Foreign leaders are being urged to not avert their gaze from the impacts of climate change and witness them firsthand in the Pacific region.
Tuvalu High Commissioner Samuelu Laloniu issued the plea at the Australian Clean Energy Summit on Wednesday, saying hard work had gone into convincing presidents and prime minsters to attend pre-COP events in the region to show them the reality behind the research.
The unusual event could also trigger renewable energy commitments and investments in the Pacific region, experts said, although it was unlikely to inspire changes to fossil fuel exports.
The comments came after Fiji and Tuvalu were announced as hosts of pre-COP events in October, which are designed to shape the agenda of the United Nations’ COP31 event in Turkey.
The Tuvalu event would demonstrate the practical impact of global warming on communities, Mr Laloniu said, and show leaders its effects in person rather than in a document.
“They will see the human face of climate change,” he said.
“Tuvalu is one of the nations that are no more than two metres above sea level and now we are having 50 per cent of our land frequently flooded during high tides.”
Diplomats from Australia, Fiji and Tuvalu had been working behind the scenes to boost attendance to the event, he said, which would also show how island nations were changing practices to survive.
“We want them to see how we are coping, how we are adapting, and how we are building our resilience, how we, for example, are growing our food crops in lands that are frequently flooded with seawater,” he said.
“Tuvalu has an opportunity to really showcase the need for immediate transformational changes in terms of how we adapt to the climate crisis.”
If well attended, the meetings could also boost investments in Pacific nations, former climate diplomat Thom Woodroofe said, both in donations to the Pacific Resilience Facility and in environmental commitments.
The region had the potential to become the first powered entirely by renewable energy, he said, with the creation of 1500 to 2000 megawatts of stored capacity, equivalent to the power use of Adelaide.
“It probably doesn’t sound like an insurmountable quantum of energy in order to go renewable but of course the challenge is it’s across thousands of different islands,” he said.
Expectations for this year’s COP summit were high, Mr Woodroofe said, particularly in relation to worldwide electrification goals, although conflict in the Middle East would make fuel insecurity hard to ignore.
“There’s a global fossil fuels crisis and at some point global public attention will demand a commensurate response,” he said.
Electrification would dominate talks at both COP events, Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience special envoy Kate Thwaites said, but climate finance would also top pre-COP talks.
