Climate Change

Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga chaired the 73rd ESCAP Commission in Bangkok last week and called for those attending to create a world that rewards progressive countries who are taking action on climate change.
 
“Climate change is the greatest challenge time, and we are all well aware that one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases is considering withdrawing from the Paris Agreement,” said Prime Minister Sopoaga.
 

The message was heard loud and clear at a two-day meeting that preceded the United Nations biennial forum Mexico is hosting this week in its holiday city by the Caribbean Sea coast this week.
 
Island Business reports presentations at the meeting by SIDS and members of the UN lobby group, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) showed that access to finance and delays in fund disbursement continued to hamper the implementation of GCF.
 

Deputy Director-General of the Information Department at the China Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wang Xining said China has taken a lot of measures to address global warming.

These include penalising enterprises violating the environment protection law in order to bring up a more sustainable economic development module.

Xining explained during a dialogue with Asia Pacific journalists that China has stressed out innovative ways to put the green elements into the economic growth.

Climate Action Tracker, an umbrella group for three climate think tanks, said sweeping policy changes by US President Donald Trump would flatten out a recent US trend of falling greenhouse gas emissions, unless cancelled out by other events.

"The highly adverse rollbacks of US climate policies by the Trump Administration, if fully implemented and not compensated by other actors, are projected to flatten US emissions instead of continuing on a downward trend," said Professor Niklas Höhne, from one of the think tanks, NewClimate Institute.

With record temperatures sweeping over continents year after year, it is easy to overlook that the ocean has absorbed some 90% of the heat trapped by the carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution; and how much of that CO2 has dissolved into seawater as carbonic acid, altering its basic chemistry.
 
The UN meeting follows on the heels of a new secretary general report that investigates the impacts of these changes and the findings are concerning, to say the least.
 

The nearly 18 tonnes of plastic piling up on an island that is otherwise mostly untouched by humans have been pointed to as evidence of the catastrophic, “grotesque” extent of marine plastic pollution.
 
Nearly 38m pieces of plastic were estimated to be on Henderson by researchers from the University of Tasmania and the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, weighing a combined 17.6 tonnes.
 

These latest talks are aimed at developing the rules for implementing the accord signed in the French capital in 2015.

But there is a growing worry that President Trump might soon pull out of the historic deal.

Some delegates say such a move would be a body blow for the landmark deal.

Preparing for and responding to natural disasters as they affect access to food for millions of people in the Pacific Islands, was of the major themes at the meeting.

50 representatives from governments, non-governmental and UN organisations, jointly hosted by Food Security Cluster co-lead Coordinators: the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

The three-day event was designed to foster collaboration, coordination and the sharing of ideas and experiences amongst members.

Malcolm Turnbull is due to meet the American president on Thursday in New York.

Mr Bainimarama, who is in Australia, said he has asked Mr Turnbull to reinforce his earlier message to Mr Trump for the US to stay in the Paris Agreement and to continue to take a leadership role.

In his speech in Melbourne at the opening of the 4th Australasian Emissions Reduction Summit Mr Bainimarama said his message was simple.

He called on the president not to let the side down by leaving the Paris Agreement when there was a clear game plan and so many scores on board.

As part of this effort, SPC is developing a coastal inundation forecasting tool for the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) Coastal Inundation Forecasting Demonstration Project (CIFPD) in Fiji.

This tool will be demonstrated in the Coral Coast before being replicated in other areas within Fiji including the Nadi River catchment.

This project has been established at the request of the Fiji Meteorological Service (FMS) and made possible with donor funding from the Korea Meteorological Administration (KMA) in 2017.