A young Samoan climate activist says the UN’s new guidance on children’s rights to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is “the first step to global change”.

The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child have affirmed for the first time that climate change is affecting children’s rights to life, survival and development.

“General Comment No. 26” specifies that countries are responsible not only for protecting children’s rights from immediate harm, but also for foreseeable violations of their rights in the future.

• READ MORE: New UN guidance affirms children’s right to a clean, healthy environment
• UN child climate rights

It found the climate emergency, collapse of biodiversity and pervasive pollution “is an urgent and systemic threat to children’s rights globally”.

Children have been at the forefront of the fight against climate change, urging governments and corporations to take action to safeguard their lives and the future, said committee member Philip Jaffé.

Samoan-born Aniva Clarke, 17, is an environmental activist based in New Zealand. She has been a climate advocate since 10 years old.

Amplifying Pacific youth voices
Growing up in Samoa, she helped to amplify Pacific youth voices about climate change.

“Children and young people have been calling on action for so long and I think this is one of the many things and sort of products of that action working.”

Clarke was one of 12 global youth advisors on the inaugural Children’s Advisory Team, established to facilitate youth consultations on children’s rights, the environment and climate change.

She said the comments “create a framework” that hold 196 UN countries to account.

“They have recognised that there is a call and need for action,” she said.

Countries that have ratified the UN Child Rights Convention are urged to take immediate action including towards phasing out fossil fuels and shifting to renewable energy sources, improving air quality, ensuring access to clean water, and protecting biodiversity.

A lot to lose for Pacific nations
Clarke said Pacific Island nations had a lot to lose and larger nations responsible for emitting the most carbon emissions must take a stand to preserve the environment for future generations.

“The climate crisis is a child rights crisis,” said Paloma Escudero, UNICEF Special Adviser on Advocacy for Child Rights and Climate Action.

Clarke is worried that future generations are at risk of not only losing their land but their “culture”.

“We lose our ancient traditions … we live off the land but we live for the land,” she said.

For island groups like Tokelau and Tuvalu, which are low lying atolls, if climate change continues, then “those communities risk losing their islands completely”.

The committee received more than 16,000 contributions from children in 121 nations, who shared the effects of environmental degradation and climate change on their lives and communities.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Around the world, today – July 26 —  is commemorated as the International Day for the Conservation of the Mangrove Ecosystem.

In 2015, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) during its General Conference proclaimed the day, also known as the World Mangrove Day.

It was first commemorated in 2016.

• READ MORE: Other climate crisis reports

Mangrove forest conservation is crucial for global strategies on climate change mitigation as it is one of the most carbon-rich ecosystems in the world today.

According to the Department of Forestry, Fiji has more than 46,600 ha of mangrove forests which is approximately 4 percent of Fiji’s forest cover.

The ecosystem goods and services provided by mangroves include the provision of firewood, saltwater resistant building materials, traditional medicines and natural dyes.

Mangrove forests are productive fishing grounds and fulfil an important role as nurseries and habitat for a wide range of fish and invertebrate species which is crucial for food security and coastal livelihoods.

From masi to erosion defence
From the use of mangrove as a main ingredient for masi printing dyes to its role as a defence against soil erosion, mangroves are indeed plants with multiple benefits and their significance goes beyond just carbon storage.

However, despite the many benefits of the mangrove ecosystem, it continues to encounter challenges, including new infrastructure and development, pollution, and over-use.

In her Mangrove Day address, UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay warned that mangroves were in danger.

“Mangroves are in danger — it has been estimated that more than three quarters of mangroves in the world are now threatened and with them all the aquatic and terrestrial organisms that depend on them,” she said.

“In the face of the climate emergency, we must go even further, for mangroves also serve as key carbon sinks that we cannot allow to disappear.

“Beyond protection and restoration, we also need global awareness. This means educating and alerting the public, not only in schools, but wherever possible.”

Around the Pacific, the project on the Management of Blue Carbon Ecosystems (MACBLUE project) focusing on conservation and management of mangrove ecosystems and seagrass meadows is being implemented in four countries: Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.

Close collaboration
“The project is implemented by the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ Pacific) together with the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) and the Pacific Community (SPC) as regional partners.

The project in close collaboration with the four governments will utilize remote sensing approaches to map the extent of seagrass and mangrove ecosystems, assess if the areas in the partner countries are increasing or decreasing, and model related carbon storage capacity and ecosystem services.

The resulting data will support government partners in their efforts to strategically develop and implement conservation, management, and rehabilitation efforts.

The integration of traditional use and ownership rights in national blue economy and ocean governance approaches is seen as a key priority.

MACBLUE Project director Raphael Linzatti said the implementation of the project would see support provided towards the four countries with mangrove conservation and management.

“The support will follow a demand-driven approach and tailored to address the needs and priorities of each partner country,” Linzatti said.

“The MACBLUE project will also allow for closer regional and international collaboration and building regional capacity through training activities and knowledge exchange, supporting long-term expertise within the region.”

The project will be implemented until December 2025 and is commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection under its International Climate Initiative.

Joeli Bili works for the German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ Pacific). The views expressed are the author’s alone.

There was euphoria at the campus of the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Suva in Fiji last Thursday when news came from New York that a historic resolution on climate action had been adopted unanimously at the United Nations General Assembly.

The resolution refers to the International Court of Justice case that would result in an advisory opinion clarifying nations’ obligations to tackle the climate crisis and the consequences they should face for inaction that could be cited in climate court cases in the future.

The campaign for the landmark resolution, supported by more than 130 member countries, started its journey in 2019 when a group of final-year law students conceived the project as an extra-curricular activity known as “learning by doing” on USP’s international environmental law course at their campus in Port Vila in Vanuatu.

• READ MORE: Vanuatu hails ‘historic resolution’ in climate battle on the world stage
• UN adopts Vanuatu-led resolution in ‘epic win’ on climate change
• Other Pacific climate reports

An elated Dr Justin Rose, adjunct associate professor of law and coordinator of the 2019 class where the campaign originated, told University World News from New York where he had joined his former students for the UN vote that it was any lecturers dream to see such results achieved by the students he had guided.

“Teaching and learning about climate change and climate change governance can increasingly be somewhat depressing — I teach what are essentially the same problems, and the same proposed but unimplemented solutions, that were taught to me at ANU [Australian National University] in 1992 when I studied the course I now coordinate.

“Those same problems and solutions have been ignored for so long that catastrophic climate impacts are occurring,” notes Rose.

Then in 2019 he set up an extra-curricular exercise that students could volunteer for.

A different skillset
“There were 20 participants from a class of 140,” he said, recalling how the project started.

“It was a way to teach a different skillset to those interested in doing some extra work and to empower them to do something positive about climate change.

“The exercise was, firstly, to discuss among the group the most productive legal action Pacific island countries could initiate within international law, and secondly to prepare letters and a brief that could be sent to PIF [Pacific Island Forum] leaders seeking to persuade them to implement it,” explained Rose.

When, at the annual summit meeting of the PIF leaders in 2019, the leaders only “noted” the proposal, the students did not give up but instead formed an organisation — Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC) — to start what soon became a global youth campaign for an International Court of Justice climate change opinion.

Their key objective was to convince the governments of the world to seek an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice answering a question that would develop new international law integrating legal obligations around environmental treaties and basic human rights.

They were soon joined by the World’s Youth for Climate Justice.

The world ‘has listened’
“We are just ecstatic that the world has listened to the Pacific youth and has chosen to take action. From what started in a Pacific classroom four years ago,” noted Cynthia Houniuhi, the Solomon Islands-based president of PISFCC, who was one of the original law students at USP that initiated the project.

“We in the Pacific live the climate crisis. My home country Solomon Islands is struggling. Through no fault of our own, we are living with devastating tropical cyclones, flooding, biodiversity loss and sea-level rise.

“The intensity and frequency of it is increasing each time. We have contributed the least to the global emissions that are drowning our land,” said Houniuhi in a statement released from New York.

“The vote in the United Nations is a step in the right direction for climate justice.”

The International Court of Justice will now hold hearings and hear evidence on the obligations of states in respect to climate change, with a view to handing down an advisory opinion in 2024.

A favourable opinion should make it easier to hold polluting countries legally accountable for failing to tackle the climate emergency, possibly with compensatory payments given to victim countries.

“This isn’t the end of our campaign for climate justice. The court process will unfold, taking evidence from around the world,” said Vishal Prasad, a campaigner for PISFCC and a graduate from USP in politics and law.

“The real work begins in applying whatever the court advisory opinion says in domestic law, especially in countries that continue to drive the climate crisis with their toxic emissions.”

Merilyn Temakon, an assistant lecturer in legislation and intellectual property law at USP, said: “I am very proud indeed of these students as one of their leaders is Solomon Yeo whom I had the privilege of teaching.

“I was invited on one or two occasions to sit in the main conference room at Emalus (Vanuatu campus) and to listen to their presentations on the effect of climate change,” she recalls.

“At that time there were only a few active members, but now the whole of the PICs [Pacific Island Countries] and half the globe are behind their submission.”

Countries face escalating losses
USP politics and international affairs Associate Professor Sandra Tarte, who sent out an email to all colleagues on March 30 saying “Colleagues, we did it”, told University World News that the resolution emerged out of “mounting frustration at the mismatch between the global community’s rhetoric and action on climate change amid escalating losses for countries such as Vanuatu, which face an existential threat due to sea-level rise”.

The frustration spawned a social movement led by Vanuatu law students turned youth activists, and work on the resolution was led by Indigenous lawyers in the Pacific, she said.

Vanuatu’s Prime Minister Ishmael Kalsakau, speaking after the vote at the UN General Assembly, said: “Today we have witnessed a win for climate justice of epic proportions. Vanuatu sees today’s historic resolution as the beginning of a new era in multilateral climate cooperation.”

Solomon Yeo, one of the students involved in the initial project at USP, who was part of Vanuatu’s delegation to the UN General Assembly meeting, argues that securing the resolution demonstrates that Pacific youth can play a part in tackling climate change.

“Today we celebrate four years of arduous work in convincing our leaders and raising global awareness of the initiative,” he told Radio New Zealand, speaking from New York.

“The adopted resolution is a testament that Pacific youth can play an instrumental role in advancing global climate action [and] young people’s voices must remain an integral part of the process.”

“We are enormously proud of everything our alumni at PISFCC have achieved,” said USP vice-chancellor and president Professor Pal Ahluwalia in a statement.

“These are exactly the kind of high-achieving publicly minded graduates that we aim to produce.”

Dr Kalinga Seneviratne is consultant lecturer with the University of the South Pacific journalism programme based in Suva. This article was first published by University World News and is republished with permission.

