Living Climate Change Impacts in Pacific SIDS: Articulating the Pacific Way in an Unresponsive World

Abstract

Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are among the world’s smallest nations living the severe impacts of climate change and development that are consuming them while the world remains largely divided about how to adapt to and mitigate against these changes. This is an onerous concern because while the life-threatening impacts of climate change are becoming better understood across the world, humanity has not agreed on concrete plans and appropriate activities to effectively address the single most callous threat of our time.1 In spite of decades of the Conference of the Parties and associated meetings, assortments of agreements, treaties and conventions formulated at global, regional seas and continental levels and through various organizations, and innumerable partnerships that produced policy frameworks, guidelines, strategies, plans, action plans and pathways to direct countries, there has been little unified effective action taken by the global community. The deeply entrenched and polarized positions between the different countries and the variations in their activities have frustrated Pacific SIDS, which are fighting a losing battle against climate change unless all the major countries of the world commit to these initiatives.