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Faster-than-average sea level rise, ocean warming and acidification are threatening the Pacific Islands, the World Meteorological Organization said, as regional leaders meet to discuss economic and security issues this week.
The latest WMO report found that sea surface temperatures in the Pacific had risen three times faster than the global average since 1980. Marine heatwaves had also doubled in frequency over the same period.
UN secretary-general António Guterres once again sought to highlight the region as one which had done little to contribute to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions yet faced some of the most serious consequences, as he attended the Pacific Islands Forum of leaders of 18 member states, mostly low-lying islands and atolls vulnerable to climate change, held in Tonga.
The Pacific Islands had accounted for just 0.02 per cent of global emissions, he said. “This is a crazy situation: rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making,” he said. “A crisis that will soon swell to an almost unimaginable scale, with no lifeboat to take us back to safety.”
The WMO report concluded that the average sea level in the western tropical Pacific had risen by about 10cm to 15cm — nearly twice the global rate as measured since 1993.
Between 1981 and 2023, nearly the entire south-west Pacific region showed surface warming of nearly 0.4C degrees per decade. This was almost three times faster than the global average sea surface warming rate.
The WMO also found that measurements taken in Hawaii showed a more than 12 per cent increase in ocean acidity, caused by the absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, between 1988 and 2022.
Guterres called on global leaders to “step up” and to “drastically slash global emissions; to lead a fast and fair phaseout of fossil fuels, and to massively boost climate adaptation investments”.
The world’s largest economies in the G20, representing the world’s biggest emitters, “must be out in front”, he said, and called for the developed countries to make “significant contributions” to a new loss and damage fund to assist developing nations in coping with climate change.
The fund, which received its first pledges last November at the UN COP28 climate summit in Dubai, has been at the centre of wrangling over which countries should pay in and who should be allowed to draw money out.
Developing countries have argued that wealthy nations — responsible for about 80 per cent of historical greenhouse gas emissions — should play a lead role in giving money to the new fund.
But the US and others have insisted that no country should have an obligation to pay into the fund. These richer, western countries counter that the wealthier developing nations, including China, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, India and Brazil, should also contribute towards a global fund to address climate change.
Meanwhile, a proposed Pacific Resilience Facility to help island communities become more resilient to climate change and natural disasters has also struggled to raise adequate finance, despite pledges from Australia, the US, China and Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
The engagement by China in Pacific Island countries, such as the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, in recent years has created further geopolitical complexity as the region confronts security and economic issues, including divisions among the nations over the exploitation of mineral resources through deep sea mining.
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