Oceania is already living through a climate future that will affect us all

Some of the world’s smallest states have taken their climate fight to the highest international court, shifting the debate from pleas for help to questions of human rights and state responsibility.

‘If we save the Pacific, we will save the world,’ UN secretary-general António Guterres said in Tonga in August 2024. His acknowledgement that the Pacific archipelagos are on the front line of the coming climate disaster gave his remarks to the Pacific Islands Forum Summit a prophetic cast. But they also implied that it was the powerful, and especially industrial, nations that would save them – with the Pacific islanders, once under the yoke of the French, British and American empires, still consigned to the role of victims.

But these islanders have long since stopped waiting for the international community to wake up. The Pacific region is pioneering new ways of thinking about and pursuing climate justice. Its small island states are among the world’s lowest emitters of greenhouse gases (around 0.03%). the main cause of global climate disruption, whose impacts include ever-rising sea levels and worsening environmental disasters. Yet these states suffer the most brutal consequences: increasingly violent and frequent cyclones, prolonged droughts, flash floods, disrupted seasonal cycles, soil salinisation, coastal erosion and the destruction of coral ecosystems. All these phenomena directly affect housing, harvests, access to water and economic resources.

This structural injustice feeds deep anger. How can it be acceptable that peoples whose way of life is still largely based on subsistence farming and modest patterns of consumption developed over centuries of adapting to the environment should be the first victims of an industrial system created far away? Why should the inhabitants of Samoa, Vanuatu, Fiji and Kiribati pay the price for prosperity they have never benefited from? These questions challenge the foundations of the international order and justice itself.

Profound climate disruption is evident across the Pacific. Naulas Iwai, whose family live in the working-class Blacksands district of Vanuatu’s capital, Port Vila, warned me (…)

Full article: 3 732 words.

Eric Wittersheim

Eric Wittersheim is professor of the anthropology of Oceania at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris. He is the co-editor (with Marie Durand et Monika Stern) of Le Vanuatu dans tous ses états (Vanuatu in all its aspects), Presses de l’Inalco, Paris, 2024.

Loïc Ramirez is a journalist and the author of La Rose assassinée (Fondation Gabriel-Péri, Pantin, 2015).

(1) The Venezuelan currency is worth far less on the black market, where 70 bolivars work out to $0.16

(4) The opposition won 111 seats in the national assembly, and the PSUV 55, out of a total of 167. See Gregory Wilpert, ‘Venezuela lurches right’, Le Monde diplomatique, English edition, January 2016

(5) The revocatory referendum demanded by the opposition and approved in April by the national assembly requires the signatures of 20% of the electorate. On 7 June the national electoral council (CNE) validated the majority of the signatures after the government had denounced fraud. It must now get the remaining 1% of signatories to confirm their signature in person