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The Pacific Calling Partnership (PCP) consists of organisations and individuals who seek an Australia and a world that:

- Listens to calls from our low-lying island neighbours in the Torres Strait and the Pacific about the serious threat that climate change poses to them

- Recognises that Australia has an ecological debt to these peoples

- Raises awareness of our responsibility to these communities as part of a global solution towards a sustainable future.

More about the Pacific Calling Partnership (PCP) below.

Pacific Island Nations Call Out

Australia and New Zealand’s neighbours in the Pacific: the Cook Islands, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tuvalu are asking for our solidarity as they face the consequences of human-induced climate change. The Torres Strait Islands at the northern tip of Queensland face similar threats.

Low lying islands acknowledge that they need to address population and unemployment issues, better manage their environmental resources, improve food security and protect their fish resources from poaching. What they want us to realise is that greenhouse gas emissions from polluting countries like Australia and New Zealand are exacerbating these problems and creating new ones.

They are experiencing increasingly severe storm surges and higher king tides resulting in coastal erosion and receding shorelines. Longer droughts and more frequent inundation of salt water is damaging soil and leading to the death of important food sources such as bread fruit, taro and coconut. Fresh water supplies are also threatened. As with Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, warmer ocean surface temperatures threaten to bleach coral reefs and thus damage coastal fishing supplies. As the climate changes some islands will see an increase in diseases like dengue fever and malaria.

Green house gas emissions need to be drastically cut back and the islands need more substantial assistance than is already being provided to adapt to the impacts of climate change.

At the Pacific Island Forum in Cairns in August 2009 the Cook Islands, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tuvalu restated their adoption of the position of the global Association of Small Islands States that asks developed nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 45 percent by 2020 and 85 percent by 2050.

Tuvalu

“Sea level rise is likely to be the biggest long term threat to Tuvalu. But climate change can no longer be seen as a future concern. It is a matter of life and death for us this very moment.”
Rev Tafuae Molu Lasama, Tuvalu Climate Action Network.

Ted Billy in the Torres Strait

"We know the signs of the season in our whole being; when that tree flowers the turtles are mating. Now it seems it is very late. That tree now doesn’t know what time to flower. Then we are confused too. We know that the turtle mating season is late; before we could just tell with our own signs and our own inner knowledge"
Jack Billy, Torres Strait.

Kiribati

"On a recent visit to the island I grew up on in Kiribati, I was shocked to find that most of the breadfruit trees are all dying out. For people of Kiribati the breadfruit tree is very important because we get shelter from it, local medicine, of course, food. It’s almost the source of life for people of Kiribati.”
Maria Tiimon, Pacific Outreach Officer for the Pacific Calling Partnership

 

 

About Pacific Calling Partnership

The Pacific Calling Partnership began in May 2006 in response to a series of calls that had come from the peoples in low-lying Pacific Islands. The PCP brings together a number of significant Non Government Organisations (NGOs), school groups, community organisations, and individuals who all recognize Australia’s ecological debt to Kiribati, Tuvalu, parts of the Torres Strait and other low-lying Pacific Island neighbours. These are joined in partnership with individuals and organisations living in the Pacific and migrant groups in Australia. New members are always welcome.

Together we strive, in all our endeavours, to listen to and be accountable to voices from the Pacific and Torres Strait and to raise awareness about the impacts on them of high greenhouse gas emissions from industrialised countries. The PCP meets regularly in order to co-ordinate, energise, and review the progress that the campaign is making. Several partners are members of the Climate Action Network of Australia (CANA) and are active participants in CANA processes.

The PCP aims to build a consensus that drives support for Australia, in partnership with our neighbours, to undertake an audit of the civil, cultural, economic and environmental resilience of all countries within the Pacific region. In this way we can work towards building a positive, communitarian and sustainable response based on Human Rights to the increased water, food, fuel and land stresses that are predicted under present circumstances and future climate change scenarios.

The PCP raises awareness in Australia and the Pacific of a sense of connection by celebrating and making known the human stories that bind us.

The PCP seeks to encourage leadership and advocacy skills around climate change issues among interested Pacific and Torres Strait Islanders.

The PCP supports the development of a regional approach to climate-related migration and labour mobility that prioritises the Pacific and increases the choices of Pacific Islanders.

The PCP supports the statement by the Australian Council for International Development (ACFID) that,
‘The greatest form of mitigation and assistance to adaptation Australia could provide to the Pacific is to instigate significant cuts in our greenhouse gas emission and move away from a fossil fuel-based economy.’

The PCP supports the call of the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS) in its campaign to ensure that

AOSIS Input into the Assembly Document, “Shared Vision” presented at climate change negotiations to the UNFCCC in Copenhagen 2009

Twelve people from several different organisations that make up the Partnership came together on 30 January and decided on the major directions for the the Partnership for 2009. The meeting that decided that during 2009 our main focus will be to link the local with the global as decisions made at Copenhagen are going to be crucial to the future of the Pacific Islands.

Click here to read the Strategic Plan

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