UN General Assembly
2018

Our country is dealing with multiple vulnerabilities. We recently suffered one of the longest droughts in our history, a reality that climate change has inflicted on us. That obliges us to invest additional resources in order to guarantee families food security and keep food prices stable. If we are to tackle that situation, it is crucial to ensure that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change continues to be implemented and the current Green Climate Fund crisis is resolved. As a country that hardly pollutes globally but suffers the effects of climate change caused by others, El Salvador urgently needs access to financing for climate-change mitigation and adaptation action that will improve its population’s security and resilience. Our adoption in Bonn of a global initiative at the twenty-third Conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has enabled us to move forward with the large-scale restoration of our ecosystems and to become an example of a small country with limited financial resources capable of protecting its environment. I am deeply grateful to Mr. Erik Solheim, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, for supporting our proposal to declare 2021-2030 a United Nations decade of ecosystem restoration. We invite the General Assembly to consider this initiative aimed at coordinating our efforts to counter the accelerated loss of forests and