Giving up isn’t an option for the Pacific

Despite a landmark victory at the world’s highest court this year, Pacific nations are facing waning enthusiasm for climate action from the global community and diminishing faith in the process that’s supposed to provide answers — even as they head into another climate summit, COP30, which begins in Brazil tomorrow.  

Jamie Tahana reports.

 

One of the most striking things in the aftermath of a cyclone, aside from all the despair and destruction, is how the world seems sapped of colour.

Verdant forests and luscious gardens awash with beige and brown, tree trunks snapped like matchsticks, branches shredded of leaves, nature smothered and denuded. Crystal lagoons and the deep blue sea are left a sort of dishwater grey. Even the soundscape vanishes for a bit, the terrifying roar giving way to a terrifying silence. Who knows where the birds go.

So it was for Jimmy Namile, a ni-Vanuatu chief from the island of Tanna, when a super cyclone known as Pam walloped his village on the night of March 13, 2015. Namile, who is in his 70s and has only ever known life on Tanna, has witnessed many cyclones. Despite their capacity for destruction, they were also a refreshing aspect of the cycle of life, he said, a marker of the shift of seasons. Their rains would replenish water supplies and nourish the food gardens, their winds would clear the forests and untangle vines to allow the fruit trees to bloom and flourish.

But Pam was unlike anything he’d seen before.

The category five storm, with winds as high as 250km/h, was one of the most destructive cyclones the Pacific has ever seen. It started near the Solomon Islands, gaining size and strength as it tracked a path down the archipelago that forms Vanuatu. It saved its worst for the cashew-shaped island of Tanna, passing directly over it while at its most ferocious peak.

It arrived in the middle of the night, while Namile and his wife, four children, and six grandchildren were huddled in a home that disintegrated under Pam’s force. The family was forced to cling to the trunk of a banyan tree, hoping its roots would keep their grip of the earth. By the time the winds abated, there was nothing left.

“We had nowhere else to go, so we continued to live under that tree for two weeks,” Namile said. The village food gardens were destroyed, his people desperately sifting through silt and debris to salvage scraps for the children, while the adults survived off the stems of taro plants. “It burns your throat if you try to eat it,” he recalled. “But we were starving.”

In nearby Yakel, Mangau Iokai’s family fled when their house was blown to pieces, pacing a panicked path to a neighbouring village which had a Tanna House, similar to a wharenui. They scrambled through the darkness, the rain pelting the earth in heavy sheets as trees toppled onto the path ahead, making the journey even more treacherous. When they finally reached the shelter, it was so crammed with nervous locals that there was no room to sit. When day broke, all he saw was piles of strewn rubble and naked, twisted tree trunks. “I don’t know my place anymore,” the 78-year-old said.

The destruction wrought by Cyclone Pam was so significant that it has come to resemble a kind of epochal shift of time, like BC and AD: how life was before Pam and how it is after.

The government of Vanuatu estimates few buildings escaped without damage. In a country of 270,000 people, more than 65,000 were displaced, many of them permanently. Communications, electricity and other infrastructure were wiped out for weeks, if not months, and the economic consequence amounted to about 60 percent of the country’s entire GDP. In many ways, Vanuatu is still recovering from Pam, the government minister Ralph Regenvanu told me. It’s a recovery undermined by a lengthening catalogue of climate emergencies.

Pam was supposed to be a once-in-a-generation storm, but Vanuatu has been struck by five category 5 cyclones in the decade since. In 2023, much of what had been rebuilt after Pam was destroyed again when the twin cyclones, Judy and Kevin, barrelled through within days of each other, leaving another 10,000 homeless. Increasingly, there is no such thing as a recovery. Crops don’t have enough time to re-establish, coral never replenishes before it’s washed away once more, and houses are rebuilt only to be toppled again.

These recollections from Tanna come from testimony collected by the government of Vanuatu and taken to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s highest court, in The Hague.

In a landmark advisory opinion in July this year, the court found that, under international law, states have a legal obligation to address their greenhouse gas emissions, and that high-emitting countries could be penalised for failing to do so.

