The last time UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres held a summit with the leaders of the Pacific Islands Forum, he made international news as he stood thigh-deep, dressed in a suit and tie, in the sea off the coast of Tuvalu.
“Our Sinking Planet”, read the headline on the cover of TIME magazine, as Guterres looked mournfully into the camera, warning of the existential threat facing the Pacific countries due to climate change.
Five years on, as the UN chief returns to the region for the 53rd Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) Leaders Meeting, the annual gathering of the region’s main political and economic grouping, there’s a growing sense of urgency as existential threats intensify on several fronts.
In June, Fiji Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka described the Pacific region as facing a “polycrisis”, saying climate change, human security, transnational drug trafficking, and geopolitical competition were reinforcing and exacerbating one another.
Pacific leaders will be expected to take action on these long-running issues at next week’s Leaders Meeting, as well as acute issues like the ongoing crisis in French overseas territory New Caledonia, when more than 1,000 international dignitaries descend on Nuku’alofa, Tonga’s tiny capital of 23,000, from August 26-30.
In April, Tonga’s Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni cautioned against inaction at the upcoming meeting, announcing that its theme would be “Build Better Now”. He also called for “tangible results and outcomes”, as well as for leaders to “move beyond policy deliberation to implementation”.
Sandra Tarte, an academic at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji who specialises in regional politics, said there were “a lot of ambitious things on the agenda” at the meeting.
“There’s a greater urgency around climate change, we also have a much deeper concern with the potential for escalating tensions between the US, China and other powers. Economically, countries are still recovering from COVID. There’s international drug trafficking too,” she told Al Jazeera.
“If the region is to survive, it really needs something to drive their collective agenda and identity,” she added.
The @UN chief @antonioguterres
met families in Tuvalu Friday “Whose homes & way of life are at risk because of relentless rising seas”#ClimateAction is essential.
“We must save Tuvalu – and save the world”. pic.twitter.com/TRuzaryep2— UN News (@UN_News_Centre) May 17, 2019
That something, Pacific leaders wager, is the far-reaching 2050 Strategy for a Blue Pacific Continent.
Endorsed by PIF members in 2022, the document, which tackles seven themes – including justice and equality, climate change, economic development, and geopolitical and security trends – has been touted as a master plan for the region. But it has also been questioned over its broad nature.
“It’s seen as the Pacific’s priorities that they want the rest of the world to recognise and engage with the region on,” Tarte said. “But, obviously, there are dangers with strategies like this that they become a bit of everything, and in the end mean nothing.”
A ‘significant’ appearance
With Prime Minister Sovaleni’s comments setting the tone, PIF leaders will be aiming to make tangible progress on implementing the Pacific 2050 strategy when they meet in Tonga.
The group’s 18 member states, mostly low-lying islands and atolls, sometimes just a few feet above sea level, are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Predicted rises in water levels are set to leave much of the region uninhabitable by the middle of this century.
Among their most ambitious mitigation efforts is the Pacific Resilience Facility (PRF), which aims to provide financial support to communities often overlooked by international donors. The “Pacific-owned and led” financial institution is scheduled to commence operations in 2025 and will help communities become more resilient to climate change and natural disasters.
The leaders will probably endorse an earlier recommendation to host the facility in Tonga at next week’s meeting, but raising the funding for the facility remains a major hurdle.
Pacific nations aim to raise $500m for the PRF by 2026 but have so far only secured $116m – $100m of which has been pledged by Australia, with the United States, China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey committing a total of $16m.
Guterres’s presence at PIF could help boost the fundraising campaign, according to Kerryn Baker, a research fellow in the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University.
“It’s a new approach to climate finance. It’s a Pacific-led approach, but it has been hampered by the fact that it hasn’t got the external funding it needs. The presence of Guterres will be important in drawing attention to that gap between ambition and capacity at the moment,” she told Al Jazeera.
Meg Keen, a senior fellow in the Pacific Islands programme at the Lowy Institute, also described Guterres’s attendance as “significant” in terms of drawing attention to the PRF on the international stage, saying “he has leverage”.
“The Pacific island countries have consistently said climate change is their biggest security issue. They’re now saying they want the PRF up and running,” Keen told Al Jazeera. “If you’ve got the UN secretary-general backing you up, that does build pressure for countries to put their money behind climate action.”
