We cannot discuss global security today without commemorating the many men, women and children who are dying in Ukraine. President Putin has launched a war of aggression against Ukraine, violating its sovereignty and territorial integrity. I align myself with other speakers in condemning Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in the strongest terms.

Russia’s attack is a war of President Putin’s choosing. It is all the more incomprehensible since we have so many existential threats to humankind and that we need to urgently address, jointly in the spirit of the UN Charter.

And as we have just heard, the climate crisis is putting our survival in jeopardy. According to the latest IPCC report, almost half of the human population, more than 3 billion people, are at high risk to be affected by climate impacts. This is increasing injustice across the globe because on average the impacts hit the poor and vulnerable more.

Over the period of 10 years, more than 410,000 people have died because of climate-related catastrophes. 220 million people have been displaced. The estimated cost of these catastrophes amounts to more than 3,64 trillion USD.

So President Putin's aggression confirms once more that we have to make our energy supply crisis-proven by enhancing efficiency and accelerating the transition to renewables.

Thus, we have every reason to act. For peace, for stability, for climate security. And we have to act with a sense of urgency:

Implement Paris and the Glasgow Pact, including revisiting and strengthening the targets within our NDCs and Long Term Strategies in line with 1.5°C goal and greenhouse gas neutrality by mid-century.

The developed countries, including my own, must deliver on the 100 billion USD goal as soon as possible and on our commitment to collectively double climate finance for adaptation by 2025.

I think Glasgow was a watershed moment on the adaptation issue and on loss and damage, I think the upcoming COP in Egypt needs to be where we see the turning point on this issue. Germany plans to further increase our adaptation finance, in line with the plan to increase general climate finance from 4bn to 6bn EUR by 2025.

We must improve the balance between finance for adaptation and mitigation, while adaptation finance already is at 40 % of our contribution from budgetary sources.

We, all countries, urgently need to work on making all of our finance flows consistent with the mitigation and the adaptation goals of the Paris Agreement.

We need to mobilise climate finance from all sources and encourage broadening the contribution base to reach the level needed to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.

We must phase out fossil fuels as a matter of security, this is also a matter of fairness and justice.

Concretely, we must implement our net-0-strategies and Support least and less developed countries in the just transformation of their economies.

Also, we should label climate impacts as a threat and place them at the core of the international security discussion. As Co-Chair of the Group of Friends on Climate and Security, which we chair together with Nauru, Germany remains a steadfast advocate of this.

Finally we should increase UN capacity in crisis prevention, along the lines the Security Council call for in its December 2021 draft resolution – which unfortunately was vetoed, but still supported by 113 countries!

All this is at the heart of the German G7 presidency.

And we thank the presidency and organizer of this event for recalling the urgency of dealing with climate impacts and we look forward to finding concrete solutions together with all of you, for peace, for security, and for humanity.