The goal: make the world respond to the urgency of climate change.
No one nation can solve a problem as complex as climate change alone, but together bands of nations can make a difference. These mostly poor nations with little hard power leveraged the moral force of their peril to shape the global 2015 Paris Agreement. During a three-day meeting in advance of the 2017 Paris climate talks, government officials and civil-society leaders from 15 Pacific nations drew up a list of what they wanted out of the approaching negotiations. The goals included a halt to new coal mines in countries that still supported the industry,
The incoming 2017 Republican Administration in the U.S. was hostile to climate science, and the E.U.’s attention had turned to Brexit. So Fiji pioneered a program called the “Talanoa Dialogue,” the name for the national tradition of listening and sharing.
The world remains on track for more than 3°C of warming if countries implement only their current plans, according to a December 2018 analysis from Climate Action Tracker.
“I know it’s very hard for the Secretary-General to get 200 nations to come together and decide on one thing, but we need the political will, the political commitment to fight this,” said Fiji Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama . “If we don’t get through this, the crisis will turn into chaos, and chaos means the end of the world for us.”, Earthlobbyist David Carr adds ” I believe this will be the fate for humanity by heat, extreme weather, air pollution, crop destruction and war if we do not address climate change now.” Miami’s permeable limestone subsurface exposes the city to the same peril. New Orleans and Houston already face the threat of supersized storms that will only get worse with time.
This post was created with content from TIME magazine