COMMENT: By Ralph Regenvanu and Seve Paeniu

The cycle is repeating itself. A tropical cyclone of frightening strength strikes a Pacific island nation, and leaves a horrifying trail of destruction and lost lives and livelihoods in its wake.

Earlier this month in Vanuatu it was two category 4 cyclones within 48 hours of each other.

The people affected wake up having nowhere to go and lack the basic necessities to survive.

• READ MORE: Some Pacific nations ‘won’t survive’ if NZ and world drop the climate ball
• Port Vila call to phase out fossil fuels
• UN calls for rapid, ambitious action to tackle climate crisis
• IPCC report: world must cut emissions and urgently adapt to climate realities
• The AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023

International media publishes grim pictures of the damage to our infrastructure and people’s homes, quickly followed by an outpouring of thoughts, prayers and praise for our courage and resilience.

We then set out to rebuild our countries.

The Pacific island countries are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, and Vanuatu is the most vulnerable country in the world, according to a recent study. Our countries emit minuscule amounts of greenhouse gases, but bear the brunt of extreme events primarily caused by the carbon emissions of major polluters, and the world’s failure to break its addiction to fossil fuels.

The science is clear: fossil fuels are the main drivers of the climate crisis and need to be phased out rapidly, as the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report once again confirms. The International Energy Agency (IEA) has shown that ending the expansion of all fossil fuel production is an urgent first step towards limiting warming to 1.5C.

Driven by greed
The climate crisis is driven by the greed of an exploitative industry and its enablers. It is unacceptable that countries and companies are still planning to produce more than double the amount of fossil fuels that the world can withstand by 2030 if we are to limit warming to 1.5C, a limit Pacific countries fought hard to secure in the Paris agreement.

As the UN Secretary-General António Guterres has repeatedly declared, fossil fuels are a dead end. Governments must pursue a rapid and equitable phase-out of fossil fuels.

Countries cannot continue to justify new fossil fuel projects on the grounds of development, or the energy crisis. It is our reliance on fossil fuels that has left our energy infrastructure vulnerable to conflict and devastating climate impacts, left billions of people without energy access, and left investment in more flexible and resilient clean energy systems lagging behind what is needed.

Transitioning away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy is crucial to mitigating the impacts of climate change and ensuring a sustainable future for Pacific island countries and the world.

This requires ambitious collective effort from governments, businesses and individuals around the globe to transition towards renewable energy systems that centre the needs of communities and avoid replicating the harms of fossil fuel systems, while supporting those most affected by the transition.

Transitioning to clean energy and battling climate change is also a human rights and justice issue. This is why our countries will soon be asking the UN General Assembly to request an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the obligations of states under international law to protect the environment and the climate.

We urge all countries to support us in that endeavour.

Planning our transition
We acknowledge that Pacific countries are still reliant on fossil fuels for our daily lives and our economy. This is why we are planning our own just transition.

Last week, Pacific ministers and international partners met in cyclone-stricken Vanuatu to chart our collective way forward. We have affirmed a new commitment to work tirelessly to create a fossil fuel free Pacific, recognising that phasing out fossil fuels is not only in our best interest to avoid the worst of climate catastrophe — it is also an opportunity to promote economic development and innovation that we must seize.

By investing in renewable energy sources, we can build resilient, sustainable economies that benefit our people and the planet; and momentum for this shift is already building.

Last year at Cop27 in Egypt, more than 80 countries supported the phasing out of all fossil fuels. We must drive this new ambition around the world. Pacific nations will continue to spearhead global efforts to achieve an unqualified, equitable end to the world’s dependence on fossil fuels.

We will raise our collective voices at Cop28 and through leading initiatives such as the Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance and the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.

We know what needs to be done to keep 1.5C alive, and are aware of the small and shrinking window which we have left to achieve it. We are doing our part and urge the rest of the world to do theirs.

Ralph Regenvanu is Vanuatu’s Minister of Climate Change, Adaptation, Meteorology and Geohazards, Energy, Environment and Disaster Risk Management. Seve Paeniu is the Minister of Finance for Tuvalu. This article was first published by The Guardian and has been republished with the permission of the authors.

There is “is much to win by trying” to take action on climate change — that is a key finding in a major new international climate report the UN chief is calling a “survival guide for humanity”.

It is something of a mic drop moment for the army of scientists who wrote it — the culmination of seven years’ work and three previous lengthy reports.

Thousands of scientific studies and nearly 8000 pages of findings have been boiled down in the latest UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, released overnight.

• READ MORE:  UN calls for rapid, ambitious action to tackle climate crisis
• IPCC report: world must cut emissions and urgently adapt to climate realities
• The AR6 Synthesis Report: Climate Change 2023

In a nutshell, it said huge changes were needed to stave off the worst climate predictions but it was not too late.

“This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action & shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.” – #IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee on the release of #IPCC’s Synthesis Report.

Read here https://t.co/zAMzd12lR7 pic.twitter.com/YcCqIHxuLJ

— IPCC (@IPCC_CH) March 20, 2023

Pacific Climate Warriors Te Whanganui-a-Tara coordinator Kalo Afeaki agrees there is no time for despair.

“My family live in Tonga, my father has an export business, my brother works with [him], his family depends on that livelihood,” he said.

“We do not have the luxury of being able to turn our backs on the climate crisis because we are living with it daily.”

The IPCC authors were optimistic significant change can happen fast — pointing to the massive falls in the price of energy from the sun and wind.

New Zealand has seen a big increase in the number of renewable energy projects in the works.

University of Otago senior lecturer Dr Daniel Kingston said the world had the tools it needed to reduce emission.

“We can still do something about this problem, and every small change that we make makes a difference and decreases the likelihood of major, abrupt, irreversible changes in the climate system.”

Those impacts need to be avoided at all costs — there are tipping points after which comes staggering sea level rise, storms and heat waves that could imperil swathes of humanity.

No country too small
Aotearoa New Zealand has an important role to play. It is one of the largest emitters per capita in the OECD, and its emissions, combined with the other smaller countries, adds up to about two-thirds of the world’s total.

New Zealand’s gross emission peaked in 2005 and have essentially plateaued, while other countries, including the UK and US, have actually made reductions.

Dr Kingston said Aotearoa finally had comprehensive emissions reduction plans on the books.

“Now’s the time to be doubling-down on our climate change policies, not pressing pause or scaling them back in any way.”

Action would never be cheaper than it was now, and not making enough cuts would be far more expensive in the long run.

Humans at fault
Meanwhile, the reports showed human activities had unequivocally caused global surface temperatures to rise: No ifs, no buts.

Massey University emeritus professor of sustainable energy and climate mitigation Ralph Sims said emissions needed to be slashed in the cities and the countryside alike.

Without a doubt farmers needed to cut methane emissions, but people also needed to eat less meat, he said.

Professor Sims said cities had a huge role to play.

“Design the cities around… public transport. [Putting] it onto the cities to plan for a more viable future means that local people can get involved locally.”

Afeaki said some Pacific nations would not survive unless the world got real about cutting emissions.

“When people are feeling disheartened they really need to understand the humans on the other side of this crisis,” he said.

“It is easy to be deterred by numbers, by the science, which isn’t always positive, but you have to also remember that this is happening to someone.”

Afeaki said Pacific communities’ experience living with climate change meant they should be given lead roles in coming up with solutions.

The IPCC scientists have now done their part, there likely will not be another report like this until the end of the decade. It is now time for the government, and for everybody, to act.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

This decade is the critical moment for making deep, rapid cuts to emissions, and acting to protect people from dangerous climate impacts we can no longer avoid, according to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The synthesis report is the culmination of seven years of global and in-depth assessments of various aspects of climate change.

It reiterates that the world is now about 1.1℃ warmer than during pre-industrial times. This already results in more frequent and more intense extreme weather, causing complex disruption and suffering for communities worldwide.

• READ MORE: ‘It can be done. It must be done’: IPCC delivers definitive report on climate change, and where to now
• Floods, cyclones, thunderstorms: is climate change to blame for New Zealand’s summer of extreme weather?
• Other climate reports

Many are woefully unprepared.

Key takeaway from #IPCC 2023 Synthesis Report for every nation, business, investor & individual who contributes to #climate change: we must move from climate procrastination to climate activation. And we must do it today.https://t.co/wqPf6CveMB

— Inger Andersen (@andersen_inger) March 20, 2023

The report stresses our current pace and scale of action are insufficient to reduce rising global temperatures and secure a liveable future for all. But it also highlights that we already have many feasible and effective options to cut emissions and better protect communities if we act now.

Many countries have already achieved and maintained significant emissions reductions for more than ten years. Overall, however, global emissions are up by 12 percent on 2010 and 54 percent higher than in 1990.

The largest rise comes from carbon dioxide (from the burning of fossil fuels and industrial processes), followed by methane.

The world is expected to cross the 1.5℃ temperature threshold during the 2030s (at the current level of action). Already, the effects of climate change are not linear and every increment of warming will bring rapidly escalating hazards, exacerbating more intense heatwaves and floods, ocean warming and coastal inundation.

These complex events are particularly severe for children, the elderly, Indigenous and local communities, and disabled people.

But in agreeing to this report, governments have now recognised that human rights and questions of equity, loss and damage are central to effective climate action.

New @IPCC_CH Synthesis Report released
One of the most impressive figures relates to the fairness across generations. The generation of my kids born in 2010s will face substantially more heatwaves, heavy rainfall and droughts during an average lifetime than their grandparents. pic.twitter.com/hWivpq74iO

— Erich Fischer (@erichfischer) March 20, 2023

This report also breaks emissions down to households — 10 percent of the highest-emitting households contribute 40-45 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, while 50 percent of the lowest-emitting households (including small islands communities), contribute less than 15 percent of overall greenhouse gases.

Climate-resilient development
The report points to solutions for climate-resilient development, a process which integrates actions to reduce or avoid emissions with those to protect people to advance sustainability. Examples include health improvements that come from broadening access to clean energy and contribute to better air quality.

But the choices we make need to be locally relevant and socially acceptable. And they have to be made urgently, because our options for resilient action are progressively reduced with every increment of warming above 1.5℃.

This report is also significant for recognising the importance of Indigenous knowledge and local community insights to help advance ambitious climate planning and effective climate leadership.

Cities can make a big difference
Cities are key drivers of emissions. They generate around 70 percent of carbon dioxide emissions globally, and this is rising largely through transport systems relying on fossil fuels, building materials and household consumption.

But this also means urban spaces are where we can really exercise climate leadership. Decisions made at the level of local councils are going to be significant globally in terms of bringing national and global emissions down and protecting people.

