“The emergency is existential.” In a column published this Tuesday, August 27 in the daily newspaper Fiji Times, Fijian diplomat Satyendra Prasad delivers a vibrant plea for “Blue Pacific Resilience”, this vast area of the southwestern Pacific Ocean from which emerges a group of volcanic islands and low-lying coral atolls.
And this urgency is precisely at the heart of the debates that are animating the annual Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), which is being held until August 29 in Tonga. The zone is quite simply the “the region of the world most vulnerable to climate change”, continues the platform, while “the voices of these small island states in the forums where the great decisions of our time are made have become even more stifled.”
The UN’s “SOS”
This year, however, the FIP is benefiting from a major change, that of the Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, who came to Tonga to issue what he calls a “SOS worldwide – in the sense of Save Our Seas [‘Sauvez nos océans’] – on rising sea levels”, as reported The New Zealand Herald (NZH), who quotes the UN chief:
“The ocean is overflowing […]. Rising sea levels are a crisis of humanity’s own making. A crisis that will soon reach almost unimaginable proportions, with no lifeboat to bring us back to safety.”
In this global crisis, the nations of the South Pacific are at the forefront of the impending disaster, which begins with their increasingly inexorable engulfment by the waters. A rise in the oceans itself due to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions at the global level, linked to human activities.
Tuvalu to be submerged in thirty years
According to the Fiji Times, In archipelagos such as Samoa and Fiji, sea level rise is three times greater than the global average. And Tuvalu will probably be completely submerged within thirty years.
Added to this is a resurgence of extreme weather events: the subject has been “cruelly highlighted no later than this Monday, August 26,” the very day of the opening of the FIP, notes the NZH : “A storm caused flash flooding, and a 6.9 magnitude earthquake struck northern Tongatapu, the main island of Tonga.” CThis is also the reason why Satyendra Prasad is sounding the alarm in the Fiji Times :
“Each decimal increase beyond 1.5°C [la limite du réchauffement climatique fixée en 2015 par la COP de Paris] means that the difficulties of adaptation for the Pacific economies become all the more insurmountable.”
The diplomat proposes, as an emergency solution, “to operationalize the local climate finance mechanism, the Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which aims to provide relatively rapid and easy access to climate finance.”
Australia’s double game
But, underlines the Australian channel’s website ABC, “The pledges (led by Australia’s commitment of $100 million and Saudi Arabia’s additional $50 million) remain far from the $500 million that would need to be raised by 2026.”
A situation denounced by Antonio Guterres, who continues the NZH, recalled in his speech that “80% of emissions [de gaz à effet de serre] come from developed countries,” some of which “are still granting new oil and gas permits, putting our common future at risk.” Or “New Zealand is part of this camp,” with the coalition government set to reverse a 2018 ban on such oil and gas exploration.
ABC also sweeps in front of his door adding that “Mr Guterres may not want to single out Australia by name: it is the only PIF member that is both a major fossil fuel exporter and a member of the G20.”
Moreover, he specifies the NZH, The UN Secretary-General has issued warnings “which are not limited to the Pacific alone, but extend to coastal megacities such as Dhaka, Los Angeles, Bombay, Lagos or Shanghai.” Before a timid note of hope: “But if we save the Pacific, we also save ourselves.”
