The United Nations and climate activists have pressed developed nations such as Australia to further curb fossil fuel emissions at a key annual Pacific leaders’ forum in Tonga, amid warnings of the “grave danger” of rising sea levels.
Leaders at the Pacific Islands Forum meeting on Wednesday also separately endorsed a Canberra-led regional policing initiative, a move seen as a means to limit China’s security influence in the region.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres opened the meeting on Monday with a warning, saying the unprecedented rate at which the seas were rising due to global warming was putting the Pacific islands – only a few metres above sea level – in “grave danger”.
Guterres said developed countries with the means to cut back on fossil fuel projects must step up their efforts to reduce emissions. That includes the Pacific’s biggest member, Australia, which has been criticised for “climate fraud” over its continued expansion of coal and gas projects.
“The changes here in the Pacific region are visible since my last visit,” Guterres said during a follow-up press conference on Tuesday. “If we save the Pacific, we also save ourselves.”
350 Pacific, a regional group fighting climate change, said it expected better leadership, particularly from Australia.
“While Australia has contributed A$100 million (US$67 million) to the Pacific Resilience Facility on the one hand, it is important to note that they are still actively approving new fossil fuel projects, exacerbating the climate crisis and increasing the burden of recovery faced by the Pacific,” 350 Pacific managing director Joseph Sikulu said on Tuesday.
The Pacific Resilience Facility is a fund created to help Pacific nations prepare for and respond to natural disasters and climate change.
In response to calls for Australia to do more, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said at the forum on Wednesday the region was aware that his country had an emission reduction strategy that involved establishing secure energy supplies before expanding investments in renewable energy production.
“We see the transition as being very much under way. People are aware of our commitment, and I have had nothing but support for that,” he said.
With climate taking centre stage at the forum, the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union Treaty also came into force. The “climate refugee visa arrangement”, signed at last year’s meeting, offers special Australian visas annually to up to 280 Tuvalu citizens – about 2.5 per cent of the island’s population – allowing them to live, study and work there.
The treaty also obliges Australia to help Tuvalu in the event of natural disasters, health pandemics or military aggression, in exchange for Tuvalu’s agreement to new defence and security-related deals with Australia.
Policing the Pacific
At the forum, Pacific leaders also endorsed the landmark “Pacific Policing Initiative”, an A$400 million plan spearheaded and funded by Australia.
A new Pacific police training centre in Brisbane is the centrepiece of the deal, and there will also be other regional police training “centres of excellence” in the Pacific.
The initiative has been seen as a move to limit China’s growing security presence in the region, highlighted by a surprise police cooperation pact signed between China and Solomon Islands two years ago.
Support for the initiative did not come without caution.
Leonard Louma, director general of the Melanesian Spearhead Group, expressed concerns about some “cryptic” elements of the deal and its use to block competing security rivals including China, while Vanuatu Prime Minister Charlot Salwai said at the forum on Tuesday the initiative must suit the needs of island nations and not the “geostrategic interests” of their big partners, according to local press.
Experts said besides concerns over the initiative’s intentions and its vagueness, there were also questions over whether it would be led by the island nations themselves rather than Australia.
According to Danielle Watson, an associate professor at the Queensland University of Technology researching Pacific regional security and policing, Australia already has investments in police organisations in Samoa, Solomon Islands and Fiji, with Australian liaison officers also embedded in forces across the region.
It was not clear whether the new training centres would be duplicative or whether a proposed coordination hub would be different from the existing Pacific Islands Chiefs of Police Secretariat, she said.
“You can see where there are new positives that build on what Australia has already done. But there are some parts of the initiative that make you wonder if there is a potential for overlap and if those have been considered,” she told This Week in Asia. “The cryptic nature of things doesn’t give us enough to make an informed decision.”
Watson said, however, that the Pacific countries still viewed the initiative as benefiting their national interests and endorsed it with an initial “optimism”.
Asked whether the deal was meant to be a symbolic signal to China, Watson said Pacific nations had the agency to make their own decisions.
“To say Australia is basically a regional sheriff, telling other countries to go away … is undermining the sovereignty of these island states, and it insults their capacity to make decisions to meet their own national interests,” she said.
Patrick Kaiku, a political-science teaching fellow at the University of Papua New Guinea, said Pacific nations were open to the deal given a “shared policing culture in the Pacific”.
But the island nations could still pull out as such agreements were not binding, especially if there was domestic resistance, or if Australia were to use the initiative as a “geopolitical ploy” against China, he added.
“If the Solomon Islands opts out because it sees value in Chinese assistance, that is their prerogative. Vanuatu, a staunch non-aligned country, may also want assurances that this policing initiative is not a geopolitical ploy by Australia to restrict Chinese cooperation with Vanuatu,” Kaiku said.
China reacted to the deal by saying it welcomed all efforts to develop the Pacific nations. Foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian on Wednesday said China’s policing deals with these countries were “normal” cooperation between sovereign countries and not targeted at third-party nations.