Essentially, it found that to do nothing amounted to a grave injustice. The finding, wrote Canterbury University professor Steven Ratuva, “effectively reshaped the global climate change landscape by giving more power to small states, especially those in the Pacific, to hold the big polluting countries politically, morally, and financially accountable.”

It was a legal challenge born out of frustration. Brought by Vanuatu, it was backed by other countries who saw the current international mechanisms as impotent, based around loose commitments that nations often fail to meet. Dissatisfied with the status quo, they were looking for a legal cudgel to give them leverage.

“The court has declared there is legal accountability for your actions and conduct that cause climate harm,” Ralph Regenvanu, Vanuatu’s climate change minister, told me the day after the ICJ handed down its ruling. “That is going to give us a lot more leverage in our arguments.”

This week, that will be put to the test, when the governments of the world gather in the Brazilian city of Belem, deep in the Amazon jungle, for the United Nations climate summit known as COP, the annual gathering where countries agree on the targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that they often fail to meet.

This week’s meeting comes during another year of record heat and extreme weather around the globe, as the relentless march to catastrophe continues unabated. Just a week ago, Jamaica bore the brunt of a hurricane named Melissa, which was of a similar magnitude of terror to Pam.

“Experts describe Melissa to be on the very edge of what is physically possible in the Atlantic Ocean, a storm powered by record sea temperatures,” its prime minister, Andrew Holmes, said this week. “Hurricane Melissa wasn’t only a tragedy: It was a warning.”

In an op-ed for the Guardian, the president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, urged a reckoning over the future of the main mechanism for climate action. “At every climate conference, we hear many promises but see too few real commitments,” he wrote. “The era of declarations of good intentions has ended.”

But even declarations of good intent seem to be few.

“We have very little expectation for COP this year,” Ralph Regenvanu said in another interview this week. “It is nowhere near what we need to avert the catastrophic environmental crisis approaching us.”

The promise of the Paris Agreement

A decade ago, the world’s leaders met in Paris to sign a landmark agreement — a near-universal pledge to stave off catastrophic temperature rise and limit global warming to no more than 1.5 degrees celsius. Then US President Barack Obama said it represented “the best chance we have to save the one planet we’ve got.”

There was real hope that this would be the promise of a new era, that the Paris treaty was just a first step, with bolder moves and closer cooperation to follow. In the mid-2010s, there seemed to be a global consensus of urgency. Millions of students around the world were turning out for marches, governments of all stripes were promising action, and companies and banks were in a frenzy to show they were doing something.

But by the end of that decade, that momentum was already faltering.

I first met Solomon Yeo in 2019, when we were both attending that year’s COP in Madrid. At that summit, countries were supposed to be ironing out the final rules of the Paris agreement, laying the path for further action. Yeo had an infectious enthusiasm as he paced the floors of the cavernous convention centre. He had just graduated from the University of the South Pacific in Port Vila, the Vanuatu capital, and he mentioned that he and a group of fellow students had hatched a plan to take the world’s countries to court.

The conference was frenetic. The US, under the first Trump administration, had just quit the Paris agreement and wasn’t there, leaving European leaders scrambling to show that they still cared. Outside, hundreds of thousands of people, mostly youth, marched along the tree-lined streets of Madrid, demanding action. The Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, was swamped when she arrived. She was named Time’s person of the year, part of “a global attitudinal shift, transforming millions of vague, middle-of-the-night anxieties into a worldwide movement calling for urgent change,” the magazine wrote.

Yet Pacific leaders left infuriated.

For much of the two weeks, the leaders of small island states pitted themselves against major emitting powers. For days, they argued over minutiae of language, resulting in a deal that was so watered down that few were pleased. At the end of the two weeks of talks, Solomon Yeo and I sat down for an interview, where he called the outcome “dismal”.

“It’s really frustrating to see many countries still being less ambitious despite environmental crises in their backyard. I mean, this kind of behaviour is really disappointing to see — our future is decided by this group of individuals.”

In many ways, it’s worse now.