Cities are sites for solutions where we can decarbonise transport and increase green spaces. While tackling climate risks can feel overwhelming, acting at the city level is a way communities can have more control over reducing emissions and where local action can really make a difference to our quality of life.

We know there is much more money flowing into mitigation than adaptation. But we have to do both now, and move beyond adaptation focused on physical protection (such as sea walls).

We also need to be thinking really carefully about green infrastructure (trees and parks), low-carbon transport and social protection for communities, which includes income replacement, better healthcare, education and housing.

This report was particularly difficult to negotiate because we now live in a changed reality. More and more countries are experiencing very significant losses and damages. As countries face increasingly extreme weather events, the stakes are higher.

Governments everywhere, in my view as a political scientist, are now facing hard choices about how to protect their own national interests while also making significant efforts to tackle our global climate crisis.

In negotiations, larger countries can dominate debate and it can take a long time to get to agreement. This puts enormous pressure on smaller nations, including Pacific delegations with fewer people and diplomatic resources.

This is yet another reason to ensure action is inclusive, fair and equitable.

After working beyond the scheduled conclusion of #IPCC58, exhausted policymakers and authors celebrated the adoption of final outputs of the sixth assessment cycle: the Synthesis of the Sixth Assessment Report and its Summary for Policymakers #AR6

Read https://t.co/Qf2U4EXPgJ pic.twitter.com/mQa4R8eu0i

— Earth Negotiations Bulletin (@IISD_ENB) March 20, 2023

For authors of the IPCC core writing team, the past 18 months have been intense. We all felt significant responsibility to accurately summarise years of work, completed by hundreds of our global scientific colleagues, who contributed to six reports in this assessment cycle: on physical science, adaptation and vulnerability, mitigation, and special reports on land, global warming of 1.5℃, and ocean and cryosphere.

These reports show the choices we make in this decade will impact current and future generations, and the planet, now and for thousands of years.

• Fear & Wonder is a new climate podcast, brought to you by The Conversation. It will take you inside the IPCC’s era-defining climate report via the hearts and minds of the scientists who wrote it. The first episode drops on March 23. Learn more here, or subscribe on your favourite podcast app via the icons above.

Dr Bronwyn Hayward, Professor of Politics, University of Canterbury. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

ANALYSIS: By Wendy Bacon in Sydney

New South Wales police withdrew a false allegation that four climate change protesters who had stopped traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge last year blocked an ambulance.

Police included this false allegation in a statement of the so-called “facts” that police prepared on the day of the arrests. The false allegation was designed to paint a hostile image of four peaceful protesters and to successfully argue for onerous bail conditions, including severe restrictions on their movements, and tough sentences.

The documents drawn up on the day of the protest stated: “The actions today have not only caused serious disruption to peak-hour traffic, but this imposition to traffic prevented an ambulance responding to an emergency under lights and sirens as it was unable to navigate through the increased heavy traffic as previously mentioned. This imposition to a critical emergency service has the potential to result in fatality.”

• READ MORE: Wendy Bacon reports on a trail of NSW police allegations ‘bad habits’ – police admit to false allegation against protesters
• Climate activist Deanna ‘Violet’ Coco’s 15-month jail sentence quashed on appeal
• ‘It’s time to be the crowd’, Knitting Nannas tell protest against jailing of climate activist

An unprecedented tough sentence was given to Violet Coco who had already spent 84 days “imprisoned” at home between her arrest in April 2022 and her appearance before Magistrate Alison Hawkins in December.

Hawkins referred to the blocking of the ambulance in her remarks when she sentenced Coco to 15 months in prison and refused bail. After spending 10 days in prison, Coco was released on bail by District Court judge Timothy Gartelmann.

Her appeal against sentence was heard on March 15 when the matter of the false allegations was raised.

The new information emerged during the sentencing hearing against two of Coco’s co-defendants Alan Glover and Karen Fitz-Gibbon who appeared for sentencing earlier this month.

They pleaded guilty to charges arising from blocking one lane of the Harbour Bridge for 30 minutes in April last year. Magistrate Daniel Reiss sentenced both to 18 months Community Correction Orders with a fine of $3000 each.

Compared to previous sentences for peaceful protesters, these are harsh sentences. Their lawyer told the court that they regretted causing inconvenience.

Outside the court, Glover, a comedian and actor who has been a firefighter for 40 years, told the media, “I’m very unhappy and angry. I think the judgement is wrong and I’m going to appeal.”

Asked whether he thought the tactics were appropriate, he said, “I’m a firefighter and what do I have to do to make sure firefighters have the resources to do the job properly. I want the government to recognise that we are already in the midst of climate change problems…We’ve got people dying from smoke inhalation from bushfires that are bigger than anything we’ve ever seen.”

Asked by a journalist if he still agreed with his lawyer’s statement in court that he recognised the action was “inappropriate”, he said, “I do, I thought it was inappropriate at the time but we have to do something to get the government to act now now.. a few minutes delay is nothing compared to the massive disruption that will occur if we do not get action on climate change.”

Greens spokesperson and NSW Upper House MP Sue Higginson who has appeared for hundreds of environmental protesters wrote on Facebook: “I nearly fell off my chair when the Magistrate handed down his sentence — a conviction, an 18 month community corrections order and a $3000 fine. I have represented hundreds of environmental protesters and this sentence is just so wrong. He should not be punished this way. I hope he appeals.

“On the upside, the case today put to rest the dangerous false shrill claims that an ambulance was obstructed during the protest. It wasn’t! When you have a state government and an opposition in lock step in an anti-protest draconian stance and a legal intolerance to dissent and civil disobedience we fail our democracy, our climate, our environment and our communities.”

Greens Senator David Shoebridge agreed and wrote on Facebook: ”The police went into court and REPEATEDLY lied that this had blocked an ambulance — all to try to get a harsher penalty for a climate protector!

Magistrate Daniel Reiss noted that Glover’s two co-accused “Violet” Deanna Coco and Jay Larbalestier had both been sentenced on the “false ambulance assertion” and that “no emergency vehicles were obstructed”.

This could open the way for Larbastier to appeal on his sentence. Police acknowledged that they had taken no steps to inform him that the evidence used against him was partly false.

If it wasn’t for the publicity, he would not know about the ambulance lie.

The cases of the Harbour Bridge protesters were among the first to take place after the LNP government’s draconian anti-protest laws were passed with NSW Labor’s support in April last year.

CCL condemns disproportionate sentences of climate protesters
The NSW Council for Civil Liberties is one of scores of organisations calling for the repeal of the laws. Its president Josh Pallas described the case as “an outrageous” example of “police misstating the facts which have been consequential in the sentences of others.

“The police have offered no justification for this misstatement of facts. They must be held accountable and at the very least, explain how they got this so wrong.

“Climate protesters are being increasingly and disproportionately subjected to punitive legal action by Australian authorities and this has taken that legal action to a new extreme,” he said.

Pallas described this period as “some of the darkest times our members have seen for protesters,” since CCL started advocating for protest rights in 1963.

“We have fought the slow repression of police and the state in cracking down on protest every step of the way. But the fight is hard when the government is protecting mining and business interests and when the mainstream media side with government and large corporates with vested interests to stifle the right to protest,” he said.

“These cases provide yet another example of why everyone should be concerned about increasing repression of public assemblies and protests in NSW and elsewhere around the country. The right to protest and public assembly is an essential democratic right.

“Stifling protest stifles freedom of expression. Enough is enough, the government and the police must respect the right to protest and be accountable for their actions.”

Magistrate focused on ambulance in Coco case
The non existent ambulance featured in the first sentencing hearing against Coco.

The police referred Magistrate Alison Hawkins to the “fact” that Coco had prevented an ambulance with lights and sirens indicating an emergency. Coco’s barrister did not dispute that the ambulance “may have been” on the bridge but warned the magistrate against drawing implications from that or overblowing its significance.

Magistrate Hawkins disagreed asking why she would be going too far to accept that “impeding an ambulance under lights and sirens might be something that potentially has the potential to cause harm to some other person? Why is that a stretch too far?.”

She accepted the existence of the ambulance and the sirens as relevant “facts”.

She then applied these facts in her sentencing saying, “You have halted an ambulance under lights and siren. What about the person in there? What about that person and their family? What are they to think of you and your cause?”

Because Hawkins accepted the ambulance as fact, she felt free to accept that inside the ambulance was a very real person whose life was in danger. This was part of the basis for her referring to the protest as a “childish” and “dangerous” stunt.

She then justified her harsh and angry stance on the basis that this “dangerous behaviour… deserves “condemnation from not only the courts but the community” because Coco had not only illegally protested but she had done so in a manner to cause a “significant level of distress to the community”.

Because of the seriousness of the situation, Hawkins said she had no other option than to impose a full-time jail sentence.

Protester uses body cam footage to prove innocence
One of the effects of the anti-protest laws is to make it less likely that protesters will plead not guilty. This is because the laws are framed so that, for instance, you are either on a road or off a road. You do not have to be given a direction to move.

If an accused pleads not guilty and is then found guilty, there is a risk that a sentence could be even harsher.

When people plead guilty, there is less likelihood that police version of the facts will be tested in cross-examination. This means that there is more latitude for police to create their own facts — in other words, fabricate evidence.

In another case this week, climate activist Richard Boult was found not guilty of all charges brought by NSW Police for stepping onto a road during a climate protest in Sydney last June.

Boult who is part of the Extinction Rebellion drumming group was charged under NSW road rules with obstructing traffic and causing a traffic hazard arising from his participation in Blockade Australia’s call for stronger climate action.

Green Left reported that after attending the protest, he attended a media conference. When he left the conference, police followed him to his car and laid charges alleging he left the footpath and stepped onto the road.

Boult pleaded not guilty, saying his movement from the footpath was at a point in the road designated as a closing point. Significantly, he used body camera evidence that validated his claims. So it was not just his word against the police version of events.

He also rejected a plea deal, which would have dropped one charge but retained another. The court upheld Boult’s plea of not guilty and dropped the charges.

Wendy Bacon was previously the professor of journalism at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and is supporting the Greens in the NSW election. One of the reasons, she supports the Greens is because they are the only party committed to repealing the protest laws. Wendy Bacon’s investigative journalism blog.

Thousands of people turned up for climate strikes across Aotearoa New Zealand today — and briefly staged a sit-in at Christchurch City Council.

School students and others around the country protested for climate change action from the government.

School Strike 4 Climate Christchurch spokesperson Aurora Garner-Randolph, 17, said she expected between 15,000 to 20,000 people to participate.

