Ryan Ba­choo

Min­is­ter of Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment, Pene­lope Beck­les, as­sured the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty T&T is mov­ing to­wards a re­new­able fu­ture as she de­liv­ered a na­tion­al state­ment at the 27th Con­fer­ence of Par­ties (COP27) on Tues­day af­ter­noon in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt where the event is be­ing held.

Beck­les is lead­ing T&T's del­e­ga­tion at the high-lev­el cli­mate talks. She called on the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to act point­ing out T&T has seen un­prece­dent­ed rain­fall this year which has led to peo­ple los­ing their homes and to ir­repara­ble dam­age.

"This must be an im­ple­men­ta­tion COP. Even while we en­hance our am­bi­tion it is im­por­tant that we shift in­to trans­for­ma­tion­al im­ple­men­ta­tion. We must move be­yond pledges to ac­tion," she told the del­e­gates present at Ple­nary Ne­fer­ti­ti, the room in which the del­e­gates are de­liv­er­ing their speech­es.

The min­is­ter al­so tout­ed T&T's push to­wards a re­new­able fu­ture say­ing, "T&T is un­der­tak­ing wide­spread pol­i­cy re­form to sup­port im­ple­men­ta­tion of the Paris Agree­ment. Step by step, we are cre­at­ing the ar­chi­tec­ture that will guide us to­wards a just and eq­ui­table tran­si­tion to a low car­bon de­vel­op­ment path­way."

Min­is­ter Beck­les said the world must come to­geth­er and as­sist small is­lands to stave off the ef­fects of cli­mate change. She added, "A lot has been done, but I ad­mit, we need to go fur­ther. We can­not do this alone. We count on the sup­port of the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to help us fur­ther our na­tion­al im­ple­men­ta­tion ef­forts to tack­le the cli­mate cri­sis, in par­tic­u­lar, we would wel­come pro­pos­als from an in­ter­na­tion­al plat­form to as­sist coun­tries in their just tran­si­tion plan­ning. Such a plat­form would be a use­ful fo­rum for shar­ing ex­pe­ri­ences and lessons learned on these crit­i­cal ac­tiv­i­ties."