In September, the New York Times Magazine published a feature with the headline: “The Whole World Has Soured on Climate Politics.” It outlined how the spirited optimism of the 2010s has fallen away to a sort of cynicism that the rich world has abandoned its goals. In the run-up to last year’s COP in Azerbaijan, a UN report said that no climate progress had been made at all in the previous year. When the conference finally opened, Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, declared oil and gas as “gifts from God”.

In the US, recent polling shows that while Americans see climate change as a problem, it’s rarely one of their top issues — a stark change from five years ago. Media coverage of the topic has dropped by roughly half since 2023. Here at home, an Ipsos poll found a similar trend: The proportion of people who think New Zealand should do more to tackle climate change has fallen significantly, from 64 percent in 2024 to 54 percent in 2025, lower than the average in 32 other countries.

This year’s COP in Brazil is meant to be significant. All 195 parties to the 2015 agreement are supposed to arrive with updated plans for how they’ll contribute to the Paris goals. But when a formal deadline passed in February, only 15 countries had completed the assignment. (The New Zealand government’s plan, submitted in January, has been panned by advocates for lacking any ambition.)

Among other measures, countries are also supposed to be reckoning with the state of climate finance — that is, how rich countries will support poorer countries with climate adaptation and mitigation — but this has proved one of the main sticking points at previous summits. Countries are also supposed to finally settle on a list of 100 “indicators” that will help track their resilience.

‘Giving up is not an option’

Yet not caring anymore doesn’t mean the problem is no longer there. Especially in the Pacific, where climate change isn’t a distant threat but a present-day catastrophe already uprooting communities, unravelling the fine tapestry of culture, and upending entire ways of life.

In the islands, there can be no retreat, because that would mean admitting defeat. So this year, once again, the leaders of the Pacific find themselves at the front of a determined push to persuade the world’s richest countries to step up to avert disaster, their voices looking to fill the void of inaction and injustice.

These are countries with insights born not only from living in close harmony with the earth and sea, but also from having survived so much already — whether that’s the grip of colonisation, the ravages of extractive industry, or the poisonous experiments of nuclear powers.

“It’s interesting that some of the most important achievements of the international community originated in the Pacific,” Ralph Regenvanu said. “We’re always referred to as the moral compass of the world, speaking about climate change, and it’s almost paternalistic the way we’re referred to. But we continue to say this.”

As the great Tongan intellectual Epeli Hau‘ofa wrote, “smallness is a state of mind” — and it’s one that the Pacific has rejected outright. “Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still,” Hau‘ofa wrote in Sea of Islands.

Much of the push for denuclearisation came from the Pacific, which today still lives with the fallout from the explosive experiments of great power games. The Paris agreement would have been so much weaker if not for the determination of Pacific leaders — in particular, the late Marshallese politician Tony deBrum, who, as head of the High Ambition Coalition, drove the Paris Agreement to accept no more warming above 1.5 degrees celsius.

Then there are the Pacific students, among them Solomon Yeo, whose coming-of-age had been defined by a new generation of super cyclones and other emergencies. They saw it as obscene that the countries that contributed the least to climate change were the ones suffering its worst effects, and spent six years pursuing justice in the world’s highest court.

Across the Pacific, the story of climate change is one of ingenuity as much as one of survival. But that’s not enough. The answers and action must come from the whole world.

“The multilateralism process is imperfect, and the concerns are valid. But it is the only process we have, and giving up is not an option,” Tagaloa Cooper, the director of climate at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, said this week. “If big countries . . . do not care to save the Pacific now, the impacts our communities are experiencing in relation to the climate crisis will inevitably be at their front door.”

“As the leader of the Marshall Islands, I cannot take the view that we cannot survive,” the president, Hilda Heine, told The New York Times.

The unravelling of a way of life

Tanna is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. Dense forests rise from soil so rich it looks like coffee. A deep sea crashes onto volcanic sand as black as night, shimmering like the Milky Way as it catches the sun’s rays and sparkles.

At the market in the town of Lenakel, the mamas while away a hot afternoon beneath the shade of a giant banyan tree, its tentacle-like branches drooping over pyramid stacks of fruit splayed on blankets.