• READ MORE: Other climate protests reports

After the fallout from the Auckland floods and the devastating effects of Cyclone Gabrielle across the North Island, the organisers of the protest have five demands, including no new fossil fuel mining or exploration and a rebate for e-bikes.

Other demands include greater marine protection, funding a transition to regenerative farming and lowering the voting age to 16.

Earlier this evening in Christchurch, young climate activists breached the doors of the city council offices and staged a sit-in.

One of the organisers for School Strike for Climate Ōtautahi, Aurora Garmer-Ramdolph, said the group had been planning to protest at the council’s office for a while.

‘Strike protests a long time’
“We feel that we’ve been having these strike protests for a long time now.

“Young people, people of all generations have been showing up in the streets to protest for climate action and we’re not seeing the change that we need, so we’ve decided to step it up this time. We decided to come directly into the Christchurch City Council.”

Garmer-Ramdolph said the group’s key demand is that the council retracts its support for the proposed new international airport at Tarras in Central Otago.

More than 1000 people of all ages joined the Wellington march, which arrived at Parliament in the afternoon.

Speaking after the march to Parliament, Te Umanako Waa said the horrific weather events of the last few weeks should be a wake-up call for those in authority.

“I feel like the facts are in their face. The students, the people, everyone is telling them what needs to be done.

“If the response for covid can happen this quick surely the response for a worldwide disaster, a natural breakdown, can happen too.

“It’s really important that we hold our leaders to account.”

Time for politicians to take notice
Waa said it was time for politicians to take notice of what their citizens were telling them.

The crowd of protesters, who were mainly young people, stretched half the length of Lambton Quay, with shoppers stopping in doorways to watch them pass, some breaking into spontaneous applause.

In Auckland, the march began at Britomart Station and went to Victoria Park, where a concert continued until 7pm.

Addressing the crowd at the Auckland march, the co-president of Unite Union Xavier Walsh said the government had failed to deliver the radical change needed to tackle the climate crisis.

“Plans by the opposition, such as to reopen deep sea oil drilling, would make the situation even worse — and that is a shame.

“So I say to the Labour and National parties, I can smell the fossil fuels on your breath!”

Walsh said real change will only come from ordinary people standing together and refusing to accept injustice.

Auckland Transport warned of delays
Auckland Transport said more than 1000 people were expected to march in the city. Public transport users could also expect detours, cancellations and delays.

In Wellington, the protesters marched down Lambton Quay before gathering at Parliament.

Student Breeana was among them.

She told RNZ it was important to protest for a better future.

“Most people in the older generation assume we do it … well, I’ve had a lot of people say you’re just doing this to get out of going to classes.

“We have to grow up with this. This is our future that we’re trying to prepare for and our planet. We don’t have another option.”

Wellington Mayor Tory Whanau was also among them.

She used the opportunity to tell the crowd in order to get climate justice, the right politicians needed to be voted into central government.

“Now I know that your Minister for Climate Change is listening. I know he backs the kaupapa. So my message to you, this year, it is election year.

‘Vote for environment parties’
“So if you can vote, make sure you vote for the parties that put the environment at the top of their priorities.”

Students also gathered near Nelson’s church steps as part of the global climate strike calling for change.

Garin College student Nate Wilbourne said they were demanding transparent and meaningful climate action from decision-makers.

He said the evidence of climate change was clear.

Nate Wilbourne said teenagers had many concerns about the environment.

Climate strikers wanted to see real commitment to achieve climate goals from policy and decision makers, Wilbourne said.

They marched to the Nelson City Council buildings this afternoon to present a letter to Mayor Nick Smith calling for free public transport, he said.

‘This is going to be a climate election’ – Greens co-leader
Labour will have to commit to stronger climate change policy if it wants the Green Party’s support come election 2023, Greens co-leader James Shaw said.

Shaw made the comments to reporters on Parliament’s forecourt after speaking to climate inaction protesters.

“Frankly, this election is going to be a climate change election and it is clear from the experience that we’ve had over the course of the last month that we’re now living in an age of consequences,” he said.

“I think if any political party wants the Greens’ support they’re going to have to come to the table.”

Shaw said he could not imagine a scenario where he would choose to work with the National Party over Labour.

“If you look at National’s track record in the last 20 years on climate change it’s frankly appalling and while they say that they’re committed to the targets we’ve committed to, they’ve actually voted against every single policy we’ve put in place to meet those targets without proposing alternatives.”

Shaw said he hoped everyone, including politicians from all parties, would support stronger climate policy in the wake of terrible weather events.

Cyclone ‘wake up’ call for politicians
“I really hope that if anything, the experience that people have had of the cyclone and the floods in such close proximity will cause politicians to wake up and start to take it seriously and treat it at the level of emergency that it actually is.”

Speaking from Christchurch on Friday, Prime Minister Chris Hipkins said the government was making a lot of progress on many of the topics students were striking about.

“Climate change has been at the forefront of the government’s agenda for the past five years and it will continue to be so,” Hipkins told reporters.

“If you look at the emissions reduction plans that we’ve already set out, you can see that we’re making significant progress — of course we’ve still got some heavy lifting to do though, there’s no question about that and the government’s absolutely committed to doing it.”

There was no question we were seeing the effects of climate change here and now, Hipkins said.

“What’s happened with our flooding, with the cyclone, we’re going to see more of these sorts of events, and that just I think underscores to New Zealand how important it is that we do two things: one is that we do everything we can to reduce climate change, the human-induced effects on the climate,” he said.

“The second is that we also look at how we can be more resilient and how we can make sure that we’re adapting to accept that actually there are going to be more of these sorts of events in the future.

‘It doesn’t happen overnight’
“Many of the things that are going to make the biggest difference to our emissions are going to take some time, so when we think about transitioning to more renewable energy use … that doesn’t happen overnight, it requires some hard work and some ongoing work to make that happen.”

On the voting age, he said people should expect to hear something further on the government’s intentions on that soon.

“The courts made a ruling, Parliament now has to consider that, that’s been referred to a select committee for consideration. How the government ultimately responds to that process is something that we will turn our minds to in due course.”

In November last year, the Supreme Court declared the voting age of 18 inconsistent with the Bill of Rights Act. Any change would require the backing of three quarters of MPs, or a majority vote in a referendum.

New Zealanders on average in 2021 produced 6.59 tonnes of carbon dioxide each — about 40 percent above the world average, according to the Our World In Data Global Carbon Project.

Climate Action Tracker, an international project which rates countries’ efforts towards meeting their climate obligations, ranks New Zealand’s efforts overall as “highly insufficient”.

New Zealand’s farming industry also produces a lot of methane, which though it does not remain in the atmosphere as long as CO2, traps a lot more heat.

‘No time for finger-pointing’
But the country’s small population meant it contributed only about 0.09 percent of the world’s total C02 emissions.

Garner-Randolph said it did not matter that Aotearoa only accounted for a tiny fraction of the world’s emissions.

“Now isn’t the time for finger-pointing and saying, ‘Oh other countries are producing far more emissions.’ It’s our responsibility as global citizens, as players on the global stage, to step up and do our part, no matter how big or small it is.

“And we have incredibly high per capita emissions here in Aotearoa, so although we may be small, we are high individual emitters and that needs to change.”

The last school climate strikes took place in September.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

New Zealand journalist and academic David Robie has covered the Asia-Pacific region for international media for more than four decades.

An advocate for media freedom in the Pacific region, he is the author of several books on South Pacific media and politics, including an account of the French bombing of the Greenpeace flagship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbour in 1985 — which took place while he was on the last voyage.

In 1994 he founded the journal Pacific Journalism Review examining media issues and communication in the South Pacific, Asia-Pacific, Australia and New Zealand.

• READ MORE: Other presentations at the Mediasia conference in Kyoto, Japan
• The Bearing Witness project

He was also convenor of the Pacific Media Watch media freedom collective, which collaborates with Reporters Without Borders in Paris, France.

Until he retired at Auckland University of Technology in 2020 as that university’s first professor in journalism and founder of the Pacific Media Centre, Dr Robie organised many student projects in the South Pacific such as the Bearing Witness climate action programme.

He currently edits Asia Pacific Report and is one of the founders of the new Aotearoa New Zealand-based NGO Asia Pacific Media Network.

In this interview conducted by Mediasia organising committee member Dr Nasya Bahfen of La Trobe University for this week’s 13th International Asian Conference on Media, Communication and Film that ended today in Kyoto, Japan, Professor Robie discusses a surge of disinformation and the challenges it posed for journalists in the region as they covered the covid-19 pandemic alongside a parallel “infodemic” of fake news and hoaxes.

He also explores the global climate emergency and the disproportionate impact it is having on the Asia-Pacific.

Paying a tribute to the dedication and courage of Pacific journalists, he says with a chuckle: “All Pacific journalists are climate journalists — they live with it every day.”

• David Robie’s Eyes Of Fire microsite (with Little Island Press)

Climate change remains the single greatest existential threat facing the Blue Pacific, as leaders concluded the biggest diplomatic regional meeting in Suva last week with a plea for the world to take urgent action to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.

While renewed commitments by Australia to reduce its carbon footprint by 43 percent come 2030 and a legislated net zero emission by 2050 were welcomed initiatives, Pacific leaders reiterated calls for rapid, deep and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, adding the region was facing a climate emergency that threatened the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of its people and ecosystems, backed by the latest science and the daily lived realities in Pacific communities.

PIF chairman and Fiji Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama said the need was for “more ambitious climate commitments” — actions that would require the world to align its efforts to achieving the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree temperature threshold.

• READ MORE: Other Pacific Islands Forum reports
• Wansolwara News reports

“We simply cannot settle for anything less than the survival of every Pacific Island country –– and that requires that all high emitting economies implement science-based plans to decisively reduce emissions in line with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5-degree temperature threshold,” he told journalists at the PIF Secretariat.

“That requires that we halve global emissions by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by no later than 2050. Most urgently, it requires that we end our fossil fuel addiction, including coal,” he said.

“That is our ask of Australia. That is our ask of New Zealand, the USA, India, the European Union, China and every other high-emitting country.

“It is also what Fiji asks of ourselves, though our emissions are negligible.”

Crisis felt in Fiji, Pacific
Bainimarama said the world faced a global energy crisis that was felt in the Pacific and Fiji.

While he understood the political realities that existed, planetary realities must take precedence.

“It will take courage and surely extract some political capital. But if Pacific Island countries can respond to and rebuild after some of the worst storms to ever make landfall in history, advanced economies can surely make the transition to renewables.

“The benefits will be remarkable. Our region has the potential to become a clean energy superpower if we summon the will to make it happen. That path is no doubt the surest way to an open, resilient, independent, and prosperous Blue Pacific.”

