Summary Report No.175: The Pacific and its peoples in a changing climate: Workshop report
This Summary Report addresses the key issue areas, summarises core arguments made, and focuses on selected findings with particular relevance for research as well as for policy and practice from the ‘The Pacific and its Peoples in a Changing Climate: Pasifika Wisdom and Relational Security’ workshop. This workshop was co-hosted by the Toda Peace Institute and the Australian National University Pacific Institute. It was held in Canberra in September 2023 and attended by around 50 researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from Pacific Island countries, Australia, and New Zealand with expertise on climate change, its environmental, social, and cultural effects, climate security, and environmental peacebuilding.
This publication finds the following:
- There is a need to criticize and de-colonize the climate change discourse, which includes the need to challenge the colonialism ‘within us’ that has led people(s) in the Pacific to imitate the ‘developed’ world.
- Pacific people(s) are (not) vulnerable/Pacific people(s) are (not) resilient. Both are true at the same time. Which narratives are foregrounded depends on context, and foregrounding one or the other is highly political.
- Relocation is not an option/relocation is an option. Immobility and mobility are not mutually exclusive; they go together. Pacific people(s) are closely connected to place; their ontological or relational security is fundamentally em-placed; people/ land/ancestors are one. Hence people do not want to relocate.
- Time is running out/slowing down is required. The impacts of climate change are cascading and accelerating. The time to prevent catastrophic climate change is now. Rapid action is required. There is no time to waste. Yet Pasifika's thinking and acting are grounded in slowness.
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