Climate Change

FRDP is the world’s first integrated regional framework to build resilience to climate change and disasters.

The FRDP was developed in response to recommendations from the Pacific Platform for Disaster Risk Management and Pacific Climate Change Roundtable in 2011 and endorsed by the Pacific Island Forum Leaders in 2012.

The Framework aims to ensure that climate change and disasters are understood as a development challenge with priority actions to address vulnerability to climate change and disasters and build resilience across all sectors.

The action by Tonga means a strengthening the voice of the Pacific Island countries’ call in Paris to limit temperature rise to way under 1.5°C.

An official communiqué sent by the PIDF Secretary General to all member countries earlier last week reiterated the call for Pacific Island countries to remain united and urged them to ratify the Paris agreement at its earliest.

The agricultural union Agri SA has requested over $1 billion in government subsidies to help farmers through the crisis, but a cut-price solution could soon be available -- from an unlikely source.

Johannesburg schoolgirl Kiara Nirghin, 16, recently won the Google Science Fair's Community Impact Award for the Middle East and Africa with her submission "No More Thirsty Crops."

RNZI reports Labour is also calling for the government to take a humanitarian approach to people from the region who are overstayers in New Zealand.

United Nations warns if sea level rise continues at the current rate, the Pacific atolls of Kiribati and Tuvalu could be completely submerged within decades.

Terry Edwards has lived on Kiribati's main atoll of Tarawa his entire life.

The people there feared for the future, he said.

"We are so afraid and we think about Kiribati, Kiribati maybe in future is going to sink, we worry about it."

A Scholar for the Islands Society, Genevieve Neilson, said climate change funding for Pacific countries is improving with the US contributing $US500 million to the Green Climate Fund, and new programmes starting in the region.

But she said Pacific states would like greater opportunity to make decisions about how the money was spent.

"If it's being decided in a boardroom somewhere which programmes are being run or how programmes are going to be run or funded then that can really take away from the closer needs of the community."

The ITC is the joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation and advises and trains producers on how to reach international markets.

Following a visit to Fiji, Arancha Gonzalez identified climate change as being the biggest challenge to Pacific farmers being able to access international markets.

This statement was made by the Minister of Agriculture, Livestock, Forestry, Fisheries & Biosecurity, Matai Seremaiah Nawalu as he was officially launching the International Day of Forests on Wednesday 23 March 2016 at the Agriculture Station in Tagabe, Port-Vila.

“Together, we’ve shown what’s possible when the world stands as one,” he said. “We met the moment.”

While he saw the agreement as a global achievement, he emphasised what had been accomplished by America since he entered the White House.

The Palestinians say they will submit to the U.N. secretary-general their instruments of accession to the global climate change convention.

At climate talks in Paris, experts called for strong language on respecting human rights and the rights of indigenous people to be included in the agreement.

Craig Mokhiber of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights says the climate crisis is a human rights crisis and it needs to be addressed as such.