 Good evening. Good evening, and ya kueh. We say ya kueh in the Marshall Islands. That's our language, Marshallese. So good evening to everyone. It is a great pleasure to be with you tonight. And before I say a few words, I'd like to thank Chancellor Pro, Chancellor Cardo Hall, and Marlon for the introduction, and for allowing us to be here in this space this evening. As an educator, I am honored to be here at ANU, a place of learning. And there are few institutions like this Hallowed Institution as ANU. So I want to particularly thank the College of Asia and the Pacific for inviting me to be here. Sometimes Australia can forget that it is not just part of Asia, but that it is also a Pacific Island. And this college serves a great role in helping chart and define its role in the regional or in the region I call home. Ladies and gentlemen, I come from a country whose beauty is as breathtaking as its vulnerability. While most people have a chance to visit an island, island nation in their lifetimes, few have a chance to visit an atoll nation like mine. Indeed, there are only four countries in the world that are made up entirely of coral atolls formed from the rims of ancient volcanoes in the middle of the ocean. Nestled between or midway between Brisbane and Hawaii, the Marshall Islands is comprised of 29 different atoll chains, which looks like spaghetti strings of land often no wider than a road and with no elevation at all. These atolls are broken into more than 1,156 individual islands. Our ancestors refer to these islands as Joliet Janani, or gifts from God. And it is easy to understand why. A little bit about our turbulent history. It is perhaps strange to think that a country as beautiful as ours has experienced as much turbulence as we have. After centuries of big power, conquest, and in nearly 40 years of trusteeship, our peoples' fight for independence led to full 70 in 1986. But the seas and citizens bore the scars of wars and Japanese occupation. Our beaches and lagoons are littered with shipwrecks from some of the largest sea battles in human history. Polistic warfare gave way to something far more deadly. As custodians of the trusteeship territory that was established in the Pacific, the United States went on to test 67 different nuclear weapons in my country between 1946 and 1958. The sheer horror of these tests is hard to believe. Over the course of these 12 years, the total blast yield of all the different tests was equivalent to 1.2 of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima, being detonated every single day, every single day. The largest test known as the Bravo shot was itself 1,000 times more powerful than Hiroshima. Entire islands, like Elluclep, were evaporated, and others, like Piggini et al., where the Bravo test was conducted, remained uninhabitable to this day. While the physical impacts to our islands are hard to fathom, it is physical impacts to our people that are simply unconscionable. The pervasiveness and extent of nuclear radioactivity was known by US but deliberately hidden from our people. This has resulted in a higher toll of birth defects and cancers in second and third generation Marshallese. We continue to live with this legacy to this day. The world sees the Cold War and the arms race as history, but we are still trying to get answers and justice from the United States for innocent people who unwittingly swam in our crystal clear seas and ate its delicious fish unaware of the radioactive spots or hot spots. Sound scientific knowledge would have provided a basis for preventative action, but this was not acted upon by those in power. On to climate change. Sadly, I see many parallels with climate change. Scientists have been warning us for decades about the irreversible and catastrophic risks to our islands by the relentless dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Governments have acted on these warnings by creating international and national laws like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, but vested interests have tried to toward these efforts at every turn. Climate deniers hold key posts in the new United States administration. Like others from vulnerable countries everywhere, it saddens and disappoints me to see climate change regulations enacted by the Obama administration being repealed by President Trump, who is now being lobbied by those same vested interests to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. Paris is the last chance for the world. We must hope the presidency's that strong international cooperation based on climate science is the way to avert the catastrophic threat to our very existence. Because the Marshall Islands is literally on the front line of this battle. We have no higher ground to go to. And climate impacts are already with us. In the last few years, kink tides and droughts have become a regular and more frequent occurrence, with disaster often hitting us in two different ways, in two different parts of the country at the same time. Once I was sworn in as President of my country in January last year, one of my first act in office was to declare a state of disaster because of an unseasonal and prolonged droughts across many of our islands. It lasted nearly seven months, disrupting our economy and negatively impacting the education sector too as schools were having to shut down. On the day I signed the state of disaster proclamation, I was advised we had less than three weeks of freshwater supplies left in our capital island, Maduro. But at the same time, my country was on high alert for widespread inundation. The year before this is a single typhoon that wiped off more than 3% of our small and precious economy. And the year before that, more than 1,000 of our people were left temporarily homeless by a single king tide. This is what climate change look like. If that happens year on year, it is a serious detrimental impact on livelihoods, including on our children educational opportunities. I want to speak about climate leadership. Despite the challenges we face, my country has chosen a path of climate leadership. This also makes sense economically. After an oil price spike in 2008 highlighted the dangerous reliance of our economy on costly and imported fossil fuels, we knew we needed to chart a new direction for ourselves. And standing here today, I am pleased to say we are in the midst of doing just that. More than 90% of our vast outer islands spread over a million square kilometers of the Pacific Ocean are now completely solarized. And we are pursuing aggressive renewable energy targets in our population centers of Maduro, E-Buy and elsewhere. At the end of last year, I pledged with 46 other vulnerable developing countries that we would go 100% renewable by 2030. These countries are called the Climate Vulnerable Forum and I'm pleased to say we will chair this group of countries from 2018 for two years so that we can develop a more detailed strategy to get our small but precious economies to be 100% clean and get our emissions to zero by 2050, if not well before. But while the political will is there, sometimes the support to our small country is not. Our donor friends have not scaled up their efforts in line up with the threats now facing us. Their support covers a patchwork of different priorities, sometimes not always in accordance with ours or with our own. Multilateral funds like the Green Climate Funds require a lot of technical expertise to access and are not responsive to the small scale projects we need to begin to take the next steps to shore up our resilience or doubling down on renewables. As one of this GCF's major donors and with Australians at the helm at the fund, your country has a big role to play in helping make this money more accessible for countries