Déplacement de S.A.S. le Prince Albert II à Bali (Indonésie) Conférence Our Ocean 2018 (28-30 octobre 2018)
S.A.S. le Prince Albert II se rend à Bali en Indonésie, du 28 au 30 octobre 2018, afin de participer à la cinquième édition de la conférence internationale Our Ocean.
Cet évènement, initié par M. John Kerry, ancien secrétaire d'État américain, vise à réunir dirigeants mondiaux, entrepreneurs, scientifiques et société civile, pour identifier des solutions et s'engager dans des actions en faveur d'un océan géré durablement.
Le 28 octobre 2018, à 16 h, l'avion princier se pose à l'aéroport de Denpasar, chef-lieu de la province de Bali. S.A.S. le Prince est accompagné du colonel Bruno Philipponnat, Son chargé de mission. Il est accueilli par M. Akio Alfiano Tamalo, directeur du protocole, S.E. Lieutenant General Hotmangaradja, M.P. Pandjaitan, ambassadeur d'Indonésie à Paris, et la Princesse Karlina Damitri, consul de Monaco à Djakarta.
Le Souverain est conduit à Son hôtel à Nusa Dua, où Il participe à un dîner offert par la Princesse Karlina Damitri.
Le lendemain matin, le Souverain se rend au Centre de conventions pour la conférence internationale Our Ocean 2018\. La délégation princière est composée de S.E. M. Bernard Fautrier, ministre plénipotentiaire, vice-président et administrateur délégué de la Fondation Prince Albert II de Monaco, M. Robert Calcagno, directeur général de l'Institut océanographique, M. Francis Staub, secrétaire pour Monaco de l'Initiative internationale pour les récifs coralliens (I.C.R.I.), M. Wilfrid Deri, chargé de mission au Département des Relations extérieures et de la Coopération du Gouvernement princier, et Mme Auriane Pertuisot, chargée de projets marins à la Fondation Prince Albert II de Monaco.
Des discours de bienvenue sont prononcés par S.E. Mme Retno Marsudi, ministre des Affaires étrangères de la République d'Indonésie, et S.E. Mme Susi Pudjiastuti, ministre indonésien des Affaires marines et de la Pêche.
S.E. M. Joko Widodo, président de la République d'Indonésie, prononce également un mot de bienvenue.
Plus tard dans la matinée, le Prince Albert II s'entretient avec S.E. M. Joko Widodo. Puis, Il assiste à un déjeuner organisé par le président indonésien.
En début d'après-midi, un évènement sur le thème de « l'avenir des récifs coralliens dans une perspective d'économie durable » est organisé par l'Initiative internationale pour les récifs coralliens, dont Monaco assure la co-présidence jusqu'en 2020, aux côtés de l'Australie et de l'Indonésie.
S.A.S. le Prince participe à cet évènement en compagnie de S.E. M. Tommy E. Remengesau JR., président de la République des Palaos, et M. Erik Sohheim, directeur exécutif de l'ONU-Environnement.
En conclusion de l'événement, le Souverain prononce un discours :
« Excellences,
Ladies and gentlemen,
Dear friends,
In bringing these discussions to a close, I would first like to congratulate all the speakers for the remarkable quality of their contributions.
I would also like to thank all those who made this event possible, particularly those within the International Coral Reef Initiative, the presidency of which Monaco has had the honor of sharing with our Australian and Indonesian partners and friends.
I would like to express my gratitude to the Indonesian organizers of this Our Ocean Conference, who made it possible to give corals an important place on the agenda, after our meeting in Malta last year where many of you were present, together with HRH the Prince of Wales.
I am delighted to see that the issue of corals is at last receiving the attention it deserves, as shown by the quality of the debates we have just heard. The high level of the participation is in itself excellent news, because it opens up real prospects for improvement.
Prospects for political improvement first of all, because what we have heard is the need to establish frameworks that will permit the sustainable preservation of coral reefs.
