US-China rivalry and an inter-island rift yesterday overshadowed the start of a landmark Pacific summit in Fiji, hampering efforts to focus world attention on the islands’ dire climate crisis.
This year’s Pacific Islands Forum is the region’s most important meeting in years, coming after a hiatus due to COVID-19 and as low-lying tropical isles run out of time for climate action.
Forum chairman Fiji President Voreqe Bainimarama opened yesterday’s first meeting by saying that the “runaway climate change crisis” threatened the security and sovereignty of many Pacific nations.
Photo: AFP
However, instead of a singular focus on the threat of rising sea levels and ever-more-powerful storms, a shock decision by Beijing-allied leaders in Kiribati to quit the forum altogether, revealed on the eve of the summit, loomed over proceedings.
Geopolitical jostling between the US and China has been building since Solomon Islands controversially signed a security pact with Beijing in April.
US Vice President Kamala Harris yesterday said that she would make an unprecedented video appearance at the summit, which is usually restricted to Pacific nations, Australia and New Zealand.
Leaders gathered at Suva’s luxurious Grand Pacific Hotel are to discuss a strategy to guide the Pacific through to 2050, keenly focused on the existential threat posed by climate change.
They are also to debate announcing a climate emergency in the Pacific and whether to endorse a push, spearheaded by Vanuatu, to ask the International Court of Justice to weigh in on nations’ climate obligations.
Vanuatuan Prime Minister Bob Loughman yesterday said that the people of the region “are calling on us, Pacific leaders, to take action to fight this emergency.”
However, Kiribati’s exit from the forum has sparked concerns about a fracturing of the Pacific’s closely held unity, which gives the region of small island states heft in global climate negotiations.
Tuvaluan Minister of Foreign Affairs Simon Kofe said he was optimistic the nation could be enticed to rejoin.
Last year, Kofe made headlines when he addressed the Conference of the Parties summit standing knee-deep in water to draw attention to the threat climate change poses to his low-lying nation, which could disappear below rising seas in the next 50 years.
Faced with such a threat, his priority at the summit is climate change — Tuvalu would be pushing for a focus on statehood and climate financing.
Concerns about regional security — brought to the fore by the Solomons-China pact — “draw a bit of attention away from climate change,” Kofe said.
The summit would be a test of newly elected Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has pledged to do more on climate and to heal his country’s fractured relationship with the Pacific.
At the last Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting, held in 2019, negotiations descended into shouting and tears as Australia’s former government attempted to muzzle leaders who wanted to issue a global call for climate action.
Yet Albanese also wants to use the summit to raise his concerns about security developments in the region in the wake of the Solomons-China deal.
Albanese yesterday sought to knit the issues of climate and security together.
“Our neighbors in the Pacific understand that climate change is a national security issue,” he told a news conference in Sydney.
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