Reporting the Pacific’s climate plight

The 2^nd Edition of the Climate Vulnerability Monitor was launched last month on the sidelines of the 67^th Session of the United Nations General Assembly. The Monitor has sobering figures: 5 million people are currently estimated to die annually due to climate change and the carbon economy, 100 million people are expected to die by the end of the next decade, and under the most likely parameters the monetary cost is expected to reach 3.2 per cent of GDP by 2030.

Developing countries will face the majority of these impacts, and Pacific states are amongst the nations facing the most severe costs relative to GDP.

The report was commissioned by the Climate Vulnerability Forum (CVF), a bloc of countries – including Kiribati, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu and Vanuatu – identifying themselves as being ‘among the most vulnerable to the adverse impacts of climate change’. The CVF uses its collective voice to push for stronger action in the international system, and has been active in the UN system, including at Rio+20 and the climate change conferences, since its establishment in 2009.

The Monitor provides a global overview of the current and future costs in 2030 resulting from both climate change (such as sea level rise and droughts) and impacts of the carbon economy (for example, indoor pollution and oil spills). These costs are broken down into a number of categories in the report: industry change, natural disasters, habitat change and health impacts.

From this wide-scale assessment, the Monitor has successfully illustrated how pervasive and expensive the impacts of climate change and carbon pollution are globally. While global reports are useful for rallying support at important international meetings, such as the upcoming Doha Climate Change Conference, the Monitor lacks detail and is probably inaccurate at the country level in the Pacific.

The Pacific features prominently in the CVF, yet the region’s plight is poorly articulated by this report.
For example, Kiribati is predicted to have one death per year in 2030 due to climate change induced hunger. And perhaps more erroneously, this report suggests that there will be no increase in hunger mortality from the current estimate, also at one death per year.

When I travelled to Kiribati last month on a research assignment for PiPP, I was told that there were people being hospitalised because they were malnourished. Determining the cause of current hunger is difficult, but one does not require advanced statistical models to postulate that hunger will increase due to climate change in Kiribati.

While data in Pacific microstates is notoriously difficult to come by, inaccurate estimations may result in resource allocations away from the most pertinent issues if domestic decisions are made based on the data from influential reports such as this. From a cursory glance, there appear to be a number of other poorly substantiated estimations on other Pacific island countries, and the use of more accurate, up-to-date data would help improve the legitimacy of future Monitor reports. This weak approach towards the Pacific is not unique to the Monitor, but is symptomatic of the focus given to our region in most international reports.

Often it seems that the Pacific is tacked onto Asia for no better reason than hyphenation. Globally focused reports are useful, particularly for global collective action issues such as climate change, but care ought to be taken when assessing specific regions, sub-regions, and states.
Different sections of the report are available, and the full report can be read here [36 MB].

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