 To begin with, I have the privilege to invite to the podium Dr. Salim Haq, Chair of the Center for Advanced Study, also the Director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development. Dr. Haq will be speaking on CPA 8 Reflections and the way forward. Thank you very much. Good morning. Salam Aleikum. I am the Honorable Deputy Prime Minister, Dr. Prakash Mansingh, Mr. Leela Mani Padgyal, Chief Secretary of the Department of Health, Dr. Krishna Padgyal, Secretary of the Ministry of Science and Ethnology, Cristiano Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, I'm in the movement, Director of IIEP London and Dr. Ramon, Executive Director of the Center for Advanced Study. It's my great privilege to share with those of you who are not part of this conference what we did in the conference and what the outcome of the conference was. It seems like we've been in Nepal for a very long time but we've only been here for seven days and in those seven days we've done a lot. The first three days people went out on field visits to seven different sites where they were hosted by seven different organizations. For two nights they saw many different things and we had a visual representation of that in the earlier session today. A lot of photographs, a lot of interesting experiences. I will mention one interesting experience that one of our participants shared with us. He felt this very strongly that in one of the programs the buses were stuck in traffic for a long time and they were sitting, the engine was turned off, the air conditioning was off, they were sitting in the heat, feeling a bit uncomfortable. When they saw some people getting off the bus behind them in Nepal and some children and ladies started playing music and dancing and so they went and joined them and then before they knew it the traffic jam was over and they went on their way. So that's an example of adaptation in the face of adversity and I think our community is now able to face adversity and make the most of it and indeed derive enjoyment from it as well. So I think that's a very good telling example of what happened here. We spent a lot of time talking in the conferences, sharing sessions, we had parallel sessions, we even had games where the whole plenary session, all 400 plus of us took part in that games exercise and we enjoyed ourselves and learned at the same time and we had many different activities. We had some video programs that people shared their videos of their activities. We had a lot of posters sharing examples of people doing community adaptation from around the world. We had over 400 people from 62 different countries spending time with us this last week sharing from all the continents of the world and we had a very wide variety of participants, a lot of NGO participants both national and Nepali as well as international, a lot of academics and researchers, quite a lot of government representatives from various governments from Asia and Africa in particular. That's a very good sign that we are now also participating in some funding agencies, multilaterals like the Asian Development Man, Mokdad Bilaterals like BFID and GIZ and some young people as well. We put in the commentator as many young people as wanted to come so we encourage the youth climate change forum of Nepal to have a parallel event just down the road at the Grand Hotel so they had a parallel event there and then some of our people have been at that and then some of their boys and girls came this morning and shared what they are doing with us and we have incorporated in our Kathmandu Declaration their views as well. So we tried to reach out to as many people as possible to involve them in different ways. One other way which we've involved people is by a category we call VIPs which does not mean the VIPs that we have on the table here, it stands for virtual interactive participants and we had nearly 1000 people from all over the world who are registered online and they were watching us what is happening in real time. We were twittering and there were events going on so there are 400 people who are here and another 1000 people outside around the world who have been following the events, sending us questions, giving us their views and opinions so we've been interacting with people from all over the world over these three, four days at the conference. This particular session is being live web streamed, we've alerted people around the world, we're hoping that people will be watching this live and we'll be presenting the outcome of this which is the Kathmandu Declaration. But before that let me also share something else that we tried to achieve in these conferences and that was very well reflected yesterday at lunchtime, two of our participants were intensely talking to each other so I went and sat next to them and joined them. One of them is Christina Rumbaitis who is from the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, in the US, in America and the other one is an employee in and out from Practical Action in Nepal and they were talking and I joined them and they said they were both in I think CBA 2 or 3 together, they were on a field visit together so I said okay so what have you done differently since then? What has the CBA added to your experience, being part of it? They thought for a while and then they said, we told us something we want friends, we are friends now because we met in Bangladesh at that time and I said that's what we want, we want friends to come out of this. You will leave here this afternoon, some people are catching flights now but you will leave with a lot of friends, Nepali friends, international friends and for us that's the most important legacy. That friendship will lead to things that we don't know what will happen but it will lead to good things we believe in. So that to us is the most important element of the outcome that everybody leads here with a sense of having made some new friends, made some new connections that will continue beyond the time period that you spend with us. Having said that, we also do have some formal outputs, we will be having a proceedings of the conference we will be putting up all the photographs that you took on the website there's been a lot of videoing, communities, we will all go on our YouTube account so the rest of the world can watch what happened in Kathmandu as well this will be legacies on the web and this time around what we are also trying to do is to bring