Pacific scholars bring Pacific people’s voices to COP29

A Pacific Ocean and Climate Crisis Assessment report prepared by more than 100 scholars from the Pacific, working in association with community leaders across the South Pacific, was launched on 11 November on the sidelines of the 29th Conference of Parties (COP29) meeting in Azerbaijan.

The project provides an interdisciplinary, multicultural and transnational study of the impacts of climate change and community responses, covering 16 Pacific Island countries and territories. It was a response to calls by Pacific leaders in various climate change forums for region-wide research to be conducted reflecting local voices.

Funded through the New Zealand International Development Cooperation Programme, it involved all the universities in New Zealand, the Fiji-based regional University of the South Pacific (USP), national universities of Fiji, Samoa, the Solomon Islands and Hawaii, and three Australian universities.

The 1,000-page report in two volumes was three years in the making, from 2021 to 2024. It is an attempt by academic institutions in the Pacific region to bring traditional knowledge and indigenous voices to the climatic change mitigation debate in the international arena.

Pacific communities’ stories

Dr Hilda Sakiti-Waqa of USP, project leader for the Pacific Ocean Climate Crisis Assessment (POCCA), pointed out to University World News that this project is unique and reflects the Pacific peoples’ close connectivity to the environment.

“It’s roping in the stories and the narratives from the communities in the 16 Pacific island countries, documenting their stories and the narratives. These are reflected in the report [about] how they build their resilience through local practices and indigenous knowledge and how that is built over the years.

“It’s important to see how crucial the environment is to communities and how we can build resilience from understanding the cultural practices, the traditional practices, and the local practices of our community people,” she said.

The study covers a range of climate adaptation strategies, including relocating households and villages, that are already being employed across the Pacific region.

It provides an analysis of climate change impacts, responses and adaptation strategies in the region using multidisciplinary approaches from the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities and Indigenous knowledge.

Professor Steven Ratuva, pro vice-chancellor (Pacific) of the University of Canterbury (UC) and project co-leader, speaking in a podcast of New Zealand’s Science Media Centre from Azerbaijan on the eve of the POCCA report’s launch, said that they were able to pull together all the different disciplinary positions in relation to climate.

Marginalised voices now heard

“This knowledge was always being marginalised as a form of knowledge, which is considered not sufficiently well versed with the way things happen in the modern world,” he said.

There has been much resentment in the Pacific academic community about the annual Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports presented to COP meetings because Pacific scholars have not been properly represented in the team that prepares the report.

“It’s often been driven by experts from other parts of the world. IPCC tends to focus more on the natural sciences and the physical sciences,” noted Ratuva.

POCCA has tried to give Pacific voices prominence. “It’s one of those rare moments where we have the voices of the people at the grassroots level, particularly those who are at the forefront of the front line of the [battle against] climate change,” he said.

“They are suffering, not just during times of cyclones, but actually in their everyday lives in the villages,” he added. While the IPCC and science have provided the evidence of what’s happening, more thought needs to go into the response, in terms of “how do we fit people into what we do in support of science”, he argued.

“So, the report talks about and deals with the experiences, the reflections, the historical knowledge and indigenous knowledge of people on the ground, in terms of what they’ve been doing all the[se] years,” he explained.

How community voices were gathered

Sakiti-Waqa’s team at USP consisted of eight people who liaised with Pacific researchers who work in the field, government agencies, community leaders and organisations across the Pacific to speak to and gather local voices. Team members travelled to far-flung communities in the islands to meet with people.

Eliki Drugunalevu, a technical editor and digital communications officer with the USP team, is one of those who visited communities in the Solomon Islands, Nauru, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Vanuatu and Fiji to record community voices.

“The IPCC report is very scientific and science driven. No human side to it, to hear from the people who are directly affected by climate change,” he told University World News.

“The POCCA report was written by Pacific researchers who have connections with the communities, and their research reflects the realities of what the people are facing.

“Our field-work team visited communities to capture the resilience and the basic strategies they may be using to help mitigate impacts of climate change, capturing indigenous knowledge,” he said.

“It is very humbling when we visit these communities and we see how they openly share the traditional knowledge they have been practising to help and, you could say, adapt to the impacts of climate change. Some things their forefathers have passed on to them, they are still using today,” he noted.

How local people adapt to climate change

Drugunalevu gave University World News many examples of how his field visits helped him to gather knowledge about how communities are coping every day to survive the impacts of climate change.

For example, in remote Fijian islands, when the sea rises people flee inland. But the sea destroys natural coastal habitats and birds vanish from the islands.

Communities that have built sea walls now find that the tidal waves destroy them and they have to move from their farming lands. In the Solomon Islands, people build artificial islands from corals using traditional knowledge drawn from their forefathers, with no cement used, using earth transported from the main island to their farms.

“The more we visit these communities, the more we come to see a lot of synergies between how communities are choosing to adapt to the impact of climate change. We are all connected by the Pacific Ocean,” says Drugunalevu.

Communication problems

However, one thing he has found all over the remote islands of the Pacific is a lack of communication channels – no newspapers, radio, television or social media. “This is a challenge we need to address if these communities are to be assisted with the additional knowledge.”

As part of the capacity-building process between the University of the South Pacific and the University of Canterbury, there were a series of staff exchanges and three consultative meetings. The first conference was held at Canterbury in September 2022; the second was hosted by USP in June 2023; and the third one was back at UC in May 2024.

The POCCA project feeds into and supports the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent endorsed by Pacific Islands Forum leaders in July 2022 for ‘Pacific relevant solutions’.

Ratuva said that for the first time, Pacific scholars have been able to “bring homegrown knowledge into the global narrative”. But what will happen from here? Can universities unite to develop a regional communication network to help share indigenous and scientific knowledge in adapting to climate change?