and learning lessons. And we did a particular effort at that time to bring out scientific literature from all the efforts that are happening on community-based adaptation around the world in order to feed into, at that time, the ongoing fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has just been released a few weeks ago in Japan, in Bahamina, working on two reports, which is on how it impacts adaptation. And I'm extremely pleased to share with you the fact that we have a publication by a well-known academic publisher called Earthscan on community-based adaptation, on scaling up, which made it, got published in time to get into the IPCC report. So at least this report will be far richer in terms of capturing the activities that are already taking place on community-based adaptation around the world. This particular conference, as you just heard, the theme is financing local adaptation. Financing is a big issue. Without financing we're not going to be able to scale up. And we are extremely pleased to have some very key figures in the global arena of finance. One of them is sitting with us here, Mamatul Manadia, from Burkina Faso, in the chair of State Adaptation Fund. It's the main climate change adaptation fund, unlike the French one. We will be having with us, like I said, from Philly's, at the closing session, who is co-chair of the Green Climate Fund, which is the new fund that is supposed to manage the 100 billion dollars a year from 2020 that will be available. And we also have a number of other private sector funding agencies, like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Munich Reef Foundation, and a number of bilateral funding agencies like DEFIT and GIZ and so on. So we have a very, very rich rate of 400 participants from over 60 countries. Many of them, over 200 of them went from a three-day visit to seven different sites. The people I've talked to had a very good experience. One group had a long trip coming back yesterday from Cochrane for the next 16 hours. But I think they got back safely, which is the most important thing. And I think they had a good result over there. Others had a bus ride back. And some people visited yesterday as well. So for the conference, we try and take our international participants to see something happening in the industry, particularly something relevant to community-based adaptation. I think that we have fulfilled that here. We're very pleased. And we'd like to thank our local folks, the government and the NGOs who have been hosting them. So there are three reasons why we are holding this meeting in Nepal. And I'll go through each of them very briefly. The first reason is to highlight the fact that Nepal has done, the government of Nepal has made a very significant policy decision which we would like other countries to emulate, which is to allocate 80% of global adaptation funds that they receive from the international community to the local level. And we would like other countries to consider, if not 80%, at least 50% of global funds flowing to a country be allocated to the most vulnerable to the local level adaptation. The second important reason for choosing Nepal is again a very innovative activity that Nepal has pioneered. Many developing countries, these two countries as many of you familiar, have done national adaptation plans of action on LAPAS. Nepal has gone on to further and done LAPAS, which are local adaptation plans of action at the very local level, and they are now implementing that. So again, we want other countries to learn from Nepal, to follow Nepal's example. The good news is many countries are doing that. And there are many country government representatives here today who will be sharing what they're doing in their country at the local level and we'll learn from each other. And one of the things that we hope to do in this meeting at the end of the closing ceremony and on the 13th is to come up collectively over the next few days on a Kathmandu Declaration on Finance and Local Adaptation. And we'd like this to provide advice and guidance to global funders, to national funders decision makers within countries to make allocations specifically aimed at and targeted at the poorest and most vulnerable communities within countries and countries within the world. And we hope that this will be something that others will pick up and funders around the world will be able to take forward. Before I end, I'd like to say a few remarks directed to the Honorable Prime Minister, our Chief Desk, and he highlights the third reason why we are here in Nepal, which is that Nepal chair is currently the least developed countries group in the UN framework negotiations. Mr. Prakash Kutema, who just spoke, is the chair of the LDC negotiating group and he's been doing a very exceptional job of leading the negotiators. But if we want to get a real result in the UNFCC process at the 21st Conference of Parties, which will be held in Paris, France in December 2015, then we need engagement from leaders, from ministers and indeed heads of government Microsoft. So I would like to make a special plea to you to speak when you speak internationally on climate change, not only on behalf of Nepal, but on behalf of all the LDCs. And I hope that you may be able to represent both Nepal and the LDCs at the Planet Summit that the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon is hosting in September in New York, where he has invited heads of state from all countries to come and tell them, share what they are doing. And we hope you'll go to that event and you will speak, as I said, on behalf of both Nepal and on behalf of the LDCs, and also tell the world about the Kathmandu Declaration of Local Finance and the gathering that you hosted here in Nepal of people from all over the world working at the community level with the most vulnerable people. We would like you to serve to be our spokesperson to the global community and to the other heads of state who will be in New York. So with that, I hope everybody has a pleasant and useful experience here. And it's my pleasure to thank you for that. Thank you.