Below are the remarks of UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell at the Ceremonial Opening of this year's first Climate Week in Panamá City, Panamá, on 21 May 2025.
Excellencies
Honourable Ministers
Colleagues, dear Friends,
It is my sincere pleasure to welcome you to the first of our newly formatted Climate Weeks.
And what a fitting place to start.
A country that is carbon-negative.
A country where more than 65% of land is forested.
And a country whose leadership in climate, nature, and sustainable development sets an example to the world.
Thank you, Minister Navarro and the Government of Panama, for your vision, your partnership, and your very warm hospitality. Thank you.
Friends,
This Climate Week marks a new chapter - in the way we gather, and in what we aim to deliver together.
We heard the concerns that Climate Weeks risked becoming disconnected from the intergovernmental process.
Valuable conversations, yes - but too often adrift from the engine room of climate implementation.
This week, we change that.
The revamped Climate Weeks have a clear and vital purpose: to fast-track the journey from ambition to implementation, and to make progress in the real economy the heartbeat of climate progress.
We are driven by the urgent need to deliver real outcomes, faster, and at scale; and to align even more closely with the work Parties have mandated under the Paris Agreement.
We have built them around four core priorities:
First, Efficiency - clustering mandated events to save time, costs, and carbon.
Second, Implementation - making room to advance concrete, real-world solutions.
Third, Inclusivity - ensuring space for diverse perspectives.
And fourth, Momentum - creating strategic milestones between negotiation sessions to accelerate action.
At the heart of the Climate Week is the new Implementation Forum - a first-of-its-kind platform to bring together governments, Multilateral Development Banks, investors, businesses, civil society, and Indigenous Peoples to unlock progress across three critical pillars: finance, technology, and carbon markets.
Because let's be clear: every national climate plan - be it an NDC or a National Adaptation Plan, and every goal it contains will depend on bold ideas, the people in this room, alongside people like you, taking action. Deploying solutions at scale.
At the Implementation Forum, we'll launch the AI for Climate Action Award - a genuine effort to accelerate climate action through the power of people and technology, supporting bold ideas in adaptation and mitigation.
Because in the face of the climate emergency, there is no substitute for action.
And we have made real progress.
Thanks to this progress, and the tireless work of Parties, the world is no longer on a path to 5°C of heating.
That would have been a death sentence for vast parts of the planet.
But we are still heading towards 2.7°C.
That's not safety: that's still catastrophe.
To correct the course, we must do the hard work now.
And these new Climate Weeks are about doing just that - focusing our efforts, cutting duplication, getting more impact for every hour and dollar spent.
And confronting today's political headwinds.
The UN System faces headwinds from fiscal tightening to some scepticism about international cooperation.
And so our response must be emphatic: we must deliver more; more efficiency, more impactful, and more inclusively. Showing real value.
That's what this Climate Week represents.
It's a signal of our collective intent to ensure that every conversation, every dollar, every partnership moves us closer to 1.5 degrees and greater climate resilience.
Here I'd like to again thank Minister Navarro and the Government of Panama for the excellent cooperation and collaboration, and to my Deputy, dear Noura, together with a dedicated team from the secretariat who've worked tirelessly in recent months and weeks to structure and organize this first of the new Climate Weeks.
Friends, let me end with this:
If we are to retain and expand trust in the global climate process, we must show that our promises lead to practice.
We must show that multilateralism works.
We must show that climate action delivers.
And that means moving beyond a meeting mindset - toward a movement for implementation.
This week, let us seize that opportunity, to transform Climate Weeks from spaces for dialogue into platforms for delivery.
I thank you.
