Monthly Archives: February 2016

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Cyclone Winston Wreaks Havoc on Fiji

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It was one of the South Pacific’s fiercest storms on record.

Source: https://thediplomat.com/ , By Catherine Putz
Cyclone Winston Wreaks Havoc on Fiji
Image Credit: NOAA

Cyclone Winston, which made a direct hit on the Fijian island of Koro over the weekend, was the first Category 5 cyclone to make landfall on Fijian territory in recorded history. The latest reported numbers indicate that 42 people have died as a result of the storm, with aid agencies warning that more may die in the storm’s aftermath as the small country rushes to reach communities on remote islands.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a U.S. agency, the storm’s winds were estimated to have reached 185 mph. Tom Di Liberto, a meteorologist with NOAA’s climate prediction center, wrote that it  “was one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the Southern Hemisphere.”

With the storm over, the recovery has begun but the task is monumental. The Fijian government declared a month-long state of emergency and put out calls for assistance. The storm did not make a direct hit on the country’s capital, Suva, but wreaked havoc on Koro and many of the country’s other islands. There are more than 330 Fijian islands, about a third of which are inhabited.

Fijian Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama gave a national address Wednesday in which he said, “Almost no part of our nation has been left unscarred.” Per the Sydney Morning Herald, Bainimarama focused attention on immediate concerns: food, water, and shelter.Cyclone Winston flattened homes, caused extensive coastal flooding and knocked out utility and communication systems. The storm also irreparably damaged sugarcane crops.

Radio New Zealand reports that New Zealand, Australia, and France have sent relief flights and the United States, China, India, and the EU have all offered financial assistance. The New Zealand Navy is dispatching the HMNZS Canterbury, a multi-role vessel,  and the HMNZS Wellington, an offshore patrol vessel, loaded with supplies to assist in recovery efforts.

Numerous aid agencies and international organizations have pledged help for Fiji. The Asian Development Bank committed to $2 million in emergency assistance. The Red Cross says it had mobilized more than 300 staff and volunteers in the islands and is releasing emergency funds to the Fiji Red Cross.

Days after the storm aid still seems sluggish for some, as Kim Baker Wilson makes clear in a report for Radio New Zealand from Rakiraki, a district on the northern edge of the island of Fiji’s main island of Vitu Levu. An estimated 1,000 homes were destroyed in Rakiraki.

And more is needed. Ewan Perrin, the newly-appointed permanent secretary for Communication and Information Technology, said that Fiji would “definitely need more international assistance.” From his comments reported by Radio New Zealand, Perrin said Fiji had “everything that we need at this stage” but that more assistance would be needed in the medium to long term.

Fiji’s economy is built on sugar and tourism, both of which are likely to take a massive hit in the storm’s wake.

Last year, Cyclone Pam made a direct hit on Vanuatu, devastating the country. In the months after the storm, Vanuatu’s political system nearly imploded with a quarter of the parliament jailed on corruption charges.

Pacific island nations–like Fiji–have led the charge on climate change globally, sounding the warning siren because their communities will be among the first affected by rising sea levels and worsening storms. Ahead of the Paris climate change talks last year, Bainimarama warned,“Unless the world acts decisively in the coming weeks to begin addressing the greatest challenge of our age, then the Pacific, as we know it, is doomed.”

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Green growth, activism & Pacific regionalism – in conversation with Fe’iloakitau Kaho Tevi

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Tess Newton Cain, Feiloakitau Kaho Tevi

To reboot Pacific Conversations, Tess recently met with Fei Tevi over coffee in Port Vila. You can hear a podcast of their conversation here and read a transcript here. For the highlights of what they discussed, read on…

I started by asking Fei to fill us in on his background and participation to date in development in the Pacific. Fei is now based in Vanuatu as a result of his wife Eleni’s position at the Melanesian Spearhead Group. He is working as a consultant to the governments of Solomon Islands and Vanuatu, assisting them in developing sustainable development policies and brings with him a wealth of experience in diplomacy, international relations and civil society activism and advocacy.

I am trained in diplomacy and international relations. I worked for the churches for a number of years, over a decade, both in Geneva, Switzerland and also here in the Pacific … prior to that, I was with the Pacific Concerns Resource Center, which is the secretariat to the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific Movement. Very formative years, ’96 to 2000.

