Pacific leaders pressed wealthy nations for more funds to help them “survive” climate change Wednesday at a gathering aimed at drawing the world’s attention to life on the frontline of global warming.
This week’s “pre-COP” meetings in the Fijian city of Nadi are a precursor to the larger UN-sponsored global climate summit -- known as COP31 -- to be held in Turkiye next month.
The South Pacific is among the regions of the world most vulnerable to global warming -- from rising seas jeopardizing homes to increasing temperatures causing coral bleaching.
Speaking on the sidelines of the summit, Papua New Guinea Prime Minister James Marape told journalists it was an issue of “morality.”
“Nations who have sovereign borders are facing the threat of being nations no more,” he said.
“We live with the burden of decisions made elsewhere.”
Pacific nations are using the pre-COP platform to push for more backing for the countries most affected by climate change.
The EU’s climate commissioner Wopke Hoekstra told journalists, “We’re clearly not doing enough.”
A UN report released in August found developing countries needed $310 billion-$365 billion to adapt, yet had only $26 billion in adaptation finance available in 2023.
Regional leaders have set up the Pacific Resilience Facility with the hopes of raising $500 million, but it has so far brought in commitments for less than half of that.
Fiji on Wednesday announced an addition of $10 million for that fund.
The country’s climate minister Lynda Tabuya told AFP one of her main messages to delegates in Nadi was the need to speed up the distribution of money for climate solutions.
“Part of our appeal going to COP is to make the current finance structure to be restructured so that it’s simplified,” she said.
“It’s frustrating. We are the least emitters in the Pacific, and yet we are the most disproportionately affected.”
The Australian government also said it would invest AU$3 million in a number of regional road and communications infrastructure projects in Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Kiribati and Tuvalu.
Australia’s climate minister Chris Bowen said the money would “help these countries adjust to climate change, particularly focused on the coastlines with erosion, with rising sea levels.”
Also high on the agenda is a push by Pacific leaders for the world to stick to a target of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.
Scientists agree that warming above 1.5°C relative to pre-industrial times poses grave risks, and nearly 200 nations committed a decade ago to try and keep global temperature rises to this safer threshold.
On Wednesday, AFP accompanied dozens of campaigners from the Pacific and Australia’s Torres Strait Islanders on a flotilla which sailed past the summit venue and urged leaders to “keep 1.5°C alive.”
Poiongo Lisati from Fiji’s Kioa Island said they hoped to “protect our people and also our land.”
“If climate finance assistance can be made available for the maritime islands, it will be easy for us to get help,” Lisati said.
On Tuesday, over a dozen leaders visited the nearby Pacific nation of Tuvalu, one of the world’s least-visited countries already laying plans to relocate its population of 10,600 if its islands are consumed by the ocean.
A marine heatwave in 2024 wiped out an estimated 99.9% of the coral that built the remote Tuvalu islands.
With just a few hours on the archipelago before flying back to Fiji, there was a rush from organizers to get in as many events as possible.
“The objective of this Tuvalu event is for you, leaders, to experience and feel climate change first-hand, from being in the frontline of the impact of climate change,” Tuvalu Prime Minister Feleti Teo told visiting officials.