out what we are calling the Kathmandu Declaration on financing local adaptation and I will not read out the entire two page statement but I will just say a few of the highlights first of all it is called the Kathmandu Declaration from this conference, the community based adaptation, 8th conference based adaptation, it is not endorsed by any government or agencies who are here, it's just a general view of the people who are here and we spent a lot of time thinking about what should be in this we had a drafting committee that used to meet every night, last night they were up till 12 o'clock drafting it and during the day during the sessions we asked everybody to make contributions which were all pulled together into a very short, sharp document, two pages only and the key messages are the following we are asking the global community to enhance the level of funding for adaptation to climate change in the developing countries so the first message is enhance the level of funding that is already being made available, we need a lot more the second message again at the global level is to ensure that whatever funding for adaptation is made available whether it's from the Green Climate Fund or the Adaptation Fund or foundations like DFID in the UK or GIZ in Germany or foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Munich Reef Foundation which is also represented here that they take into account the need to direct funds to the most vulnerable communities and we are asking for at least 50% of the funds to be allocated to the most vulnerable communities and here we would like to cite the example of who has not just done 50% but has allocated 80% of the funds to the local level so we lawed Nepal, we want other countries to follow the example of Nepal and so I'd like to again applaud the policy decision and we want policy makers from other countries to follow their example. The third level of our advocacy or request is at the national level, governments and city governments and other decision makers who allocate resources at national level and GeoSeconds sometimes also allocate resources we have representatives here from the Global Development Facility small grants program that is run by UNDP they were here and they have also pledged to take forward this idea of allocating to the most vulnerable that at the national level and the sub national level as well decision makers who are making decisions on allocating resources for climate change adaptation should pay special attention to the poorest and most vulnerable. If they don't pay special attention to the poorest and most vulnerable then they will not be allocated, they will lose out so we urge everybody to pay special attention and that means allocating we ask for 50% even if it's not 50% do what you can but allocate something and monitor it and report on it that's very important, we need to know what you're doing, you need to make yourself accountable by sharing with us what you are doing and how much you are spending for the most vulnerable. And so finally what we then did this is the Kathmandu Declaration, I mentioned the salient features to ask as they are called to the global community and to the national decision makers then the question comes what about us what are we doing, are we just going to talk the talk or are we going to preach or are we going to practice what we preach and walk the walk as well so amongst us all of us in some different shape or form, some individually some as groups have made pledges to do something, each of us will go back and we will do something to make the Kathmandu Declaration real, we had examples from a group from the Pacific Islands who said they go back to the Pacific Islands they talk to their governments, they talk to Aeosis, their alliance of small island states and give the Kathmandu Declaration to them, we had a representative from the city government of Surat in Gujarat in India who said he'll go back and he'll translate it into Gujarati and give it to all the city officials in his city so everybody has promised similarly to go back and take the Kathmandu Declaration principles of allocation and prioritization of the most vulnerable and see if they can implement them or persuade others to implement them and then next year we will take stock of all of these pledges and the pledges have been made on camera with their names and they'll be on the website and so with everybody's name the pledges will be there on our website so next year we'll look at them and we'll ask you to report back yourselves outside on what we have done to fulfill the pledges that we made while we were here at CDA 18 in Nepal and so finally before I end I would like to share with you where we are going next the next conference of Amin's Place Adaptation, the 9th conference will be in Nairobi in Kenya, we have a good number of people from Kenya here, we had a good meeting with them yesterday, they have already formed the organizing committee, I'll be going to Nairobi in June to discuss with the government of Kenya who have already endorsed that they can be the host, I'll go and talk to them about the details the theme for next year is going to be a bit more focused than it was this time finance attracts everybody, everybody's interested in finance so we had a huge turnout over 400, nearly 450 people next time it'll be a bit more focused, it'll be on making CBA more effective or how do we make it effective or evidence of effectiveness which includes things like monitoring and evaluation, a big specialist but right now as funding is going into community-based adaptation there is a need for us in the community-based adaptation to be a bit more thorough in terms of an evidence phase of what works, what doesn't work and we will hopefully gather a year from now in Kenya, we haven't fixed the dates which will be roughly this period of April-May and we will have a focus as I said on monitoring and evaluation and before I end let me reiterate my challenge that I made in the earlier session to everybody about giving examples of failure, we must learn from our mistakes and admit failure and learn from our failures so I'm still open to being pitched for articles or chapters on a book on failure, lessons from failure, if I get enough of them from you then we will try and put a book together on that, with that I thank you all very much and I hope for those of you who come from outside the country you have a safe journey back home, thank you.