Australia Signs Declaration Saying Climate Change 'Single Greatest Threat' To Pacific

The Guardian - Ben Doherty

Leaders of Pacific Forum Island countries call on United States to return to Paris agreement on climate change

Leaders at the Pacific Islands Forum in Nauru. They issued a strongly worded statement on climate change. Photograph: Jason Oxenham/AP 

Climate change is the single greatest security threat to the Pacific, and all countries must meet their commitments under the Paris climate agreement, the 18 countries of the Pacific Islands Forum said on Wednesday.
The first assertion of the strongly worded Boe Declaration says all Pacific nations, including Australia, “reaffirm that climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific, and our commitment to progress the implementation of the Paris agreement.
“Leaders reaffirmed the importance of immediate urgent action to combat climate change and … called on countries, particularly large emitters, to fully implement their … mitigation targets, including through the development and transfer of renewable energy, in line with committed timeframes.
Leaders of the Forum Islands countries also called for the US to return to the Paris agreement and the commitments it made under President Barack Obama.
The Boe Declaration said the security challenges being faced by Pacific nations were broader and more complex than in previous generations. The forum committed its members to addressing humanitarian assistance, environmental and resource security, transnational crime and cybersecurity.
Australia will work with regional security agencies to establish a Pacific Fusion Centre to better share intelligence and target threats including illegal fishing, drug trafficking and other cross-border crimes.
But the forthright declaration on climate is awkward politically for Australia, with its new prime minister, Scott Morrison, apparently at odds with his own government’s Energy Security Board over whether Australia will meet its Paris targets of a 26% reduction in emissions from 2005 levels.
The government does not have any emissions reductions policies in place to achieve the target.
Morrison told a radio program on Wednesday that “the business-as-usual model gets us there [meeting the Paris targets] in a canter”.
But the Energy Security Board said business as usual – and a failure to implement the now-discarded national energy guarantee – would mean the electricity sector would “fall short of the emissions reduction target of 26% below 2005 levels”.
The Australian government’s apparent ambivalence towards a low-emissions climate policy has disquieted its Pacific neighbours.
As a region, the Pacific has produced the least carbon of any areaon Earth but its citizens have felt the impacts of climate change first, and most acutely, through rising seas, increased salinity, and more frequent and severe natural disasters.
Low-lying island Pacific countries including Kiribati are forecast to be among the first on the plant to disappear underwater if rising sea levels are not arrested.
Xavier Matsutaro, the national climate change coordinator for Palau, a small nation in the north-west Pacific, told the Guardian Australia’s relationship with the Pacific was “dysfunctional”, adding that Australia was also responsible for diluting the strength of previous regional declarations on climate change.
“Australia is a bit of an anomaly, because on the floor [of climate summits] they’re basically sometimes as far right as Trump in some of their views on climate change, at one point they even denied that it existed … But then on a regional basis they’ve actually given a lot of support to our region,” Matsutaro said.
“Sometimes the way I think about it ... it’s like you’re in a relationship and you get abused by your spouse but at the same time they feed you and clothe you and things like that,” he said. “You could say it’s a bit of a dysfunctional relationship.”
In a blistering speech in Sydney last month, Samoa’s prime minister, Tuilaepa Sailele, called climate change an “existential threat ... for all our Pacific family” and said any world leader who denied climate change’s existence was “utterly stupid”.

Australia's climate wars: a decade of dithering

Links

• Australia relationship with Pacific on climate change 'dysfunctional' and 'abusive'
• Australia warned it has radically underestimated climate change security threat
• Pacific islands make last-ditch plea to world before Paris climate change talks
• Pacific island leaders fail to shift Australia and NZ on climate target
• Pacific leaders voice frustration over Australia's position on climate change
• Australia's inaction on climate change set to dominate Pacific Island talks
• Climate change seen as greatest threat by global population 
• Disempower far-right climate change deniers. Don’t debate with them
• Scott Morrison contradicts energy advice, saying Paris targets can be met 'at a canter'

At '5 Minutes To Midnight', Rights Group Calls Time On Climate Change

Reuters - Laurie Goering

As disasters strengthen, it's time to recognise climate change is now a major human rights risk, says Amnesty International's new chief

Kumi Naidoo, secretary general of Amnesty International, speaks at his inaugural press conference at the Nelson Mandela Foundation in Johannesburg, South Africa, August 16, 2018. Credit: Amnesty International

