Pacific in peril: UN urges Australia to block new coal and gas projects

Wealthy countries like Australia must immediately phase out fossil fuels and block new coal projects and oil and gas expansion to drastically reduce greenhouse emissions, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said in Tonga on Tuesday.

The UN issued a global SOS – what Guterres described as a “save our seas”, releasing new data from NASA and the World Meteorological Organisation that showed sea-level rises had doubled since the 1990s.

Fiji residents are among our Pacific Island neighbours under threat from rising seas.Credit: Eddie Jim

Relative sea-level rises in the Pacific were more than double the global average, with melting glaciers and ice sheets from Greenland and the Antarctic causing accelerating sea-level rise.

At the Pacific Islands Forum, where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese will formalise a new climate migration agreement with Tuvalu, Guterres said the very future of island states in the Pacific region was under existential threat.

“Without drastic cuts to emissions, the Pacific islands can expect at least 15 centimetres of additional sea-level rise by mid-century, and more than 30 days per year of coastal flooding in some places,” Guterres told reporters at the forum.

Especially hard hit were low-lying Pacific nations, which faced relative sea-level rises more than double, in some instances, global averages.

Emeritus Professor Lesley Hughes, a co-author of the landmark 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, said sea levels rose at variable rates depending on the warmth of ocean waters (warm water expands) and proximity to the magnetic poles, and the variability of coastlines.

The UN climate report showed oceans had absorbed more than 90 per cent of the heat generated by greenhouse gases since 1971, creating further water expansion and contributing to sea-level rises.

“These latest reports are extremely concerning,” Hughes said. “They are reinforcing the urgency with which we must tackle emissions, and it’s reinforcing the notion that we simply cannot keep opening up new fossil fuel developments in Australia or elsewhere. Because that’s just feeding the problem.”

The new report by the UN’s Climate Action Team, Surging seas in a warming world, includes fresh data from NASA showing the global average sea-level rise had already reached 9.4 centimetres.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres, pictured in Tonga, has issued a global SOS for oceans.Credit: United Nations

Apia, in Samoa, had recorded a 31-centimetre sea-level rise since 1990, while the average number of flooding days was projected to reach 35 days a year by 2050, up from five.

Without mentioning Australia directly, Guterres warned that wealthy G20 nations were the biggest global emitters of greenhouse emissions, and must be “out in front” on reducing emissions placing Pacific nations in “grave danger”.

Crucially, this meant immediately ending new coal projects and new oil and gas expansion.

“The world must look to the Pacific and listen to the science,” he said. “This is a crazy situation: rising seas are a crisis entirely of humanity’s making.”

His comments will increase pressure on Australia and other G20 countries to deliver improved national climate action plans by next year, as committed last year in Dubai at the COP28 summit.

In 2022, Australia reaffirmed its commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent, from 2005 levels, and reaffirmed a target of net zero emissions by 2050.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese arrived in Tonga on Tuesday for the Pacific Islands Forum, where he and Tuvalu’s Prime Minister, Feleti Teo, were to announce that a landmark climate resettlement treaty signed last year had entered into force.

The Falepili Union created a special visa pathway for the Pacific nation’s residents to escape the threat of climate change and give Australia effective veto power over any possible security pact between Tuvalu and China.

A raft of scientific studies on the climate “tipping point” found exceeding the long-term temperature threshold of 1.5 degrees’ warming would likely lead to the irreversible collapse of the Greenland Ice Sheet and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the UN climate report found.

Suega Apelu bathes a child in Tuvalu, which is facing the disproportionate impacts of climate change.Credit: Getty Images

Average global sea-level rises have more than doubled over the past 30 years, from 0.21 centimetres a year between 1993 and 2002, to 0.48 centimetres a year between 2014 and 2023.

While the sea-level rises may sound small, Guterres said, “a doubling in speed shows that the
phenomenon is accelerating in an unusual and uncontrolled way”.

“Emerging science suggests that a two-degree temperature rise could potentially lead to the loss of almost all the Greenland ice sheet, and much of the West Antarctica ice sheet,” Guterres said.

“That would mean condemning future generations to unstoppable sea-level rise of up to 20 metres – over a period of millennia.

“At three degrees of warming – our current trajectory – the rise in sea level would
happen much more quickly – over centuries.”

Professor Nathan Bindoff, a climate scientist and co-author on three IPCC reports, said the report’s focus – the South-West Pacific – was of crucial importance to Australia.

“It’s raising the alarm bells around the accelerating nature of climate change from observations for this region … all the standard measures of environmental indicators – like sea level, like sea-surface temperatures, like ocean acidification – all of these have been accelerating,” he said.

“For these islands, it’s especially important because they are low – an average elevation of one to two metres across the small island developing states – and it means they’re especially vulnerable to sea-level rises.”

The latest advice from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that global greenhouse gas emissions would need to be cut by 43 per cent by 2030 – compared with 2019 levels – to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees.

Also on Tuesday, a coalition of five climate and justice organisations in Australia and the Pacific – ActionAid Australia, Oxfam Australia, Climate Action Network Australia, the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network, and the New Zealand Climate Action Network – issued a joint call for $US1 trillion ($1.47 trillion) in global finance to support low-income countries bearing the brunt of the climate crisis.

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