Pacific Islands Forum Secretary-General Henry Puna told Wansolwara ahead of PIF51 that issues such as climate change, oceans, economic development, technology and connectivity as well as people-centered development were key priorities on the talanoa agenda for leaders from PIF’s 18-member countries, including Australia and New Zealand.

These priorities and the way forward to achieving it are incorporated in the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent, a collective ambitious long-term plan to address global and regional geopolitical and development challenges in light of existing and emerging vulnerabilities and constraints.

Cook Islands is expected to host the next PIF Leaders and related meetings in 2023, the Kingdom of Tonga in 2024 and Solomon Islands in 2025.

Geraldine Panapasa is editor-in-chief of the University of the South Pacific journalism programme newspaper and website Wansolwara. The USP team is a partner of Asia Pacific Report.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and more than 60 environmental journalists of 34 different nationalities have appealed for respect for the right to cover environmental issues.

These journalists — who are from every part of the world and every kind of media, and who have all kinds of backgrounds and political views — have joined RSF in signing an unprecedented appeal coinciding with COP26 entitled “Climate emergency, journalism emergency”.

Men and women, some of them environmental experts and some of them more general reporters, some with a long history of covering “green” issues and some covering the environment more recently as it has become an increasingly alarming news story, they have denounced the obstacles that limit the right to provide information about these issues.

• READ MORE: Red alert for green journalism — 10 environmental reporters killed in 10 years
• Other COP26 climate reports

Climate change is crucial for all humankind.

The petitioners are asking governments to officially recognise that the right to information about these issues is inherent in the right to a healthy environment and the right to health.

The first journalists signing the appeal include Gaëlle Borgia, a 2020 Pulitzer Prize winner based in Madagascar, France’s Morgan Large, a food industry specialist, Russia’s Grigory Pasko, an RSF Press Freedom laureate who was awarded the Sakharov Prize in 2002, India’s Soulik Dutta, an expert in energy and land issues, South Africa’s Khadija Sharife, who investigates environmental crimes, and Lucien Kosha, a freelancer covering mining in the DRC.

Most of them have signed on an individual basis but the staff at some news organisations have wanted to sign collectively.

Environmental teams
This was the case with Afaq Environmental Magazine, a Palestinian media outlet, and Reporterre, a French news site covering environmental issues.

Crucially, the appeal points out that, although the right to cover environmental issues was established as a principle as early as the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, this right is still not being respected.

The signatories report that, in many countries, it is still very difficult to obtain information and scientific data about the environment, although such information is of paramount public interest. Their coverage can help change behaviour and help combat the unprecedented threat posed by global warming.

“Nearly 30 years after the right to cover environmental issues was proclaimed in the United Nations Earth Summit declaration in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, this right must finally become a reality, it must finally be applied and respected without exception, as something that is self-evident,” RSF secretary-general Christophe Deloire said.

“At the hour of the climate emergency, this is a journalistic emergency. Environmental coverage is now vital.”

The dangers linked to covering environmental issues in some parts of the world has led to the killing of at least 21 journalists in the past 20 years for investigating these sensitive issues.

RSF and the journalists signing the appeal have also called for concrete implementation of international law on the protection of journalists.

For more information, see RSF’s report on the persecution of environmental journalists.

Auckland-based Pacific Media Watch is a collaborating project with Reporters Without Borders.

• Sign the citizen petition in support of the appeal Climate emergency, information emergency!

A Frontline investigative journalism article on the politics behind the decade-long Bougainville war leading up to the overwhelming vote for independence is among articles in the latest Pacific Journalism Review.

The report, by investigative journalist and former academic Professor Wendy Bacon and Nicole Gooch, poses questions about the “silence” in Australia over the controversial Bougainville documentary Ophir that has won several international film awards in other countries.

Published this week, the journal also features a ground-breaking research special report by academics Shailendra Singh and Folker Hanusch on the current state of journalism across the Pacific – the first such region-wide study in almost three decades.

• READ MORE: Pacific Journalism Review – the articles

Griffith University’s journalism coordinator Kasun Ubayasiri has produced a stunning photo essay, “Manus to Meanjin”, critiquing Australian “imperialist” policies and the plight of refugees in the Pacific.

The main theme of the double edition focuses on a series of articles and commentaries about the major “Pacific crises” — covid-19, climate emergency (including New Zealand aid) and West Papua.

Unthemed topics include journalism and democracy, the journalists’ global digital toolbox, cellphones and Pacific communication, a PNG local community mediascape, and hate speech in Indonesia.

This is the first edition of PJR published since it became independent of AUT University last year after previously being published at the University of Papua New Guinea – where it was launched in 1994 – and the University of the South Pacific.

Lockdowns challenge
“Publishing our current double edition in the face of continued covid-driven lockdowns and restrictions around the world has not been easy, but we made it,” says editor Dr Philip Cass.

“From films to photoessays, from digital democracy to dingoes and disease, the multi-disciplinary, multi-national diversity of our coverage remains a strength in an age when too many journals look the same and have the same type of content.”

“We promise this journal will have a strong focus on Asian media, communication and journalism, as well as our normal focus on the Pacific.”

Founding editor Dr David Robie is quoted in the editorial as saying the journal is at a “critical crossroads for the future” and he contrasts PJR with the “oppressively bland” nature of many journalism publications.

“I believe we have a distinctively different sort of journalism and communication research journal – eclectic and refreshing,” he said.

The next edition of PJR will be linked to the “Change, Adaptation and Culture: Media and Communication in Pandemic Times” online conference of the Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC) being hosted at AUT on November 25-27.

• Pacific Crises: Covid, climate emergency and West Papua, Pacific Journalism Review, edited by Philip Cass and David Robie, September 2021

SPECIAL REPORT: By Melanie Reid and Bonnie Sumner of Newsroom
Newsroom.co.nz

An Auckland property developer is involved in a company linked to carrying out deforestation in Indonesian-controlled Papua, where virgin rainforest is being bulldozed to grow palm oil plantations. Newsroom Investigates.

From above, the satellite image shows two insignificant dark-coloured shapes, like a couple of missing puzzle pieces in a flat sea of green. But on the ground, they represent devastation.

This innocuous picture illustrates the beginning of what is earmarked to become the world’s largest palm oil plantation, replacing one of the last remaining rainforests on earth.

Two years ago, the Tanah Merah megaproject began clearing just 230 hectares in Papua, the Indonesian-controlled half of New Guinea (the other half of the island is Papua New Guinea).

• READ MORE: Investigation: The secret deal to destroy paradise
• The Tanah Merah project is a bellweather for Jokowi’s permit review
• Nusantra Atlas
• Other Asia Pacific Report articles on West Papua

That relatively small land area was just a warning of what is predicted to come: 270,000 hectares have been allocated to the project, an area 10 times the size of Auckland’s Waitakere Ranges.

After halting work due to alleged non-payment of staff salaries, in March this year the bulldozers arrived again and forest clearing resumed. This can be seen using near-real time satellite imagery on Nusantara-Atlas.org – the newly felled sections of rainforest are in pink.

The project is divided into seven concessions — parcels of land — of around 40,000 hectares each in Boven Digoel, a regency in Papua’s southeast.

Documents obtained by Newsroom show three of those seven concessions are controlled by a company called Digoel Agri Group, whose majority shareholder is listed as a New Zealander. (Read the full response from Digoel Agri Group here.)

Environmental experts say the Tanah Merah project is a sign of things to come and if this entire forest is razed it will be catastrophic — hundreds of millions of tonnes of carbon will be released, contributing to the world’s failure to stay under two degrees Celsius of warming.

So why, when we face a climate emergency of biblical proportions, is an Auckland property developer involved in the felling of some of the world’s most diverse, intact, old-growth forest?

‘Charming’ and ‘brazen’
Neville Mahon is 61 with a soft face and a swatch of sandy hair that was once red. (See David Williams’ story looking at Mahon’s business history here)

He has an affable demeanour, and enjoys a weekly standing appointment with a group of associates at a popular Chinese restaurant in Auckland.

He cuts a controversial figure in New Zealand — he doesn’t do social media, and the only online accounts of his existence are a bunch of articles that detail court cases over failed property developments and a Wikifrauds page dedicated to his involvement in the Fiji Beach Resort & Spa, which says dozens of mum and dad investors were left out of pocket in 2010.

(Mahon’s name is registered against more than 120 New Zealand companies, the bulk of which are now defunct.)

Newsroom has spoken with a number of people on the condition of anonymity who have had dealings with him. They variously describe him as “charming”, “brazen” and someone who “worries about looking like a bad guy”.

Sometime around 2015, after he had extricated himself from the Fiji Beach Resort & Spa debacle, Mahon jumped on a plane to Jakarta for business meetings with some Indonesian movers and shakers.

It was to be the beginning of a new chapter in Mahon’s life, a move away from property and into what he described to Newsroom as the “resource sector”.

Three years later, his name popped up as a majority shareholder alongside that of Indonesian political operator Ventje Rumangkang on a companies registration document under the business name Digoel Agri Group.

Rumangkang was the patriarch of a well-connected family and one of the founders of the Democratic Party in Indonesia. He died suddenly last year and his son, Jones, took his place as Digoel Agri’s managing director.

Permits to log rainforest and create palm oil plantations cannot be bought and sold, they can only be issued by local government officials. So instead they are allocated to companies.

In the case of Digoel Agri, three subsidiary companies were set up to manage three concessions as part of the Tanah Merah megaproject.

Tanah Merah’s incredibly murky and complex history was exposed in an extensive international joint investigation by Gecko Project, Mongabay, Malaysiakini and Tempo, which lays out a web of multiple concessions, shell companies, mystery investors, court cases and claims of permit falsifications.

The investigation also exposed Neville Mahon’s involvement in the project, describing him as the Rumangkang’s chief investment partner and the majority shareholder — claims he would come to dispute in a face-to-face meeting with Newsroom.

Another name that also appears on the documents is Australian man Selva Nithan Thirunavukarasu, known as Nithan Thiru.

He was a director of Gleneagles Securities, an Australian financial services firm — the very same company believed to have looked after Mahon’s money from the Fiji Resort & Spa development.

Thiru’s name also appears on the New Zealand companies documents from another property development involving Mahon, a worker accommodation complex in Queenstown that never eventuated.

The Kiwi tree defender
Tanah Merah is just one of a number projects on the island involving dozens of players from around the world, including the Middle East, Korea and Malaysia, who are already turning the varied flora into monocrop forests of palm oil trees.

But a network of individuals and organisations is attempting to shine a spotlight on what’s going on in Papua to prevent what they say is an environmental and human rights calamity.