During 2015, Fei participated in the Pacific Islands Development Forum (PIDF) in Suva and was also in Port Moresby for the Pacific Islands Forum leaders’ meeting. So I was keen to find out what he thought the relative strengths and weaknesses are of those regional groupings. In relation to the Pacific Islands Forum, Fei was quick to acknowledge the leadership input of Dame Meg Taylor and said he was watching with interest to see what the further impacts of that would be. He then told me categorically that he thought the issue of West Papua would be critical for the Pacific Islands Forum in the future:

And so this is what I’m saying. The Forum itself, the issue will be a determining factor how they treat West Papua and how they are able to get the political support around the issue. And it won’t go away.

In relation to the PIDF, Fei felt that it had achieved a significant success in 2015 by providing a space for Pacific island leaders to caucus around key issues, especially a joint position for the COP 21 talks in Paris, ahead of the Forum meeting in Port Moresby:

But I think PIDF had a role to play in harnessing the collective momentum of the countries, to stand together and say, “Yes, this is what we need.” And not to be pulled apart … We had one meeting after the other, and people saying the same things and coming right through and holding their stance at the Forum, saying “This is what we want, and this is what you get.” Despite all the pressures, despite all the checkbook diplomacy, everything was up to try and get the Pacific island countries to shift and take position. And kudos to them.

And then he provided a very important statement to define the role and place of the PIDF; one that I feel has not been so clearly and explicitly articulated before now:

…we need to have clarity on what PIDF is. It’s a space. Maintaining that space is a very difficult challenge. Everybody wants to cloud that space, Fiji included. Everybody wants to get that space, monopolise that space. As long as we can keep that space as an opportunity for people to come and talk about issues or challenges, talk about opportunities, discuss deals, that will form the character of PIDF. It’s not a CROP agency. It will not deliver on water tanks and water and sanitation programs. It’s not geared towards that.

We then moved on to discuss the concept of ‘green growth’ in the Pacific context, which is an aspect of development with which Fei has been very involved in recent years. I began by asking him how he conceptualises the Pacific concept of green growth, given that it appears to be something that has yet to achieve one accepted definition globally:

In the work that we’ve been doing over the last 3-4 years, in the Pacific, green growth has to do with lifestyles; green growth has to do with a sustainable approach to development. Green growth has to do with—the maturity of the countries to determine where and how they want to address development.

He sees the Pacific conceptualisation of green growth as being one that goes beyond technological interventions. So, next, I asked Fei to give me some sense of what green growth means in a practical sense. How can it or should it influence the way Pacific island countries do business? He took as his starting point the resilience of the communities in Vanuatu further to the impacts of Cyclone Pam last year.

…that for me expresses a set of values that for me green growth encompasses … And that’s part of, I guess, a sense of maturity that we are going through. The recognition that there is something that we can learn and that the future of the region, in terms of green growth, it’s within us. We need to find the tools to identify this and to identify those components of what we can achieve. So that’s one example we can quote. Examples of which time and time again, the resilient nature of these communities has expressed itself with or without help or foreign assistance. So we need to think about that. We need to think how that defines, how that defines growth for us.

Drawing on Fei’s longstanding and extensive involvement with civil society activism in our region, I asked him how he assessed the current capacity within that sector to influence national and regional decision-making about the important issues that we face. He reflected on the changing nature of activism in the region, which he felt had been blunted as a result of becoming ‘institutionalised’ in the 1990s. However, more recently, he had seen resurgence particularly around the issues of self-determination for West Papua and climate change activism:

You have the new environmental activists that are coming through, the young Solwarans, the Young Solwara movement, the Wan Solwara movement, the other groups that have— … PICAN, Pacific Islands Climate Action Network. These are all young, new activists that are coming through.

I expressed a concern that a weakness for civil society at present in our region is a lack of access to and influence with governments. Fei was quite clear that governments in the region should do much more to include civil society in relevant discussions and policy formulation:

… I think we cannot point five of our fingers at civil society. I think there’s a lot of responsibility also that governments have to take on in terms of how they deal with civil society… there has to be a revisiting of what civil service means, and being a civil servant. You are a servant of the government, and by government means the people. So you serve the people. It’s not the other way around. The people don’t come in on their knees to come and ask for service. They shouldn’t. Citizens, rightfully, ask and request their assistance, and their service. Then I think there needs to be a give and take in this discussion.

Finally, we discussed the impact of the election of ‘Akilisi Pohiva as prime minister of Tonga and what it means for democracy in that country. He was quick to acknowledge that the early months have proved disappointing in some ways:

I think in the longer run, in the medium to long term, I think there’s a lot of benefit that can accrue from ‘Akilisi and his time, and his government being in place. I think there’s a lot of lessons that can be taken from the first year or so of ‘Akilisi’s government. A lot of questionable decisions.