In the first instance, this means local frameworks. I would like to stress once again the importance and the relevance of marine protected areas. They alone enable us to assure the protection of the most sensitive ecosystems, provided they can be underpinned by defined standards and adequate resources.
I want to stress the importance, for each country involved, of a specific commitment in favor of corals, whose significance extends far beyond the regions in which they are located.
Therefore, I can only encourage all the States who may not yet have done so to sign the Coral Reef Life Declaration, which sums up the commitments to be taken to assure the future of our corals.
But the necessary frameworks must also be international. At their forefront is the Convention on Biological Diversity, which requires improvements both in terms of objectives and in terms of implementation. We are now approaching the 2020 horizon, and with it, the need to sharpen our strategies for dealing with certain specific issues, including corals.
The ICRI General Meeting, which I will have the pleasure of hosting in Monaco this December, will be an important step in preparing for this deadline. My wish is that it will lead to adopting a practical, effective, ambitious and realistic action program.
We will do our utmost to achieve this goal and I would like here to assure you of the full mobilization of the Principality, the Monaco Scientific Centre and our various institutions actively involved in ocean preservation, in particular my Foundation.
We know that the global objectives we must pursue would be of little account unless we take action against the primary cause of coral reef degradation: global warming with its corollaries including ocean acidification in particular, is one of the primary causes of damage to corals.
Tackling global warming and engaging in a transition of the carbon economy is, and here I am speaking to some of our partners too, more than ever a priority that must always be kept in mind.
Finally, the role of policy-makers should be to support the mobilization of resources, especially financial, which are needed today to implement a real strategy for corals.
This has been said today: there is a lack of resources, even though corals play a key role in the preservation of our planet's equilibriums, and even though the Eco systemic services they deliver are worth billions of dollars.
This economic equation is something we must develop, in order to demonstrate to everyone the collective benefits that we can expect from a real coral preservation strategy - and also, the consequences in the event of their disappearance.
This, I believe, is how we will succeed in bringing onboard private stakeholders, who must also mobilize themselves.
Our discussions have once again shown the need for private initiatives, which should be combined with public actions in a collective strategy constructed around various tools and at various levels, from the most local to the most global.
On this subject I would like to acknowledge the remarkable initiative of the Vulcan Group and its founder Mr. Paul Allen, who sadly passed away a few weeks ago, in regards of the creation of a global funding mechanism for corals.
My Foundation, which in September hosted a workshop of experts in Monaco to set this mechanism up, is supporting this initiative, including on the financial level, and will match Vulcan's contribution to the initial funding, with the objective being to raise two million dollars for corals between now and 2020\.
Ladies and gentlemen,
My dear friends,
I cannot close these proceedings without stressing again the support that we all owe to our scientists, without whom our action would be not only ineffective, but quite simply impossible.
Without them, their capacity for understanding, deciphering and anticipating the phenomena we have spoken of, we would not be able to respond.
Without them, we would not be able to grasp the complexity, the adaptability and the variety of corals, which call for special strategies.
In this regard, let us always bear in mind the assumptions of the last IPCC report that, if the average climatic increase reaches 1.5 degrees, damage will reach 70 to 90% of the coral zones, and if the increase exceeds 2 degrees, this damage may affect up to 99% of these areas.
Finally, I hope that this meeting will have given every one of you additional reasons to mobilize yourselves, and to engage in practical avenues for action.
Thank you. »
Faisant suite à l'appel de S.A.S. le Prince, la Nouvelle-Calédonie, représentée par M. Philippe Germain, président du gouvernement, ainsi que la République du Vanuatu, s'engagent à signer la « Déclaration pour la sauvegarde des récifs coralliens », laquelle avait été proposée par S.A.S. le Prince et S.A.R. le Prince de Galles lors de l'édition 2017 de Our Ocean à Malte.
Dans l'après-midi s'ouvre une session plénière portant sur le changement climatique. S.A.S. le Prince prononce le discours d'ouverture :
« Excellences,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Friends,
First of all, please allow me to thank the Indonesian authorities in charge of this edition of Our Ocean Conference for its organization and to thank you all for taking part in it.
