Climate Partnerships: Survival Strategy for Pacific Island Countries

Excerpt from internationalaffairs.org.au

The Indo-Pacific has emerged as prominent geopolitical theatre. Pacific Island states have adeptly used international fora and cultivated multilateral partnerships to address their greatest concern — climate change.

China’s recent unsuccessful efforts to conclude a comprehensive security and cooperation pact with ten Pacific Island countries, and its security agreement with the Solomon Islands, concluded in April this year, received intensive international political attention and media coverage. However, clarion calls of the Pacific countries themselves about a neglect of their “real” and urgent problem, climate change, did not get such a big audience. Most Pacific Island countries face existential threats such as high vulnerability to fast rising sea levels, longer droughts and increased cyclone intensity which threatens lives and affect the livelihoods of its peoples. The international focus on the growing strategic tug-of-war in the Southwest Pacific between China on one side and Australia, New Zealand, and the US on the other side, seems a golden opportunity for the island countries to highlight to the world the urgency of the threat of climate change. At numerous previous meetings of their regional governing body, the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), member countries1 had raised the subject of climate change as the greatest immediate challenge facing the Pacific region – often against strong resistance from the previous Australian government.