Standing at sunset on the edge of Mt Yasur, belching its blobs of lava, you look on the bush-cloaked hills and see little columns of smoke rise from forest villages as the cloak of night wraps itself around the island. Its people live enmeshed with nature, strong in their tikanga, or what ni-Vanuatu call their kastom.

Kastom is the source of life and law. It has many permutations, but at its essence, it’s the same as the tikanga evident across the Pacific, where it’s impossible to divorce the law and human life from the land, the seasons, or the environment. It’s a form of knowledge specific to time and place, drawing from the plants, the birds, the winds, the trees, the seas and the stars, weaving an innate sense of belonging with an intricate body of knowledge.

Many of Tanna’s villages are kastom villages, where much of the population live lives that have been little altered by outside influence, retaining ways of living and language derived from an extensive body of knowledge developed over thousands of years.

These are examples of high-functioning systems, astonishing in their depth and precision. To be of a place is to know the stories of the land. Whether they’re about heroes traversing imaginary worlds, or the complexities of knowledge tied with the shifts of wind or cycles of the fish, they are an archive of belonging embedded in the dirt and swimming in the sea.

But kastom is under threat, and there is no more potent symbol than the yam.

On Tanna, the yam is much more than a wrinkly root crop. It is an ancestor, a covenant, and a calendar, responsible for everything from governance to the seasons. Yam ceremonies mark when a child comes of age, when they are married, and when they honour the dead. So, the loss of the yam would be much more than the loss of a crop — it would be a collapse that disrupts all manner of communal life.

In the testimony put before the ICJ, one woman from Epau, noting the shrinking size of her village’s yams, was “ashamed to offer them at her sister’s wedding.”

Mangau Iokai is a tupunis, or tohunga, who is responsible for ensuring a good crop. Not too long ago, he said, he would regularly grow yams the size of fenceposts. But the yields started shrinking, and now they’re gone altogether.

“Now that the yam has vanished, my heart is broken,” he said. “I feel that I have failed in my duty that has been passed down from my ancestors, to my grandfathers, to me.” Ever since Cyclone Pam, a decade ago, Iokai said nothing has grown back the same. “I wait to eat the fruit, but just when they are about to bear fruit, another cyclone comes and destroys them again.”

The rupture of other elements of kastom life is evident in other areas, too. Crops like taro now easily rot, and pests are abundant. The coral is turning white and brittle, and the fish are migrating to deeper waters. The fishermen increasingly put their lives on the line to catch what little is left.

Then there’s Werry Narua, who, for as long as he’s been alive, would plant bananas in March, ready to harvest the following February. But now, cyclones strike as early as November. What isn’t washed away or battered is blighted with rot. The summer droughts are longer. “The banana has become confused,” he said.

These are clear examples of how climate change is eroding the Indigenous sense of time and place.

The right to self-determination is undermined not only by the loss of land to the sea, but also by the unravelling of self-determined ways of life that are owed to future generations. The lack of action by the international community, the dismissive way global powers have acted towards small countries, is what Vishal Prasad, the director of Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change, described to me as “colonisation 2.0.”

In its simplest sense, colonisation is the denial of the right of Indigenous peoples to continue governing themselves on their own lands. So here, again, powers far away are severing a people’s ties to land, language, culture and power.

In Brazil, in the lead up to this year’s COP summit, Indigenous peoples from across the Amazon basin have called on world leaders to include specific language that recognises their rights to their territories.

Jimmy Namile, the tupunis of the yam, finished his testimony with a plea. “Our living has gone very differently, and we are suffering,” he said. “We have to say something to the world in order for things to get better.”

This week will prove whether anyone still cares to listen.

Jamie Tahana (Ngāti Pikiao/Ngāti Makino/Tapuika) is a journalist and broadcaster who has worked in both Aotearoa and the Pacific. He grew up between his Dutch mother in the Hutt Valley, Wellington, and his Te Arawa dad in Rotorua. He has a master’s degree from Te Herenga Waka Victoria University, and was the Māori news editor at RNZ until May 2023. He is now working in London.

E-Tangata, 2025