LONDON - Amnesty International’s new chief, Kumi Naidoo, has little patience for U.N. climate change talks that have made slow progress for decades but left the world heading for disaster.
“The return on investment I would say should cause us to pause and reflect,” Naidoo said in an interview this week, as talks resumed in Bangkok on hammering out guidelines to put the painstakingly agreed 2015 Paris climate deal into practice.
Even now, as head of a global human rights group, the former Greenpeace executive director will keep an eye on the climate change proceedings because the threats are fast converging, he said.
“It’s abundantly clear climate change impacts are having - and will continue to intensify having - human rights impacts. So Amnesty has to embrace this,” Naidoo told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, after taking the organization’s reins in August.
Around the world, climate change is putting more people at risk from extreme heat waves, wilder storms, sea level rise and worsening droughts, floods and wildfires.
If not quickly tackled, scientists say, global warming is likely to bring large-scale food and water shortages and force more people to migrate, while exacerbating problems such as human trafficking, land conflicts and early marriage of girls.
“We are at five minutes to midnight. We’re right there at the precipice,” said the South African-born activist, who spent his youth as an anti-apartheid campaigner.
But protection for those hit by climate-related disasters is limited. People forced to leave their homes by climate pressures like recurring drought, for instance, are not classified as refugees and cannot access the same support systems.
Amnesty International has been working to get climate change recognized as a human rights issue since at least 2009, Naidoo said - and has long helped environmental activists.
“I’m not starting with a blank slate,” said the group’s new secretary general.
But with the backing of its 7 million members, Naidoo now aims to move climate threats closer to the forefront of Amnesty’s work.
“This is about securing our children and their children’s future. We must not make the mistake of framing climate change as an environmental issue only,” he said.

Kumi Naidoo, International Director of Greenpeace, arrives at a hearing at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in Hamburg, November 6, 2013. The Netherlands will ask an international court on Wednesday to order Russia to release 30 people detained during a protest against oil drilling in the Arctic. REUTERS/Fabian Bimmer

Climate Lawsuits
One particularly promising avenue for action is the growing crescendo of lawsuits brought against oil companies and other climate polluters, Naidoo said.
So far more than a thousand climate-related cases have been filed, according to the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School.
Among them, 21 young plaintiffs in the U.S. state of Oregon charge that the nation’s fossil fuel-heavy energy system deprives them of their “constitutional rights to life, liberty and property”.
A separate case filed by a Peruvian farmer against a German power giant argues its emissions have contributed to flooding threats in his community.
The Philippines’ Commission on Human Rights, similarly, this year began holding public hearings on whether fossil fuel companies have violated the rights of Filipinos, hard-hit by fiercer hurricanes.
Even if they fail, the legal actions “open up public awareness, and you help contribute to development of climate law and case law around climate change”, Naidoo said.
“If you apply existing human rights conventions and the logic many courts follow in regard to human rights, we’re in pretty good shape to win some battles,” he added.

Trump An Ally?
The bearded social justice campaigner also has long advocated civil disobedience and other frontline action to bring change. He was arrested in 2012 while occupying a Russian oil platform with Greenpeace, and has engaged in hunger strikes.
Driving climate action fast enough to keep human rights risks from spinning out of control will require building new alliances, not least between climate and rights campaigners.
“There has to be a different message that speaks to the urgency of the problem, the scale of what it means for food, the economy, jobs. We need to spell that out more clearly,” he said.
He counts U.S. President Donald Trump as an ally in the effort - not least because he has spurred about 400 local governments in the United States to push ahead with their own climate action plans in defiance of Washington.
Leaders such as Canada’s Justin Trudeau and France’s Emmanuel Macron are more problematic, he said, because they talk about climate action but do too little.
“Saying the right things creates a false sense of complacency,” Naidoo said.
Meanwhile the worsening of climate impacts - from hurricanes and flooding to wildfires - in rich countries, including the United States, opens up opportunities to press ahead, he said.
“This is not an issue that respects national boundaries,” Naidoo noted. “We either get this right together or continue to drag our feet and engage in symbolic half measures - and ultimately rich countries will not be immune.”

Links

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• Merkel says EU should meet existing emissions aims, not set new ones
• The path to climate cooperation
• Big cities vow to make buildings carbon neutral by 2050
• Imitate Vaxjo? As heat rises, Swedish city goes green - and thrives