INTRODUCTION
This volume is intended as a companion to Blue Pacific Continent, Volume I – Primer on Pacific Regional Climate Change Action.
This reference book offers an overview of Pacific countries and territories with a focus on government or administration institutions, policies, and plans for disaster risk reduction (DRR) – including disaster management – and climate change adaptation (CCA).
Where available, these profiles offer some details on civil society partners involved in climate change action, including mitigation and adaptation. Finally, each profile includes information on climate and hazard early warning systems established or planned in each country or territory along with some of the key infrastructure networks that play a role in addressing climate change and that are vulnerable to climate change impacts.
The 25 countries and territories profiled are American Samoa, Australia, Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, Kiribati, Marshall Islands (Republic of), Micronesia (Federated States of), Nauru, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Niue, Northern Mariana Islands (Commonwealth of), Palau, Papua New Guinea, Pitcairn, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu, and Wallis and Futuna.
While the profiled states and territories range in physical area, population size, economy, culture, and other facets, they are included together in this book because they are members of key Pacific regional agencies and institutions that, among other mandates, work to promote adaptation to and mitigation of climate change impacts. More broadly, they act – frequently in unison – on the local, national, regional, and international stages to address the issue of climate change. With certain exceptions, the countries and territories included in this volume are small island developing states (SIDS) which, according to the United Nations (UN) Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), “share a set of geographical, environmental, economic, and social challenges, and have unique development needs that make them extremely vulnerable”1 to the changes being wrought in the world by the increasing concentration of greenhouse gasses (GHG) in the atmosphere – emissions that largely did not originate in the Pacific SIDS.
The states and territories included here employ a range of strategies and tactics to implement risk reduction for both sudden onset disasters and problems that emerge more slowly.
Several island states have fully integrated DRR and CCA together in their policies and plans in recognition of the fact that climate change exacerbates the hazards that these states confront and, combined with vulnerabilities, can turn hazard-related events into disaster events. These strategies, policies, and plans have varying degrees of interconnection with those of other regional and international states and territories.
In many cases, Pacific Islands are part of or in treaty or compact relationships with Australia, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom (UK), or the United States (U.S.), and these relationships have direct bearing on how the islands mitigate risk and prepare for, respond to, and recover from disasters, including those linked to climate change.
Action to mitigate and adapt to climate change is not a new concept in the Pacific region, but advocacy by many countries and territories increased in volume after 2015 when leaders in the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – to which many of the states in this book belong – published their Declaration on Climate Change Action in which they plainly stated that the impacts of climate change are existential threats to their people and territories. All of the independent states among the Pacific Island Countries and Territories (PICT) profiled in this reference book have also submitted a first Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) to the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to detail their ambitions for CCA and decarbonization; many have also submitted updated, enhanced, or second NDCs since 2020. Although many of the targets in these NDCs are conditional on international support – i.e., financing – they still frequently allow the PICTs to point to their own ambitions as examples for larger countries – who are more significant GHG emitters – to emulate.