THE WASHINGTON POST: China and oil shocks push climate down Pacific Islands’ agenda

For years, the Pacific islands managed something remarkable - some of the smallest nations in the world persuaded their larger, more powerful allies that climate change was the region’s defining security challenge and pushed them to act.

Now, that hard-won focus is being tested as strategic competition with China and the impact of the Iran war on fuel supplies increasingly dominate the region’s diplomatic agenda.

At the Pacific Islands Forum Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Fiji last week, China’s ballistic missile test in the Pacific last month and the Middle East conflict were the issues at the forefront of discussions. Papua New Guinea Foreign Minister Justin Tkatchenko said on the sidelines of the meeting that climate change was no longer the region’s priority.

“In this situation we’re now facing with war all around the world, of course, it takes more priority than climate change,” he said. “Climate change has been put on the outer, really, at this point of time when we’re more interested in what oil we can get and how much we can get of it.”

Anna Powles, an associate professor at Massey University’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies in New Zealand’s capital Wellington, said many Pacific leaders and organisations are concerned that geopolitical competition is overshadowing Pacific priorities, namely climate change.

“There’s a frustration that clearly identified Pacific priorities, like climate change, are not getting the same level of attention that strategic competition is getting,” she said.

Melanie Pill, honorary senior lecturer at the Australian National University and the founder of independent consultancy the Climate Project, said China’s missile test had been designed to intimidate and undermine the Pacific.

“It definitely distracts from the single most defining issue for the Pacific and for the whole world,” she said. “I don’t think it sets back the importance of addressing the impact of climate change in the Pacific, but it might not progress at the same pace.”

Diplomatic Response

China’s growing influence in the Pacific has spurred an unprecedented diplomatic response.

Australia is forging a number of treaties and agreements with Pacific nations in an attempt to shore up its influence and block Chinese advances. Canberra sealed a cooperation deal with Vanuatu in June, signed a new security pact with Fiji and has inked security and policing agreements with Papua New Guinea and Tuvalu.

New Zealand last year paused development funding to the Cook Islands after the tiny South Pacific nation signed agreements with China without the expected level of consultation. Their relationship has since thawed, with the two countries signing a defene cand security declaration in April.

Powles said Pacific governments are trying to extract the benefits of closer ties with larger powers.

“These agreements do provide benefits such as increased maritime surveillance, funding to combat organised crime and stronger bilateral relationships,” she said. While Pacific countries do try to use these negotiations to advance their own priorities, the imbalance in power limits how much leverage they have on matters such as climate change, Powles added.

The shift in focus to geopolitical issues comes after the island nations have spent more than three decades pushing the threat of global warming and climate resilience, arguing that rising sea levels and changing weather patterns are an existential threat to their low-lying lands.

The prolonged push had been paying off. Australia will lead negotiations at the annual United Nations climate change conference - known as COP and being hosted this year in Turkey - and has pledged to focus attention on the region’s challenges. Fiji will also hold a pre-COP meeting in October, with a related event taking place in the tiny nation of Tuvalu - both are aimed at giving decision makers a first-hand experience of climate impacts in the Pacific.

Migration Pathway

Australia also struck a landmark agreement with Tuvalu offering a migration pathway for 280 people a year as sea levels rise and, alongside New Zealand and other nations, has also provided billions in climate finance.

Last year, Vanuatu, one of the world’s most vulnerable countries to the fallout from climate change, won a landmark legal battle at the International Court of Justice, which ruled that countries have a responsibility to do what they can to limit global warming to the critical threshold of 1.5C, saying that failure to do so may violate international law.

The pre-COP and COP meetings were vital for giving the Pacific a global voice, Pill said.

Still, there is concern the pre-COP meetings - particularly the meeting in Tuvalu - will fail to attract the world leaders hoped for because of the nation’s geographical isolation.

Chris Bowen, Australia’s minister for climate change and energy, said last week that Tuvalu is the least visited in the world because it was so difficult to reach, but he was still confident the Pacific’s climate change issue would be given global prominence.

“I’ve stood at the most narrow point of Tuvalu and seen the impact of rising seas,” he said. “The very existence of these countries is at stake.”

“If we can bring an element of the COP process to the Pacific and to Tuvalu, with some element of senior representation, which we’ll then use to highlight the issues of low-lying atoll countries like Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands and others, to the world’s stage, that’s a good thing,” Bowen said.