What a week! Our Pacific team is back from Palau and the 55th Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, and preparing for the next big moment in our campaign for Pacific climate justice — the Pacific Pre-COP.

So grab a cuppa as we take stock of what unfolded in Palau and what it means for the voyage ahead.

Keeping 1.5°C Alive

Immediately before leaders sat down for their negotiations, the UN Environment Program dropped a bombshell report confirming the world is set to overshoot the all-important goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C.

Limiting warming to 1.5°C is a non-negotiable survival line for Pacific communities. Every year above 1.5°C will increase irreversible harms to communities in the Pacific and around the world. The task now is to minimise the magnitude and duration of any temperature overshoot, and to return warming to 1.5°C as soon as possible.

The good news — there is a path back to 1.5°C. But it’s going to demand the very best of humanity, and all of us working together.

As a person from the Pacific, I know our communities will not quietly accept these dire warnings of climate overshoot as our fate; we are already living and fiercely resisting this reality every single day. With every increment of warming, our lands, our livelihoods, and our island homes are threatened, but the Pacific’s resolve only grows stronger.

Shiva Gounden, Head of Pacific, responds to the UNEP Limiting Overshoot report

Australia, get it together

In just two months, Australia will be chairing the world’s global climate negotiations — a role it has pledged to undertake in meaningful partnership with the Pacific. It’s a major responsibility, at a critical moment in the world’s response to the climate and energy crisis, and one that requires a focussed, all-of-government effort from Australia.

So you can imagine our shock at the start of the week, as images appeared of Australian Minister for Resources Madeleine King celebrating the first extraction of gas from the giant Beetaloo Basin, alongside Chief Minister of the Northern Territory Lia Finocchiaro. Needless to say, the image of the two leaders laughing as they turned on Australia’s largest gas tap, amid the still unfolding flood disaster in Nepal-Tibet, will not age well. Skip to Thursday, and the news came that the Australian Government had approved an expansion of one of Queensland’s largest coal mines. This was the 37th new, expanded or extended fossil fuel project approved by the Albanese Government since it was elected, and the second year in a row that Australia has approved a major fossil fuel expansion during the Pacific Islands Forum.

This is not the allyship that the Pacific has been promised from Australia, the largest member of the Forum, or the leadership the world needs. Expanding fossil fuel production is utterly incompatible with our moral, legal and scientific imperative to limit warming to 1.5°C.

Australia is not doing enough. Australia is a major producer of fossil fuels. We all know fossil fuels are the primary driver of the climate crisis. The very least a country like Australia should be doing is stopping future expansion, and it’s not doing that.

Ralph Regenvanu, Minister for Climate Change, Vanuatu

We need all hands, all heart, all minds, in this fight together

Moemoana Schwenke, Pacific Climate Campaigner

Powering up the Blue Pacific

On the bright side, the week helped bring the vision of a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific one step closer to reality.

Nowhere on Earth are the perils of fossil fuel dependence and the opportunities of renewable energy clearer than in the Pacific, where countries currently spend up to 25% of GDP on fuel imports, and renewables truly are the path to greater energy security, affordability and sovereignty. 

Tuesday saw the launch of a 100% Renewable Blue Pacific Investment Prospectus, designed to attract more than $2 billion in investment to advance the vision of a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific.

Protecting our oceans

While sometimes called ‘small island states’ owing to their small land area and population, Pacific island countries are far better understood as ‘large ocean states’. If you were to divide Tuvalu’s ocean area by its population, you’d find that Tuvaluans are responsible for around 250x more ocean per person than Australians.

Pacific islanders are the world’s ocean protectors, and right now are in a fight to protect the ocean floor from deep sea mining. This year our team, led by Rae Bainteiti, hosted a moving talanoa on deep sea mining, with diverse perspectives grounded in Pacific values.

Greenpeace has been working hard to encourage more Pacific governments to join the call for a moratorium on deep sea mining, so that this destructive new industry can be stopped before it gets fully underway.

The voyage ahead

Earlier this week, a large crowd of Greenpeace staff and volunteers gathered on the dock to bid fair winds to our campaign ship Oceania as she set sail for Fiji and next month’s Pacific Pre-COP.

Hot on the heels of the Pacific Islands Forum, the Pacific Pre-COP is the next crucial moment in our voyage towards the year’s global climate negotiations (COP31) in Antalya. It is a unique opportunity to amplify Pacific leadership, and to ensure that the core priorities of keeping 1.5°C alive, accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels, and ensuring communities can access the financial support they need, are high on the agenda for COP31.