Madame President,

The State of Palestine has the honour of speaking on behalf of the Group of 77 and China, composed of 134 developing countries, constituting more than two-thirds of the Parties to the UNFCCC, and representing 4 of every 5 people in the world.

At the outset, let me thank you and your team, and the Secretariat, for your commitment and dedication, without which the COP would not have succeeded. We would also like to extend our gratitude to the Kingdom of Spain for its gracious hospitality in making available the excellent facilities here at IFEMA in Madrid on such short notice.

Over these two weeks, our Group has engaged constructively with you, your Co-Facilitators, and with our partners in order to have conclusions here at COP25. We have all spent long days and nights together trying to hammer out conclusions and decisions that reflect compromise while at the same time seeking to be ambitious and fair. In some areas we have succeeded, in others we have failed.

Let me stress that the Group, with all its 134 members, come into these negotiations in good faith and have shown great flexibility. As Nelson Mandela once said: “Our experience has taught us that with goodwill a negotiated solution can be found for even the most profound problems.” However, particularly in areas where we have failed to reach consensus with our developed country partners, it is often a case where their willingness to compromise was absent.

The Group of 77 and China cannot stress enough the importance of the multilateral system for cooperation on climate change under the Convention and its Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement. This is a system that was founded on equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective circumstances, in order to reflect the essential fact that all countries have different national circumstances as a result of history, economics, culture, geography, and environmental conditions.

But we have all tried our best to do justice to our national interests and to the interests of humanity and the planet. One thing in common we all have is our common humanity, and our belief that together we can build a better world for us and for future generations. This is what we must strive for.

In this regard, the outcome of many of the issues in relation to transparency under the Convention and its Paris Agreement has been disappointing, with many attempts to effectively renegotiate the rules and the implementation of these treaties.

For the sake of all our peoples, particularly those in developing countries, for the sake of our future, we must now be ambitious on all fronts, in mitigation, adaptation support, finance, technology and capacity building. This therefore calls for Parties, particularly those who have had long-standing commitments under the Convention to take the lead and provide support to developing countries, to focus on the implementation of those commitments and to carry forward such implementation into the Paris Agreement including in filling in any gaps in pre-2020 implementation. At the same time, this means also means that international cooperation will be much more important as we move forward. This should be cooperation under the Convention and its Paris Agreement that is marked by a heightened sense of responsibility and commitment by our partners to live up to their obligations to support developing countries. This will help our countries to also enhance our own climate and development actions without repeating the mistakes that developed countries made when pursued their own development in the past 250 years.

Let me conclude, Madame President, by offering excerpts from the poem “Think of Others” by Palestine’s national poet Mahmoud Darwish that we could reflect on as we end this COP:

As you conduct your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace)
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps)
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep)
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: “if only I were a candle in the dark”)

Thank you much, Madame President.