Drug trade problems
Also high on the summit agenda is drug trafficking. For decades, the vast and porous Pacific Islands have served as a stop on transnational narcotics smuggling routes from Asia and the Americas, the world’s largest producers of methamphetamine and cocaine, to Australia and New Zealand, the world’s highest-paying markets.
But excess supply and the development over time of lower-grade, cheaper drugs have fuelled local consumption. Countries such as Fiji have been especially badly hit, but it is an issue affecting the whole region, according to Keen.
“It’s on everybody’s mind, every country we go to is worried about drug trafficking. Police forces are really struggling to manage it,” she said.
“The Pacific is a transit place because it’s easy to move the drugs through. But it’s more than that now, because youth and local people are suffering from drug addiction. There’s an overflow from this drug trade and it takes a lot of collaboration. That’s where the Pacific Policing Initiative [PPI] could come in,” Keen added.
The PPI is a proposed Australian initiative to provide training and capacity-building to Pacific island police forces. Its flagship programme would be the creation of a large training facility in Brisbane for Pacific officers who could then be deployed to regional crime hotspots.
Canberra has characterised the deal as a Pacific island-led operation set up in response to local needs in the face of rising crime. Its unofficial goal, analysts say, is to shore up Australia’s role as a key security partner at a time when Beijing is also developing bilateral law enforcement partnerships, with Chinese police training teams working in countries including the Solomon Islands and Kiribati.
Canberra will be hoping that Pacific leaders will give their political endorsement of the PPI, which carries a hefty price tag of more than 400 million Australian dollars (about $270m), at the Leader’s Meeting. But with concerns that it is covering the same ground as existing agreements, Tarte believes the PPI is “very much for show”.
“There’ll be some buy-in [at the Leaders Meeting], but I also know there’s a lot of tension about it as well,” Tarte said. “The criticism has been that it’s been developed without much consultation with the region, it may not be what the region needs, and it’s duplicating efforts already under way.”
Tarte said the PPI is “another example” of one of the Pacific’s major international partners “pushing something which is going to hugely suck up resources and may not have much benefit on the ground”.
“These projects are often driven by the wrong reasons. It’s about access, it’s about influence and it’s about control,” she said.
‘Oceans of Peace’
The Pacific region, long a place where major foreign powers have vied for influence, has only grown in strategic importance in recent years. Beijing has increased its engagement with Pacific island countries over the past decade, much to the chagrin of traditional security allies the US and Australia, who fear a Chinese military presence in the region.
Lamenting the Pacific’s growing role as a geostrategic arena, warning that the “chances of miscalculation are high” as a multitude of competing interests collide, Fiji’s Prime Minister Rabuka has announced his Oceans of Peace concept.
“An Ocean of Peace must reflect the Pacific way … Humility, quiet leadership, reconciliation and communication,” he said of his initiative. “Whoever enters the Pacific region will be compelled to tone down and tune in to the ways of the Pacific.”
Currently more aspirational idea than a solid plan, Rabuka has said he will bring his proposal for discussion at the summit with the hope it will eventually be adopted by Pacific countries. Baker of the Australian National University said the idea “seems to be getting quite significant traction”, but leaders will want “more clarity around what it means in practice”.
“If there’s any progress on developing this idea, it’ll have to come with specifics about what an Ocean of Peace might mean for the region, what issues are encompassed within that,” she said.
Fiji’s Oceans of Peace concept also speaks to a longstanding, but growing, desire among Pacific nations to escape a lens often imposed on the region, as merely a battleground for the great powers, and assert some agency.
Keen said that Pacific leaders have raised concerns that an over-emphasis on geopolitics, particularly from outside parties, is “trumping development priorities”.
“In these forums, it has to be about Pacific Island development first, not about geopolitics,” she said. “They don’t want their region to be just a battlezone.”
One area in which the malign influence of external powers and the struggle for Pacific voices to be heard is still being acutely felt is the French overseas territory of New Caledonia, which has been a full member of the PIF since 2016.
Tensions there erupted in May over Paris’s plan to give the vote to more recent arrivals in a move Indigenous people fear will dilute their influence. The months of violence have resulted in deaths and billions of Euros in damage.
Keen says it is a regional security issue high on the agenda at next week’s meeting, but there are limits to what can actually be done. “They can express their concerns, but they can’t force action”, she says, as France claims it as a sovereign issue.
“[Pacific leaders] won’t be silenced on it, they can really push that they have these concerns about colonisation and the desire for decolonisation sovereignty,” she said. “They want to know that the Pacific people will have a voice.”