One of those is Grant Rosoman. Tall, lean and 60 years old, he looks more university professor than tree-hugger, despite dedicating his life to protecting tropical forests and their inhabitants.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s he worked to halt the importation of kwila coming from Indigenous communities in Malaysia, at one point chaining himself to a log at a Christchurch timber yard. His campaigning succeeded.

“We managed to drop imports down to a fifth of what they were and to raise awareness of the issue. Because people had no idea their decking was coming from the destruction of people’s lives and forests. And it’s a bit the same with Papua.”

As a senior adviser to Greenpeace International, he tells Newsroom he is shocked a fellow New Zealander is involved in this – and warns the impact of losing a forest this size during a climate crisis will be catastrophic.

“If we lose this forest then we don’t survive climate change. That’s how important it is for everyone.”

He says all New Zealanders should be concerned about what’s going on over there.

“This is the first time I have come across a New Zealander investing in tropical rainforest destruction.”

But, isn’t it a bit rich for someone from Aotearoa New Zealand — a country that has systematically wiped out two thirds of its native forest in favour of naked rolling landscape covered in cows and a tidal wave of urban housing — to pass judgment when another country seeks to make money from its primary resources?

“We in Aotearoa made the mistake of clearing most of our lowland forest and now there are massive very costly national and local programmes to restore the forest that has been lost. We don’t want Papua to make the same mistake, especially for the local customary communities that are so reliant on and spiritually tied to their forests. The local communities are telling us this,” says Rosoman, who adds that they instead support local enterprises that protect the forest but also generate an income, such as sago, medicinal plants and spices, and ecotourism.

“Destroying the forests of Papua for the benefit a few wealthy Indonesian elites or foreign investors like Neville Mahon is not development.”

Atlas of destruction
New Guinea’s landscape is extraordinary. Mangroves and peat swamps sit alongside tropical alpine grasslands and lush forests: a recently released study in Nature journal proclaims it as “the most floristically diverse island in the world”, home to more than 13,000 species of plants.

It is the world’s largest tropical island, with 83 percent of Indonesian New Guinea supporting old-growth forest, and the third largest rainforest after the Amazon and Congo.

But Indonesia, the fourth largest emitter of carbon, carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions and by far the world’s biggest producer of palm oil, is running out of arable land to grow the fruit.

The thing about palm forests is they have a shelf life — after 25 to 30 years these vast monocrops begin to fail because the soil no longer holds up.

In the last few decades around 21 million hectares of Indonesian land has been relinquished to plantation companies. To put that in perspective, Aotearoa New Zealand’s landmass totals 26.8 million hectares.

Used in everything from biscuits and shampoo to biofuel and supplementary feed for Kiwi cows, palm oil made the Southeast Asian country $23 billion last year — and Papua is Indonesia’s final frontier for this moneymaker.

After laying waste to millions of hectares of primary forest in Borneo and Sumatra, this island is the last remaining opportunity to exploit the primary forest for timber and to grow colossal tracts of palm oil monocrops to feed the demand for the ubiquitous product.

Deforestation accounts for the bulk of Indonesia’s CO2 emissions, and this month Indonesia cancelled an agreement it had with Norway to halt deforestation in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars in environmental protection incentives.

A meeting with Mahon
Mahon told Newsroom he couldn’t speak on behalf of the company, but did eventually meet us at a Newmarket café so he could address some of the allegations reported about him in overseas media.

He orders tea and agrees to let us take notes.

Mahon disputes the four main accusations: that he has a majority shareholding in Digoel Agri Group, that the company has an interest in timber, that the concession area is rainforest at all, and that the land is being used to grow oil palms.

He says the claims are all “bullshit”, and can’t figure out why anyone in New Zealand would be curious about the topic: “What the hell….it’s in Indonesia, it’s in the back end of nowhere, what is the interest here?”

When asked why he hadn’t attempted to rectify the inaccuracies before, he says: “These people are so nasty that even if you tried to correct it, you’d just get yourself into a worse mess.”

By “these people” he means reporters and organisations like Greenpeace International.

“There are people that are out there that are paid to cause that sort of trouble. I mean that’s the reality, they’ll seize on anything.”

Throughout our conversation Mahon repeatedly denies that the area the Digoel Agri concessions cover is rainforest.

“There’s no virgin rainforest in there whatsoever. That’s actually just complete and utter bullshit. That area was cleared out by Malaysians 35 years ago. I mean, it’s just a stupid allegation to start with. If it was a rainforest, I can assure you my partner and my children wouldn’t even want to walk out the door.”

We put this to Grant Rosoman, the forest protector from Greenpeace. He tells Newsroom this is “patently incorrect”, and points to satellite images, aerial photos, field visits and an assessment of timber that all show the concession area is predominantly primary forest.

French environmental scientist Dr David Gaveau, who lived in Indonesia for 15 years and has also been to the area in question, backs this up. He set up Nusantara-Atlas.org for exactly this reason.

“In April I saw that the clearing [in Boven Digoel] had continued since I first looked at it two months before. That’s the whole point of the system, to be able to demonstrate a conservation outcome. Consumers don’t want the food they eat to be causing deforestation.

“The companies have understood this and they’ve signed on these no deforestation pledges. So what we’re doing is developing a system that can verify these pledges on a near real-time basis.”

The platform works as an alert system so officials, NGOs or anyone with a computer and an internet connection can see what’s happening.

“These forests are becoming a very rare resource. And we all know they are an important part of the world’s ecosystems for earth to thrive and for humans to thrive. And so why is it still happening? Why is New Zealand even involved in this?”

‘Majority’ shareholder
But just how involved really is Neville Mahon? In international reports, he is listed as a majority shareholder in Digoel Agri Group, something he strenuously denies at our meeting.

He tells Newsroom he and his family own just “seven to eight percent” of the company.

“It would be quite nice if we did own it,” he says with a laugh. “The reality is we don’t, but my family have a small shareholding,”

Instead, he says he temporarily “fronted” the company when it was first set up.

“What happened was about five or six years ago when the opportunity came up from an Indonesian family I basically sorted a deal out and then I had to pass most of it on. I just didn’t have the money to fund it. But the problem is it was my name there on day one. And so everybody seized on my name.”

Newsroom sought companies records for Digoel Agri Group from the Indonesian government via four separate sources. All documents have been vetted as legitimate and all four — one from 2018, another from 2019 and two from this year — show Mahon as a majority shareholder.

Whatever his exact beneficial shareholding, or exactly how it is configured, what our investigation can confirm is that he was forecast to receive profits from rainforest timber production into the millions this year.

Another contentious issue is the intended land use. Mahon takes a sip of his tea and leans over the table. The company’s shareholders are only interested in bare land and agriculture, not timber, he tells us.

By agriculture, does he mean palm oil plantations?

“What the Indonesian government is motivated towards is food. They’re importing something like 70 percent of their food. So our interest is to put rice, soya beans, sorghum, cattle, you know, whatever we can on it because you’re on the back door of 240 million people.”

But documents from the Indonesian government obtained by Newsroom and translated into English are clear: the concessions attached to the Digoel Agri Group subsidiary companies are expressly for logging and palm oil.

For food crops to be planted, they would need new permits to be issued.

Finally, we wanted to know about the trees. Reports indicate the timber involved in the Tanah Merah project is estimated to be worth US$6 billion, and a sawmill owned by Malaysian logging giant Shin Yang has reportedly been set up on the island.

Mahon says he has “no interest” in the wood: “We have nothing to do with the forestry at all, nothing to do with it. This is just regrowth, which hasn’t even got a lot of value because it’s not, for example, mahogany. What you’ve got to remember is I, or my shareholders, have got no interest in that side of it at all.”

Yet in a judgment issued by the High Court at Auckland in June in a bankruptcy proceedings case against Mahon, Justice Sussock writes of Mahon referring in his evidence to the possibility of security being provided at some future date “from a debt that is due to [him] from a joint venture forestry operation” and that Mahon says “there are monies due to [him] in terms of loans as well as an equity interest in the forestry operation”.

(Greenpeace and NGO Pusaka, which advocates for Indigenous communities in Indonesia, are currently investigating where the logs from the Digoel Agri Group concessions are going.)

When pressed on these issues, Mahon said the best thing we could do is to email him a list of questions and he would send them to the company’s managing director in Indonesia for a response.

So we did.

A spokesperson from Digoel Agri Group, Jones Rumangkang, wrote to Newsroom that the company has business permits to develop “less than 78,630 hectares” — two of their three concessions. (It is unknown what they plan to do with the third concession.)

He writes that they pay attention to, “the principles of sustainability through the NDPE approach in accordance with our sustainability policy.” NDPE is a palm oil industry led initiative which stands for No Deforestation, No Peat, and No Exploitation.

Rumangkang also backed up Mahon’s claim that he is a minority investor, and said the company is committed to following all relevant environmental and consent regulations, including agreement from the local Indigenous communities.

“We have obtained approval from the indigenous peoples who control the land we are working on. We also do not develop areas that are sacred and have local cultural values as well as hunting areas and areas that are a source of staple food such as sago forests.”

‘What will be the fate of our grandchildren?’
New Guinea is not just environmentally diverse, it’s also culturally diverse – a sixth of the world’s languages are found here.

According to an in-depth report released by Greenpeace International in May this year, Indonesian law states that Indigenous land can only be surrendered to a plantation company through musyawarah (a consensus decision-making process), but that this did not occur in the case of the Tanah Merah project.

Instead, police and representatives turned up to the villages handing out envelopes full of cash. There was no clarity around what these were for, but the project to clearfell their land has divided once close Indigenous clans.

The effects can be seen in a film, The Secret Deal to Destroy Paradise, in which locals talk of not being able to carry out their traditional way of life and practices such as hunting, fishing, gathering and processing sago.

“It feels like the clouds have fallen. All destroyed in an instant. What will be the fate of our grandchildren?” asks the chief of the Auyu clan, Bonevasius Hamnagi.

United Arab Emirates-owned companies with concessions in the same Tanah Merah project have already displaced some traditional hunting grounds.

“It used to be customary indigenous forest,” says Mikael Felix Mamon of Anggai village, as he stands before a seemingly endless array of uniform oil palm saplings sitting atop the bare ochre earth, waiting to be planted.

“It used to be a place for hunting. We searched for pigs or other animals. Fishing. And a source of drinking water. We could find these things quite freely. Now the indigenous people looking for food to fulfill our basic needs must go a long way. Further inland. Because our forest around here is gone.”

And agreements to create health, education, facilities, clean water, housing and electricity have not been fulfilled.

Grant Rosoman says this is a common occurrence in Papua and that companies can make up to US$2000 per hectare per year while paying locals less than US$10 per hectare in a one-off payment for taking their land.

