"Sri Lanka needs climate finance under a more transparent, participatory and democratic mechanism to support its population for adaptation, as our island nation is extremely vulnerable to the climate impact including sea level rise," Executive Director of the Centre for Environmental Justice (CEJ) Hemantha Withanage said on Thursday.

He said, as a member of Friends of Earth Asia-Pacific, the Centre would urge the Government to eparations to sign an international agreement on climatic change to redress the severe global inequalities in accessing climate adaptation and mitigation resources.

CEJ is a public interest environmental organization working towards good governance and environmental justice. It is the only Sri Lankan member of the ‘Friends of the Earth International’ (FoEI), the world’s largest grassroots based environmental justice organization.

Earlier this week, Environment and Natural Resources Minister Patali Champika Ranawaka told ‘The Island’ that at the Copenhagen Convention on Climate Change in December, he would forward collective policies of the SAARC region as Sri Lanka was holding the Chairmanship of the group, and also the Sri Lanka’s policies on mitigation and adaptation.

He also said that under the Haritha Lanka Programme Sri Lanka had already commenced mitigation and adaptive strategies in the dry zone to prepare for climati changes.

Friends of the Earth Asia-Pacific, the regional group of the Friends of the Earth International, this week urged the Sri Lankan government to take an active role in obtaining a better deal in the ongoing climate change talks under the United Nations Framework on Climate Change Convention (UNFCCC). Final decisions will be taken in Copenhagen in December 2009.

FoEI International has maintained an international campaign focusing on United Nations climate change negotiations, considering the potential impact of climate change on extremely vulnerable people and ecosystems across the world, including the question of Pacific Island nations and the livelihoods of those communities.

FoEI had also requested national governments for sufficient emissions reduction target, without offsetting international standards, to commit sufficient, reliable, consistent funding for adaptation, technology transfer and mitigation actions under the governance of UNFCC, to promote ‘rights and funds based mechanism’ for reducing deforestation in developing countries, and legal architecture based on common but differentiated responsibilities and capacities.