He then went on to make a very interesting observation in relation to what we can expect from Tonga in terms of regional participation:

There is more good than bad—there’s more strengths than weaknesses that’s coming out of this government. The fact that, you know, Tonga has taken a strong stance on the issue of West Papua is a token of that and you will see, you will see this government taking on regional issues in a much more stronger way than in the past. The first year has been about consolidating and shifting the country at the national level. I think you will see Tonga playing a more influential role in the region in the future.

…something to look forward to, for sure.

Tess Newton Cain is a Visiting Fellow at the Development Policy Centre. Fe’iloakitau Kaho Tevi is a consultant to the governments of Solomon Islands and Vanuatu on sustainable development policies, and has experience in diplomacy, international relations and civil society activism and advocacy.

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Sea-level rise ‘could last twice as long as human history’

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Research warns of the long timescale of climate change impacts unless urgent action is taken to cut emissions drastically

Huge sea-level rises caused by climate change will last far longer than the entire history of human civilisation to date, according to new research, unless the brief window of opportunity of the next few decades is used to cut carbon emissions drastically.

Even if global warming is capped at governments’ target of 2C – which is already seen as difficult – 20% of the world’s population will eventually have to migrate away from coasts swamped by rising oceans. Cities including New York, London, Rio de Janeiro, Cairo, Calcutta, Jakarta and Shanghai would all be submerged.

“Much of the carbon we are putting in the air from burning fossil fuels will stay there for thousands of years,” said Prof Peter Clark, at Oregon State University in the US and who led the new work. “People need to understand that the effects of climate change won’t go away, at least not for thousands of generations.”

“The long-term view sends the chilling message of what the real risks and consequences are of the fossil fuel era,” said Prof Thomas Stocker, at the University of Bern, Switzerland and also part of the research team. “It will commit us to massive adaptation efforts so that for many, dislocation and migration becomes the only option.”

The report, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, notes most research looks at the impacts of global warming by 2100 and so misses one of the biggest consequences for civilisation – the long-term melting of polar ice caps and sea-level rise.

This is because the great ice sheets take thousand of years to react fully to higher temperatures. The researchers say this long-term view raises moral questions about the kind of environment being passed down to future generations.

The research shows that even with climate change limited to 2C by tough emissions cuts, sea level would rise by 25 metres over the next 2,000 years or so and remain there for at least 10,000 years – twice as long as human history. If today’s burning of coal, oil and gas is not curbed, the sea would rise by 50m, completely changing the map of the world.

“We can’t keep building seawalls that are 25m high,” said Clark. “Entire populations of cities will eventually have to move.”

By far the greatest contributor to the sea level rise – about 80% – would be the melting of the Antarctic ice sheet. Another new study in Nature Climate Changepublished on Monday reveals that some large Antarctic ice sheets are dangerously close to losing the sea ice shelves that hold back their flow into the ocean.

Huge floating sea ice shelves around Antarctica provide buttresses for the glaciers and ice sheets on the continent. But when they are lost to melting, as happened the with Larsen B shelf in 2002, the speed of flow into the ocean can increase eightfold.

Johannes Fürst, at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany and colleagues, calculated that just 5% of the ice shelf in the Bellingshausen Sea and 7% in the Amundsen Sea can be lost before their buttressing effect vanishes. “This is worrying because it is in these regions that we have observed the highest rates of ice-shelf thinning over the past two decades,” he said.

Avoiding the long-term swamping of many of the world’s greatest cities is already difficult, given the amount carbon dioxide already released into the atmosphere. “Sea-level rise is already baked into the system,” said Prof Stocker, one of the world’s leading climate scientists.

However, the rise could be reduced and delayed if carbon is removed from the atmosphere in the future, he said: “If you are very optimistic and think we will be in the position by 2050 or 2070 to have a global scale carbon removal scheme – which sounds very science fiction – you could pump down CO2 levels. But there is no indication that this is technically possible.” A further difficulty is the large amount of heat and CO2 already stored in the oceans.

Prof Stocker said: “The actions of the next 30 years are absolutely crucial for putting us on a path that avoids the [worst] outcomes and ensuring, at least in the next 200 years, the impacts are limited and give us time to adapt.”

The researchers argue that a new industrial revolution is required to deliver a global energy system that emits no carbon at all. They conclude: “The success of the [UN climate summit in] Paris meeting, and of every future meeting, must be evaluated not only by levels of national commitments, but also by looking at how they will lead ultimately to the point when zero-carbon energy systems become the obvious choice for everyone.”

“We are making choices that will affect our grandchildren’s grandchildren and beyond,” said Prof Daniel Schrag, at Harvard University in the US. “We need to think carefully about the long timescales of what we are unleashing.