“The impact on the community — we are hearing from them and from the local NGOs that are supporting the community — is huge. And if we look at the concessions that have already been developed in that area, their loss of livelihood, their rights not being respected, their sacred sites being desecrated and destroyed, and their food and water sources being destroyed as well.”

And many locals are pushing back against the corporations, people like longtime environmental activist Bustar Maitar, who leads campaigns in Papua to protect the ecosystems through the EcoNusa Foundation, and clan leaders who have been coming together to put pressure on the government to stop the deforestation.

A political situation
There have also been long running debates about whether the Tanah Merah permits to log and plant palm oil have been obtained legally.

According to the NGO Pusaka, permits have not been issued for Digoel Agri to clear the land and is calling on the Indonesian government to take steps to halt the destruction.

They claim that because the original permits were not issued in accordance with the correct process, including the consent of local indigenous people, this would mean the forest clearing happening under Digoel Agri is illegal.

When Newsroom contacted Pusaka director Franky Samperante, he was firm in his request to international players like Neville Mahon.

“I found that the companies are carrying out eviction of the forests and important places of indigenous peoples without the consent of many communities, they are threatened with losing their sources of food and livelihoods.

“We ask the government and companies to be consistent with regulations and commitments to sustainable development, by not doing deforestation, violating human rights and respecting the rights of indigenous peoples.”

Indonesia is no stranger to human rights controversy. According to Amnesty International reports, at least 100,000 West Papuans have been reported killed by the Indonesian authorities since the takeover in the 1960s.

Some New Zealand academics have described Indonesia’s military killings of indigenous people in West Papua as a “slow-moving genocide”, and the conflict between the Indonesian military and the Free Papua movement continues.

Everyone Newsroom spoke to was reluctant to answer questions about the Indonesian government’s involvement in deforestation.

But without government approval, these individual companies would never be allowed to bring in the bulldozers, so isn’t this, in fact, a political situation?

“Papua as a sensitive place for the Indonesian government,” says Greenpeace’s Grant Rosoman. “And there are rights abuses that are going on. They’re being documented by some of the media that’s coming out and it’s a very unsafe place. So there is a lot of fear about speaking out about Papua and what’s going on there.”

“We focus on the deforestation and we can monitor that from satellites so we can see what’s going on and we don’t believe it’s a good thing for a New Zealander like Neville Mahon to be there destroying the forest and basically staining the reputation of all New Zealanders in the process of doing it.”

Since our café meeting with Mahon, we have contacted him several times in an attempt to reconcile his statements to us with what’s on the official documents.

We again received a reply from the company saying he has a small beneficial shareholding.

In the meantime, the bulldozers continue their work while activists and people like Rosoman try to keep them at bay.

“It’s not acceptable to be clearing rainforest in this day and age. We’re in 2021, we’re in a climate emergency. There’s plenty of other land where you can develop businesses. We do not need to clear rainforest for business anymore. It shouldn’t be done.”

Reported by Newsroom with the support of NZ On Air. Republished by Asia Pacific Report with the permission of Newsroom and Newsroom Investigations editor Melanie Reid.

In the same year that the government declared a climate emergency, imports of an especially dirty type of coal from Indonesia topped a million tonnes for the first time since 2006.

Last year, 235 kilograms of overseas coal was imported for every New Zealander in order to power homes and businesses. This is also only imported coal; the country also produces coal domestically.

Ninety-two percent of the imported coal was from Indonesia, and the vast majority of that was a low grade, high emissions type – sub-bituminous coal.

• READ MORE: Other reports on NZ’s climate emergency

“Not only are we burning more coal, [but] it’s the dirtiest coal. And it comes from Indonesia where the conditions and the mining is appalling,” said Cindy Baxter, an environmental campaigner.

In recent years, low lake levels meant our biggest electricity generator — hydroelectricity — has produced less energy than normal. Natural gas supply has been inconsistent. Coal has been increasingly used as a fuel of last resort to keep the lights on in our homes and businesses.

It is also the world’s worst fossil fuel, emitting far more greenhouse gases than any other. It produces carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxides, particulate pollution and heavy metals.

Coal imports from Indonesia in 2020 totalled 1.084 million tonnes, or just over one billion kilograms. Australia the only other significant exporter of coal here, sending over about 10 percent of Indonesia’s total, 95 million kilograms.

New Zealand has imported more than a million tonnes from Indonesia only twice in the last 20 years — 2020 and 2006.

Almost all of it last year — 910 million kilograms — was sub-bituminous coal which must be burned in greater quantities to achieve the same energy output.

Government not satisfied
An energy analyst at Enerlytica, John Kidd, said New Zealand’s reliance on this coal has undoubtedly raised greenhouse gas emissions.

“Yes it does. The fact that we’re importing a carbon-intensive fuel into the country and using it domestically to meet demand is carbon intensive. It will be adding significantly to our footprint here,” Kidd said.

On top of that, New Zealand measures and budgets for the emissions of burning of the coal. The emissions involved in getting that coal here by ship are not recorded nor fit into any country’s carbon budgets.

“The carbon miles involved with getting fuel from where it comes from and where it needs to be are generally not part of the equation. But absolutely they would be adding to the footprint involved with a higher coal burn in New Zealand.”

The government — which wants 100 percent of electricity supply to be renewable by 2030 — admits this is not good enough.

“Unfortunately fossil fuels continue to play a prominent role in security of electricity supply due to the structure of New Zealand’s electricity system, especially in providing cover for dry hydrological years, such as we have been experiencing,” said Energy and Resources Minister Dr Megan Woods.

“This government is not been [sic] satisfied with this reliance on fossil fuels and last year we backed up our goal to have a fully renewable electricity grid with a $30 million investigation into solving the dry year problem.

“The NZ Battery project is investigating the country’s potential for pumped hydro, as well as comparator technologies, and is progressing well but will take time.”

Baxter said the government’s aspirational goals on climate ring hollow.

‘Sick of hearing words’
“We’re sick of hearing the words. We need to see it turned into action and the government to stop being driven by industry, the biggest emitters,” Baxter said.

Even before the coal gets on the ship there is already a global environmental cost, including deforestation and the lack of reforestation once the mines are not used.

A journalist in Indonesia, Hans Nicholas Jong, said although there is mining regulation, the government doesn’t consistently enforce it.

“[There are] responsibilities for companies to rehabilitate their mines. Once they have finished operating they’re actually required by law to recover the environment. They’re required to reforest their areas, they’re required to close their mining pits. This is something they haven’t done because basically there is a lack of monitoring by the government, just because of the sheer number of mines.”

Indonesia is one of the world’s biggest producers of coal.

Despite public opposition, he said the government recently revised these laws, relaxing restrictions for mining companies which outraged activists.

“They saw that this new mining law really facilitates the mining industry, at a time when a lot of countries actually want to reduce their coal production and consumption. But here we doubled down on our coal production and consumption.”

Origin kept confidential
Precisely where we get our coal from has been masked by the government.

Since 2012, Stats NZ has kept confidential the type of coal and its origin. The public cannot know where we get our coal from. Importers can request their products be made confidential, which Stats approved in this case. It does release total coal imports.

RNZ sourced this data from United Nations figures.

“It’s indicative of the close relationship that the mining industry has had with our government. To be able to get that sort of information that is available internationally blocked in New Zealand arguing commercial sensitivity … the power of industry in this country over civil society is quite extraordinary,” Baxter said.

Coal makes up a large amount of our electricity. As an example – in the first quarter of this year, 44 percent of Genesis Energy’s total generation was from coal. The company has signed an agreement to receive natural gas from another company Methanex.

Woods said there has been an unexpected reduction in natural gas supply from at the Pohokura gas field, recently the country’s largest.

“At full capacity, Pohokura gas field provides approximately 40 percent of New Zealand’s natural gas supply but over the past 12 months, production from the field has almost halved.

Natural gas production down
“As a result, overall natural gas production is down approximately 20 percent on last year. While this decline has put pressure on the supply of gas for all users, including electricity generators, this is not something anyone could have foreseen and is not a result of Government decisions.

“The market responded as it was originally designed to, which included more use of coal at Huntly power station to provide the dry year cover that gas has previously provided to ensure security of supply.”

She said the energy sector has also committed over $1 billion in new renewable capacity this year alone, including both geothermal and wind energy plants. Another wind farm, Waipipi, opened last month, and the country’s biggest solar farm in Kapuni.

Woods was asked, if coal is necessary, why New Zealand couldn’t import it from a country with a stronger environmental record. She said these are business decisions made by privately-owned companies.

The government is a majority shareholder of each of Genesis, Mercury and Meridian energy companies.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

There is no question that we must act, and act fast, on climate change. This week’s climate emergency declaration by the New Zealand government acknowledges the urgency of the climate crisis and the need to collectively confront it.

But a declaration is not the same as action. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been frank that the declaration is a symbolic gesture: “It’s what we invest in and it’s the laws that we pass that make the big difference.”

• READ MORE: NZ climate change declaration – ‘nothing token about it’
• Climate change emergency declaration by NZ government includes commitment to 2025 targets

In saying this, she echoes the sentiments of some local councils during the first wave of climate emergency declarations in mid-2019.

For all that, it is wrong to imagine a declaration will make no difference at all. Language has power. Words like “emergency” have an impact in the real world, especially when endorsed by political leaders.

Political language frames how we interact with one another and the planet, and how we imagine our collective future. In that respect, the consequences of such emergency declarations — with their attendant sense of panic and fear — remain unsettlingly vague.

What does ’emergency’ mean?
On one hand, a declaration is a way for campaigners to hold the government to account. For the young people in the School Strike 4 Climate movement who made an emergency declaration a key demand, it may prove a moment of inspiration and empowerment.

If it is taken as a sign that social movements can effect political change, reset the agenda and compel governments to listen, the declaration could embolden efforts to hold the government to its word — and to implement the laws and investments that will deliver emission reductions and adaptation to climate risks.

On the other hand, the politics of emergency come with baggage, established in precedent and law, by which ordinary political processes are suspended to expand state power.

An unsettling legacy
It is important to recognise that this notion of emergency politics, like the idea of climate emergency declarations, was imported to Aotearoa New Zealand. It is another example of New Zealand’s “fast follower” approach to climate policy.

The low-emissions transition has accelerated under Ardern, but largely by way of policy transfer from the UK and EU, not by homegrown innovation. The climate emergency concept made a parallel journey via social movements such as Extinction Rebellion.

Yet the state’s emergency footing, where ends justify extraordinary means, is inherently problematic in the context of recent colonial history. Legislation such as the Public Works Act , for example, empowered the Crown to compulsorily acquire land for infrastructure development — land often owned by Māori.