Since 2014, this initiative, launched by John Kerry, has fostered dialogue regarding the seas, promoted discussions between decision-makers from diverse backgrounds, and developed concrete solutions in order to create collectively a new relationship between humanity and the sea.
Each year, this event gains momentum. In Malta last year, we were able to gauge its extraordinary effectiveness.
With 433 tangible and measurable commitments, of which 100 concern business, representing a total of 7.2 billion Euros, plus the creation of 2.5 million square kilometers of marine protected areas, the Maltese Conference has shown that it is today possible to accelerate our commitments and achievements.
This fifth conference will, I hope, provide a new opportunity for doing so. In any case, it seems that all the elements have been brought together for this – especially because we have been brought together!
For a year, and despite the commitments I have just mentioned, things have not really improved regarding the climate. On the contrary, the situation is even of greater concern than it was at our last meeting.
As you have undoubtedly noticed, the last few months have been among the most disturbing we have ever experienced. Deadly fires have ravaged California and Greece; floods have killed hundreds of people in Japan and India; unprecedented heat waves have struck Canada and Scandinavia; the hottest temperatures ever have been recorded in Oman, Baku, Scotland and Algeria.
All these events, only foretastes of even greater catastrophes that await us in the future, given that the major greenhouse-gas-emitting countries are almost all reneging on the commitments made in the Paris Agreement, if they have not quite simply and regrettably left it altogether.
Given the accumulation of these events, and in light of these perspectives, is it not too late?
While our climate system appears well and truly disrupted, while the thresholds below which we hoped to keep global warming appear to be slipping out of reach, and while humanity is continuing its mad race, burning increasing amounts of fossil fuels, is there still time for hope? Is there still time to take action?
Well, today we could provide two responses to these questions. A principled response and a specific response.
The principled response is that, we can limit these dramas.
Of course, it is too late to bring back our climate at pre-industrial levels. But it is not too late to avoid everything spiraling out of control. Even if we only have a choice between a 1.5 or 2ºC, or a 5ºC rise in temperature, this choice is of vital importance.
This choice exists. To address it, we have a valuable ally. An ally who brings us together here today, and who is at the heart of the specific response to the question about whether it is already too late or not. This ally is the ocean.
The ocean is of course the victim of global warming and its consequences. Rising water levels, acidification, and destruction of ecosystems : we are all too familiar with these phenomena, which join the long list of types of damage we are inflicting to our seas. However, it is more vital than ever that we improve the ways we protect our oceans, as they play an important role in the fight against climate change. To date, they have in fact absorbed 90% of the heat that humans have added to the climate system. They take up over one quarter of the CO2 we release into the atmosphere. Without them, this planet would have reached temperatures that would have already rendered it uninhabitable.
However, these essential services provided by the oceans are increasingly threatened by their degradation.
This is the reason why the fight against global warming involves doing more to protect our oceans.
I am thinking for example about marine protected areas, which favor the development of species capable of storing carbon and revitalizing the ecosystems, which helps regulate the climate.
I am thinking about the protection of threatened ecosystems such as mangroves or Coral Reef, which play a crucial role in protecting the biodiversity of our seas, and thus their capacity to buffer climate change, to mitigate also the effects of global warming–cyclones in particular.
I am also thinking about the many resources provided by the oceans, starting with marine renewable energies, which may tomorrow make a decisive contribution to the energy transition we need to achieve.
This is the reason why the oceans are not only a victim of global warming. They must be a valuable ally for us.
They must be the starting point for new balances that we have to build for our world. Once again, as the French historian Jules Michelet wrote, “it is by the sea that we commence all true understanding of Geography”.
To start to write a new geography for a world fighting efficiently against global warming: this is the challenge facing this meeting, and this is one of the major challenges we all face in this century.
Thank you very much. »
Un débat a lieu entre les participants à la table ronde. À l'issue, S.A.S. le Prince prononce un mot de conclusion :
« I want to thank each and every one of you for the quality of these discussions and the pertinence of the comments and suggestions made.
