Climate Change

Bruno Leingkon is alleged to have been drunk on his way back to Port Vila last year while on a chartered aircraft from Santo in the northern part of Vanuatu.

It's claimed Leingkon continued to consume alcohol inside the aircraft and harassed a female pilot, resulting in her returning to land at Pekoa Airport five minutes after taking off.

Leingkon was on an official visit with Prime Minister Bob Loughman but he missed the official flight and he ordered staff to charter the private aircraft for him to return in Port Vila.

But Robert Downey Jr has ambitions to play another role - that of an investor in technology to combat climate change.

He tells Tech Tent he wants to step out of the make-believe world of his Avengers character and confront the real threat to the planet.

"I'm not a kid any more. And I really want to find things that I think are dynamic and interesting and - tell me if I'm wrong - but isn't this the space to be catching the buzz right now?"

The decision was taken during Friday's virtual leaders' summit to mark the fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement.

The leaders have endorsed the development of a 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent ahead of next year's COP26 in the UK.

The leaders also renewed their commitment to progress the implementation of the Paris Accord.

The forum acknowledged the need for urgent and immediate actions against the threats and challenges of climate change.

The leaders including former presidents and prime ministers, foreign ministers, archbishops and other church leaders, have written an open leader to the prime minister, Scott Morrison, “as Pacific Islander leaders whose homelands and cultures face certain devastation from climate change”.

“Pacific island nations have long been leaders in driving global progress to combat climate change,” the letter says. “However, Australia’s current Paris Agreement emission reduction target remains one of the weakest among wealthy nations.”

The recommendation was outlined in a new policy paper released today by the University of New South Wales' Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law.

The paper urges the government to do more to help neighbouring countries, with several Pacific island nations facing an existential threat from rising sea levels.

Co-author Jane McAdam said it was a roadmap for Australia to deal specifically with the displacement of Pacific Islanders as a result of climate change and natural disasters.

This comes a week before Vanuatu has its Climate Change week from 12 – 16 October, 2020.

In recognition of the important role played by Pacific media and government communications officers, to share information and help build awareness and knowledge, a partnership has come together to help empower more news on climate change across Vanuatu.

The training is implemented by the Government of Vanuatu and the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme through the Regional Pacific NDC Hub, in partnership with the Pacific Community (SPC).

The training was offered by the Department of Climate Change (DoCC) and Vanuatu Meteorology & Geo-hazards Department (VMGD) in schools as well.

The aim was to inform and build community resilience through information on Climate, Climate Change and Natural Disasters.

Another aim was to educate the vulnerable communities to ensure resilience building occurs and to inform people that Climate Change is an urgent environmental matter that needs to be addressed using practical solutions that will assist them to address its impacts in future.

It assesses a 20 percent chance the threshold will be broken in one year before 2024 and a 70 percent chance it will be broken in one or more months in those five years.

Scientists say it shows the tough task of controlling climate change levels.

The 2015 Paris accord had tasked world leaders with certain goals.

It committed them to pursue efforts to try to keep the world from warming by more than 1.5C this century.

Last week the cyclone made landfall on the island of Espiritu Santo, Vanuatu’s largest island, bringing torrential rain and 240km/h winds.

Climate Change & Resilience Policy, Adaptation, Loss & Damage, Sustainable Finance & UN Negotiator Dr Christopher Bartlett from Vanuatu, described the cyclone as an outcome “of the unconscionable crime of climate change perpetrated against the people of Vanuatu by fossil fuel corporations and the countries that subsidise them.”                              

Bots are computer programmes that can masquerade as humans to post or send messages on social media.

Researchers discovered tweets posted by bots created the impression there was a high level of climate change denial.

The paper detailing the finds has not yet been published and was first reported by The Guardian newspaper.

The research team analysed 6.5 million tweets from the period surrounding President Donald Trump's June 2017 announcement that he was removing the United States from the Paris climate accord.