A climate emergency might only be symbolic, but its language carries this legacy of alienation and disenfranchisement. Moreover, it risks reviving those imperialist tendencies, by treating processes of consultation and consent as impediments to urgent action.

Where does democracy fit?
Emergency is also risky to democracy, especially when the crisis is not temporary but long-lasting, as the climate crisis is. Although many climate campaigners prioritise justice and equity as essential to the low-emissions transition, others treat democracy as a barrier to climate action rather than a vehicle for it.

The emergency response to the Christchurch earthquakes is a case in point. Limiting civic participation in the rebuild led to public ambivalence over the results, which were too often determined by the interests of the state rather than the aspirations of local communities.

Of course, it isn’t inevitable any tyrannical urges will be unleashed. Arguably, the meaning of climate emergency is still to be determined. From one angle, it is a blank page, an empty signifier, which means nothing in particular.

But the flipside is that the term has a surplus of meaning — that is, it means many things to many people. Some of these meanings are not easily dismissed, including those that conflict with justice.

The long emergency
Campaigners for a climate emergency will continue to use this language to ratchet up ambition, but they should be aware of these tensions. If a climate emergency is to be compatible with other ideals like democracy and decolonisation, then it must be fought for on those terms.

For example, the School Strike 4 Climate demands a climate emergency declaration must “uphold our democratic values and obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi”.

If climate change is an emergency, it is a “long emergency”. It has taken decades, even centuries, to create — and will take comparable timeframes to undo. It requires us to reimagine the structures of our societies, cities, economies and our politics.

If Aotearoa New Zealand is to shift from being a follower to a leader or pioneer in climate governance, it must involve local knowledge, especially Māori knowledge and leadership, to respond in ways that reflect our local circumstances.

If action is to be sustained over years and decades, it requires behaviour that springs from hope, not fear.

By Dr David Hall, a senior researcher in politics, Auckland University of Technology; Dr Raven Cretney, a postdoctoral fellow, University of Waikato; and Dr Sylvia Nissen, a senior lecturer in Environmental Policy, Lincoln University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Late on Monday night, the City of Sydney became the first state capital in Australia to officially declare a climate emergency. With climate change considered a threat to human life, Sydney councillors unanimously supported a motion put forward by Lord Mayor Clover Moore to mobilise city resources to reduce carbon emissions and minimise the impact of future change.

The decision sees Sydney join a variety of local and national governments around the world, in a movement that is increasingly gaining momentum.

In total, some 658 local governments around the world have made the same declaration, with the UK and Canada committing their national governments to the global movement in just the past two months.

An official declaration of climate emergency puts a government on a “wartime mobilisation” that places climate change at the centre of policy and planning decisions.

READ MORE: UK becomes first country to declare a ‘climate emergency’

While interpretations differ on what a “climate emergency” means in practice, governments have established a range of measures to help meet the targets set by the Paris climate agreement. Under this agreement, 197 countries have pledged to limit global temperature rise to less than 2℃ above pre-industrial levels, and ideally no more than 1.5℃.

With 2018 having brought all manner of record-breaking climate extremes, and global average temperatures projected to reach 3.2℃ above the pre-industrial average based on current national pledges and targets for greenhouse emissions, Sydney’s recognition of a national emergency is both highly appropriate and also a major turning-point for Australia.

Although a signatory to the Paris Agreement, Australia’s greenhouse emissions have risen over the past four years since the repeal of the carbon price. With Australian emissions most notably increasing around transport, the United Nations climate discussions currently being held in Bonn have raised concerns over the nation’s ability to meet its Paris commitments.

Economic impacts
With the global cost of inaction on climate change projected to reach a staggering US$23 trillion a year by the end of the century (equivalent to around five 2008 global financial crises every year), several nations are already ramping up their Paris Agreement commitments ahead of schedule. The UK recently announced its intention to be carbon-neutral by 2050.

Australia is particularly vulnerable to the future financial costs of climate change, with economic models suggesting losses of A$159 billion a year through the impact of sea level rise and drought-driven collapses in agricultural productivity. The cost for each household has been put at about A$14,000.

After Sydney’s declaration, 150 faith leaders on Tuesday signed an open letter endorsing the decision, and describing the climate issue as a moral challenge that transcends religious belief. They have called for an urgent mobilisation to reach 100 percent renewable energy by the year 2030, and for an end to the approval of any new coal and gas projects, including Adani’s controversial Carmichael coal mine in Queensland.

The recent court ruling against the proposed Rocky Hill coal mine in the New South Wales Hunter Valley – a decision made partly on climate grounds – could mark a crucial turning point in the fortunes of future mining projects.

As part of its emergency declaration, Sydney has also called on the federal government to establish a “just transition authority” to support Australians currently employed in fossil fuel industries. This is an urgent issue and a crucial part of the transition to a low-emissions economy.

A major nationwide training program will be needed to help re-skill the estimated 8,000 people who work in fossil-fuelled electricity production, and to help fill the tens of thousands of new jobs in renewable energy-related fields.

With the scale of change required to decarbonise the global economy and hopefully avoid a 2℃ warmer world, the need to support communities across Australia and overseas will likely become an increasing challenge for governments around the world. Putting ourselves on an emergency footing could help provide precisely the impetus we need.

• Dr Chris Turney is professor of earth science and climate change, ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, University of New South Wales. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Auckland Council has declared a climate emergency after an Environment Committee meeting today.

The council’s motion was passed unanimously and was met with applause from activists in the packed public gallery.

Activists had told committee members many of them would be voting this election and their votes depended on what councillors would decide.

READ MORE: UN Security-General tells youth be ‘noisy as possible’ on climate change

Waiata Rameka-Tupe from the group Climate Conscious Mana Rangatahi brought a stuffed New Zealand sea turtle to the table with her, saying it had died because its stomach was filled with plastic.

Rameka-Tupe said her group was excited the council had made the declaration but warned it would be watching carefully to see if they followed up with action.

Representing the school climate strikers, Generation Zero’s Sidd Mehita put the council on notice if they wanted their votes.

“We need to see you have skin in the game,” he said.

It was not just young people speaking today, with activist Rosie Gee telling the council it was time to stop using soft words like “encourage” when it comes to making change.

Policy change was the best way to limit climate change and it was needed now, she said.

The Environment Committee includes every member of the council, so its decisions are binding immediately without having to go through further council processes.

In a press release, the council said the declaration meant it was committing to:

• Robustly and visibly incorporate climate change considerations into work programmes and decisions.
• Provide strong local government leadership in the face of climate change, including working with local and central government partners to ensure a collaborative response.
• Advocate strongly for greater central government leadership and action on climate change.
• Increase the visibility of our climate change work.
• Lead by example in monitoring and reducing the council’s greenhouse gas emissions.
• Include climate change impact statements on all council committee reports.

Councillors also voted that all reports presented by staff to decision making committees should include a climate impact statement.

All supported the declaration, but several said the council did not have a handle on the problem and would need to make major, concrete changes if the declaration was to be meaningful.

This article is published under the Pacific Media Centre’s content partnership with Radio New Zealand.

Vanuatu and other Pacific nations can teach a lesson to the world, says UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

“That lesson is very simple. We absolutely need to save the Pacific, and to save the world, that the temperatures will not rise above 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.”

“And this needs a lot of political will.”

READ MORE: UN Secretary-General tells youth be ‘noisy as possible’ on climate change

The UN head arrived in Vanuatu on Saturday with literal as well as metaphorical storm clouds looming on the horizon. An out-of-season cyclone north of Fiji brought low cloud and high winds to Vanuatu, casting a light drizzle on the tarmac as the Guterres disembarked from a Royal Australian Air Force Hercules.

He was welcomed by representatives of the Vaturisu Council of Chiefs and given the high honour of passing under a pair of namele leaves as he entered the airport VIP lounge.

After a brief courtesy visit to the Head of State, where he toasted Vanuatu with a fresh coconut, the SG headed to the Prime Minister’s Office, where a bilateral meeting discussed climate change, as well as other priority matters, including Vanuatu’s continued support for decolonisation the world over.

Lip-service to West Papua
Guterres gave little more than lip-service to West Papua and other concerns, but he spoke passionately about the emerging climate emergency.

“The Pacific,” he said, “has the moral authority to request all countries to be able to abide by what the international community—and the scientific community—now consider essential: that temperatures will not rise more than 1.5 degrees by the end of the century, and for that purpose, that we reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

He insisted “that these objectives are possible. They only depend on political will.”

Later, in an interview with the AFP news agency, he said: “I was in Tuvalu yesterday, and to see the existential risks that Tuvalu is facing really breaks my heart.”

Asked if action was needed in 50 years, 20 years or next year, he said, “No. We have to deal with it immediately. We have the risk of making [climate damage] irreversible, and the targets that were fixed cannot be reached.”

Pacific Islanders have never seen such a high-level endorsement offered in-person and with evident sincerity.

But it is debatable whether that will translate into meaningful international action.

Actual progress?
If he thought there was any chance of finding a receptive audience in Washington, London—or Canberra, for that matter—Guterres would be saying those words there, not here.

And if it meant actual progress, Pacific islanders would be more than content to listen to them on the nightly news broadcast.

But with hardening attitudes among the most resource-rich nations, and the superpowers’ increasing fixation on trade wars and territorial disputes, it’s exceedingly difficult to see Guterres’ fervent entreaties having any impact whatsoever.

Less than a day after his surprise win in the Australian general election, Prime Minister Scott Morrison was being encouraged by Sky News commentators to walk away entirely from the nation’s remaining climate commitments.

The only substantial climate promises Australia has made to the Pacific relate to adaptation, not mitigation.

Australia signed the Boe Declaration along with all the other Pacific Island Forum countries. The declaration emphasises that the damage caused by a rapidly changing climate is the single greatest security threat the region faces.

Boe debate disappeared
But in the ensuing months, no mention whatsoever has been made of this by Australian diplomats or politicians. It has simply disappeared from their vocabulary.

And António Guterres is powerless in the face of this intransigence. His own speeches made no mention of Boe, presumably for fear of giving offence.

Given the opportunity, he refused to encourage Australian voters to think of the environment.

The most pressing global crisis facing the human species today has near-zero traction on the global stage.

There is no more striking evidence of this than the commendable but quixotic decision by António Guterres to use the Pacific as his backdrop in what will most likely be a vain attempt to build momentum for action.

• Dan McGarry is the media director of the Vanuatu Daily Post group. This article is republished with permission.

Ben Bohane’s exclusive interview with the UN Secretary-General António Guterres in Port Vila. Source: Ben Bohane Facebook