like mine. Australia, as you all know, is not immune from the fight against climate change. Already large parts of your great barrier reefs are dying with bushfires, droughts, hurricanes and floods becoming increasingly frequent, intense and unpredictable. Earlier this year, my people watched nervously as the people of North Queensland once again experienced this firsthand. That is why we must all be part of this battle. Some may say that Australia contributes only a miniscule amount to global emissions, but I can assure you it is more than my country. More importantly, though what Australia does makes a real difference in the world, especially with countries like China and the United States with whom your relationships are healthier. But the same people in my country that I've watched in anguish as Australia has faced the brunt force of climate change have also, unfortunately, watched in angst at much of the debate on climate change in your country. Now is not the time to be debating the science, trashing solar power or building new coal mines. And while some in Australia may think that your approach to climate change cannot influence the views of others to do more, I can assure you that it does influence the way in which Australia is viewed in the Pacific. Many of the 3.4 million people in the Pacific have often thought of Australia as a big brother or big sister. Imagine how you would feel if your big brother or big sister was not only openly marking the science, but even occasionally marking your very own plight. This not only does your country's disservice, it openly weakens your ability to be a force for good on the world stage, especially in our shared neighborhood. Last week's freeze on the foreign aid budget was another unfortunate example of this. And one, no matter how much it is concentrated in the Pacific, will impact all of us. There are many projects Australia was interested in funding in the Marshall Islands, for example, or we would have liked them to help with, which they no longer will be able to consider because of the freeze. We are fortunate though that the ROC Taiwan, Japan, and others from afar like the European Union and Germany are actively finding ways to increase their support on the ground. With last week's decision I fear Australia is therefore sitting yet more of its place in the region. On the global fight ahead, we won't win the fight against climate change if every country, including Australia, is not engaged in that fight. The same goes for the United States. As you all know, President Trump has repealed many climate measures and is supporting coal when we need to be facing out fossil fuel emissions. He is also weighing up whether his country will remain a party to the Paris Agreement. An agreement his country and mine fought hard to achieve and an agreement that provides my country a pathway to survival. My country played a key role in Paris and in the years beforehand. Through slowly developing our capacity and building alliances with other vulnerable countries, we were able to influence other countries and put our key goal of survival at the heart of the negotiations. This was perhaps best characterized by our role in helping forge and then lead a high-emission coalition of more than 100 countries, which become the dominant force in Paris, pushing for the strongest possible agreement. The fact that the agreement includes things like a limit to keep temperature increases within 1.5 degrees, a five-year cycle for countries to increase their emissions reduction targets, and a goal to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 is in no small part due to the role of my country in mobilizing the high-emission coalition, which lives on to this day. As one of the U.S. closes allies and friends, it would therefore be extremely disappointing to see them withdraw from the Paris Agreement. They fought so hard to secure. And I say this as a country that despite our turbulent history, as always believed in the principle of U.S. global leadership, which would be severely weakened by any such decision. Last week, I wrote to President Trump directly to express these views. And I know others like the VGN Prime Minister have done the same. I hope Australia will do the same and also do all that it can at places like the G20 to back the climate fight. These are the moments that count. These are the moments that decide whether a country believes in and what it stands for. And these are the moments that can help demonstrate everyone's commitment to the climate fight and to the Pacific region that stands at the precipice. No matter what happens in the U.S., my country will remain committed to the Paris Agreement. And I'm glad to say that there is no sign that any other country withdrawing from Paris or weakening their resolve. Every vulnerable country and large countries like China, India, Saudi Arabia are going to carry on their climate action and comply with Paris. They know there is money to be made in the renewable revolution and that it is here to stay. The unfortunate reality is that no single decision could make America's economy worse again than a decision to ignore the greatest economic opportunity of our times. On the future of the Marshall Islands, many have said that it's too late for my country. And even if we can contain sea level rise, then other impacts like regular typhoons and droughts will make our islands virtually uninhabitable. It is hard to explain the feeling of being the president of a country reading a report that supposedly condemns your country to oblivion. If we don't peak global emission by 2020 and then face them out in your lifetime, then it may well be too late for my country. But we simply do not know that yet. And until we do, my country will not stand down from this fight and nor will my people. Many Marshallese people have already been forced to relocate their lifetimes because of their nuclear testing. And we refuse to experience that again. We refuse to become the so-called climate refugees. As our youth climate warriors have so eloquently put it, we are not drowning, we are fighting. Our culture, our language, and our history are embodied in our islands. Our ancestral lands we call Lamoran in a way the English language cannot capture. The Marshall Islands would not be the Marshall Islands if we were somewhere else. But if we are going to save my country, everyone has to play their part. Not only must every country do more, but so too must every sector, including aviation and shipping, where my country is also has a key role to play as the second biggest flag registry in the world. Thankfully, Australia is one of the countries that can easily do more. Your current targets under the Paris Agreement was towards the bottom of the many independent assessments of not only your capacity to reduce emissions in line with economic growth, but also your fair share towards keeping global temperatures within what is required to save my country and others like it. Recent announcements like the groundbreaking snowy Hydro 2.0 project were also not factored in, but have the potential to be a real game changer not just for your domestic energy reliability, but also your international credentials. Before 2020, Australia will be required to confirm whether it intends to stick with its current target, adopted under the former prime minister. On behalf of the Pacific and in the context of a review you are undertaking this year on your climate policies, I would urge you to not only look at what more can be done to reduce emissions for the good of your economy, but also for the good of the region. We are all vulnerable. We must all act. The Pacific is counting on our big brothers and big sisters down south to do more. Thank you, thank you very much.