NADI, Fiji — Global governments must intensify efforts to reduce emissions because the planet is “hurtling past” a critical temperature threshold that would restrain sea level rise and extreme weather, delegates at a major climate conference in Fiji said on Wednesday.

The ministerial meeting in Fiji serves as a precursor to the COP31 forum, to be held in Turkey in November. Pacific nations, among the world’s most vulnerable to climate change, are seeking to lock their priorities into global climate negotiations. Those priorities include better access to climate finance, stronger protection of oceans, and ensuring that the target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is honored — despite United Nations projections that it will soon be exceeded. That gap between the demands of the world’s most vulnerable nations and the UN’s own projections forms the backdrop heading into the November talks.

“We are hurtling past the 1.5-degree temperature limit,” Fijian climate minister Lynda Tabuya told representatives from more than 50 countries at the start of the pre-COP ministerial negotiations. She said the data simply confirm what Pacific nations can already see: “The tide that reaches our homes, the pale reef our grandmothers no longer recognize, the villages we have already had to relocate.”

“Overshoot (of the target) is not a verdict we accept quietly … keeping 1.5 alive is the primary legal obligation and duty we are here to uphold,” she said.

Declaration Following Tuvalu Visit

On Tuesday, representatives from around 30 nations gathered in Fiji after visiting the vulnerable atoll nation of Tuvalu and adopted a declaration calling for “deep, rapid and sustained emissions reductions.” The delegation, which includes Pacific island leaders along with representatives from countries including France, India and the United Arab Emirates, saw heavy machinery digging sand and creating new land that can withstand rising seas — a firsthand view of the adaptation work already under way on low-lying atolls even as their leaders press global governments to intensify emissions cuts.

“Every fraction of a degree of warming accelerates the impacts of climate change and increases the risk of irreversible loss and damage,” the declaration stated. Its title, Taku Pakasoa, is a Tuvaluan concept describing the strength found in unity and collective action.

Dechen Tsering, director of the Regional Office of Asia Pacific at the UN Environment Program, said exceeding a 1.5-degree rise — and the significant environmental damage that comes with it — is now unavoidable.

“Pacific risks will outlast the temperature peak,” she said. “Each additional 100 years above 1.5 degrees would commit the world to around 40 centimeters (15.8 inches) of additional median sea level rise by 2300 compared with the pathway without overshoot.”

That arithmetic places the duration of any overshoot, not merely its peak, at the center of the Pacific case: by the figures cited in Nadi, the sea level consequences of time spent above 1.5 degrees would still be unfolding at the close of the 23rd century.

Shaping COP31 in Antalya

Turkey is hosting COP31 in the coastal city of Antalya, while Australia is leading the negotiations. Australian climate minister Chris Bowen said the pre-COP events in Fiji and Tuvalu this week will shape what is possible at the summit.

“This region is home to some of the world’s strongest climate voices,” he said, adding that Pacific advocacy was vital in the adoption of the 1.5 goal at COP21 in Paris in 2015. “It’s also experiencing the most direct impacts.”

Turkey’s environment minister Murat Kurum, who is president of COP31, said limiting overshoot of the target was the summit’s clear common goal.

“I believe in this wholeheartedly,” he said.

— Reuters