Climate Change

"President Trump believes the climate is changing and he believes pollutants are part of the equation," Haley said Saturday, answering a central question in the wake of his decision to withdraw the country from the Paris climate accord.

Trump "knows that it's changing and that the US has to be responsible for it and that's what we're going to do," she continued, adding that withdrawing from the Paris agreement won't change the country's commitment to curbing climate change.

Next week, the United Nations Oceans' Conference is being held in New York, co-hosted by Fiji and Sweden, with a specific focus on Sustainable Development Goal 14 - namely to conserve and sustainably manage the use of the oceans, seas and marine resources.

Hugh Govan is an advisor with the Locally Managed Marine Area network and had worked with Pacific coastal communities for many years.

He said these communities had lived in harmony with the ocean for thousands of years and they need to be listened to.

"Thank you. I won't forget what you said," Trump told Pope Francis, before leaving the Pope's private study after a half-hour private meeting.

Neither Trump nor the Pope revealed what their conversation entailed, but readouts from the White House and the Vatican highlighted terrorism, climate change and peace as agenda items covered.

Prime Minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga chaired the 73rd ESCAP Commission in Bangkok last week and called for those attending to create a world that rewards progressive countries who are taking action on climate change.
 
“Climate change is the greatest challenge time, and we are all well aware that one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases is considering withdrawing from the Paris Agreement,” said Prime Minister Sopoaga.
 

The message was heard loud and clear at a two-day meeting that preceded the United Nations biennial forum Mexico is hosting this week in its holiday city by the Caribbean Sea coast this week.
 
Island Business reports presentations at the meeting by SIDS and members of the UN lobby group, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) showed that access to finance and delays in fund disbursement continued to hamper the implementation of GCF.
 

Deputy Director-General of the Information Department at the China Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Wang Xining said China has taken a lot of measures to address global warming.

These include penalising enterprises violating the environment protection law in order to bring up a more sustainable economic development module.

Xining explained during a dialogue with Asia Pacific journalists that China has stressed out innovative ways to put the green elements into the economic growth.

Climate Action Tracker, an umbrella group for three climate think tanks, said sweeping policy changes by US President Donald Trump would flatten out a recent US trend of falling greenhouse gas emissions, unless cancelled out by other events.

"The highly adverse rollbacks of US climate policies by the Trump Administration, if fully implemented and not compensated by other actors, are projected to flatten US emissions instead of continuing on a downward trend," said Professor Niklas Höhne, from one of the think tanks, NewClimate Institute.

With record temperatures sweeping over continents year after year, it is easy to overlook that the ocean has absorbed some 90% of the heat trapped by the carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere since the industrial revolution; and how much of that CO2 has dissolved into seawater as carbonic acid, altering its basic chemistry.
 
The UN meeting follows on the heels of a new secretary general report that investigates the impacts of these changes and the findings are concerning, to say the least.
 

The nearly 18 tonnes of plastic piling up on an island that is otherwise mostly untouched by humans have been pointed to as evidence of the catastrophic, “grotesque” extent of marine plastic pollution.
 
Nearly 38m pieces of plastic were estimated to be on Henderson by researchers from the University of Tasmania and the UK’s Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, weighing a combined 17.6 tonnes.
 

These latest talks are aimed at developing the rules for implementing the accord signed in the French capital in 2015.

But there is a growing worry that President Trump might soon pull out of the historic deal.

Some delegates say such a move would be a body blow for the landmark deal.