Vanuatu’s climate minister Ralph Regenvanu has been sounding the alarm over climate change. As the four-day pre-COP31 meetings get underway in Fiji, he continues to argue countries need to take “urgent action” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Regenvanu points to the United Nations Environment Program report which, in September, found that the world is set to cross the Paris agreement threshold in the next few years, with a best case scenario peak temperature of 1.8°C (others suggest 2°C). That report said the impact of climate change will be increasingly dangerous, but that it is still possible to bring temperatures down to the agreed global goals.

Regenvanu also pointed to the International Court of Justice’s (ICJ) advisory opinion that countries have a responsibility to achieve the goal of limiting climate warming to 1.5°C [above per-industrial levels] but that those responsibilities extend beyond domestic emissions.

He said if emissions are not rapidly reduced within the next four years, any overshoot of 1.5°C, “even a fraction of a degree”, is not an abstract problem for Pacific nations; it will mean reefs, freshwater and land are destroyed.

Regenvanu said Australia’s argument that it is only responsible for cutting the greenhouse gases it emits within its borders is untenable. He said the ICJ’s advisory opinion specified the 1994 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was not the only climate change framework countries must abide by.

The UNFCCC was agreed to when there was less understood about the devastating impact of climate change. It aimed to stabilise greenhouse gas........

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