Since it has fallen to me to make the concluding speech, I would like to stress three things.
First, which I mentioned at the start, is the absolute necessity of including the issue of the oceans in all our reflections on global warming.
In doing so we should regard the ocean as a victim of global warming, and at the same time as a solution to mitigate or combat it.
The second is the need, if we are to succeed in bringing about change, to use sound knowledge as our basis. This is the reason why we must continue to support the scientists who clarify our understanding of the oceans. That is why my Foundation and the Principality of Monaco, have led the project for an IPCC Special Report devoted to the oceans and cryosphere. The conclusion and findings of this report will be announced by the IPCC next September in Monaco. They will, I believe, enable us to see these things more clearly and to better prepare our actions.
Finally, as the third point for this conclusion, I would like to stress the need to address these aspects using a combined political and economic approach.
The ocean's resources are incalculable and their exploitation is inexorable.
These riches are the root cause of many of the troubles being experienced by our oceans, and are no doubt in part a cause of global warming too, due for example to the growing number of offshore oil and gas operations.
Nevertheless they can and must be put at the heart of our future common strategy to tackle global warming, for example through developing renewable marine energies.
This is a fight that can only be waged and won if we act collectively, in other words, if we pool our resources, including all our active forces, and if we give our backing to the opportunities of blue growth.
It is this collective imperative that I want to take away from our discussions, whilst thanking you once again for their quality. »
Le Souverain participe ensuite à un évènement sur la nouvelle économie du plastique, organisé par la Fondation Ellen MacArthur, lors duquel Dame Ellen MacArthur dévoile « l'Engagement mondial de la nouvelle économie des plastiques » lancé par sa Fondation. Cette initiative a pour objectif de repenser les modes de production gourmands en énergie et générateurs de déchets, pour se diriger vers une économie circulaire.
La Fondation Prince Albert II de Monaco et l'Institut océanographique rejoignent cette initiative ; Dame Ellen MacArthur ayant reçu le 12 octobre 2018 la grande médaille Albert Ier de l'Institut océanographique pour ses actions.
Une rencontre bilatérale se tient ensuite entre S.A.S. le Prince et S.E. Mme Ine Marie Eriksen Soreide, ministre des Affaires étrangères de la Norvège. Puis le Souverain s'entretient avec M. Karmenu Vella, commissaire européen à l'Environnement, aux Affaires maritimes et à la Pêche.
Le Souverain échange ensuite avec M. Dave Stewart, vice-président exécutif de la société Vulcan Inc. Il se félicite de l'initiative prise par Sa Fondation, l'I.C.R.I. et le groupe Vulcan Inc, qui se sont engagés mutuellement à investir 250 000 $ dans un fonds global dédié à la préservation des récifs coralliens et leur adaptation au changement climatique.
Le lendemain matin, S.A.S. le Prince et Sa délégation assistent à un évènement organisé par l'Aspen Institute et High Seas Initiative sur le futur des aires marines protégées (AMP). Le Souverain s'entretient avec Dona Bertarelli, philanthrope co-présidente de la Fondation Bertarelli, au sujet de l'initiative Pew Bertarelli Ocean Legacy, visant la création de très grandes AMP à haut niveau de protection. Il participe ensuite à une manifestation organisée par le Pew Charitable Trust sur les aires marines protégées.
Dans la matinée, une table ronde a également lieu sur la pollution marine, lors de laquelle la Fondation Prince Albert II de Monaco, aux côtés de ses partenaires Surfrider Europe Foundation, la Fondation Tara Expéditions, la Fondation MAVA et l'Union internationale pour la conservation de la nature, annonce son intention d'investir 500 000 euros en 2019 dans le développement de l'initiative Beyond Plastic Med – BeMed, pour soutenir des projets visant à réduire la pollution plastique en Méditerranée.
Après avoir assisté à la session de clôture, S.A.S. le Prince se rend à son hôtel. En fin soirée, Il est conduit à l'aéroport de Denpasar, d'où Son avion décolle en direction de Port-Vila, en République de Vanuatu.