Pacific CSO Statement to the Port Vila II PSIDS Ministerial Dialogue - Fossil Fuel Transition and the Pacific Just Transition Agenda

KEY DOCUMENTS

1. Tassiriki Call - Port Vila II Outcome Document

2. PICAN Technical Brief to accompany Statement delivery

16 April 2026

Statement Delivered by Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN)

Co-presented with the Vanuatu Climate Action Network (VCAN)

Excellencies, Honourable Ministers, Distinguished Delegates,

The Pacific Islands Climate Action Network (PICAN), on behalf of its over 260 Pacific CSO members, extends its gratitude to the Govt of Vanuatu for the opportunity to deliver our Pacific CSO statement.  Our network sat in this very room just two weeks ago deliberating  on our shared journey toward achieving climate justice in our region.

The Pacific has always been shaped by crossings.

Our ancestors navigated this ocean freely — reading the stars, following the currents, the birds, forces only understood by their relationship to each other. That sovereignty over navigation and knowledge is a living inheritance, carried into this room today.

Others were brought below deck as indentured labourers by the same colonial system that stripped Banaba of phosphate and Bikini and Rongelap Atoll of its people. They did not choose the crossing. They survived it, and built belonging from dispossession.

And some among us are still crossing — still fighting, for sovereignty over bodies, language, culture and land where the pipeline and the military post arrived together. 

This Fossil Fuel Free Pacific is for all of us.

The Laboratory We Inherited 

For more than a century, the Pacific has been a laboratory built on a single operating principle: that Pacific resources, lands, ocean, and bodies could be exploited and stolen for accumulation elsewhere.

The scars remain in the ecosystems and bodies of the Marshallese. It is lived by the people of those communities who are permanently displaced to accumulate more wealth for the wealthy. The Pacific Ocean is suffocating with plastic waste, poisoned by nuclear waste — waste that is discharged and entombed — and threatened by new frontiers of extraction.

For decades, rising emissions have impacted our coral reefs, our groundwater, and our food systems — each year more severely than the last. The IPCC confirmed what our communities already knew: small island states face all climate risks at higher intensity than anywhere else on earth, and the harm is already significant, already compounding, already in some places irreversible.

We carry this not as history. It is in the chemistry of our soil, the biology of our people and the physics of our ecosystems. We carry this as the knowledge of what it costs to be the consequence of someone else's economic growth.

But there is something else the Pacific bears witness too. We see the system whole. Because the system lands here whole. Fossil fuels, plastic pollution, nuclear legacy, land and seabed mining, biodiversity loss — they arrive in the Pacific together, on the same ocean, on the same lands, breathing the same air, in the same bodies, and in the same communities. The Pacific understands how these things connect because we live with the consequences. No modelling required. And it is from that understanding that we speak today.

The Laboratory We Are Building

We have decided the laboratory is ours now.

The extractive economy takes without return. It breaks the oldest covenant between the living and what sustains them. Coal, oil and gas are stored energy —  accumulated from life over hundreds of millions of years. Two centuries of industrial extraction is spending what deep time accumulated, releasing in that geological instant what cannot be replaced. Underneath the language of growth and development, this is what the fossil fuel economy is. It takes without return.

Our star, the sun, does not take. Every day she radiates more energy onto this planet than all of human civilisation consumes in a year — freely, without depletion, in dynamic equilibrium between her own gravity and the outward energy of fusion. She gives. She sustains. 

A just transition, understood in physical terms, is the return to living within this equilibrium and re-centering. Pacific communities have understood this from deep practice. Tapu is a precise technology — built over generations of intimate observation — encoding the understanding that certain thresholds once crossed do not allow return. That the ocean gives abundantly within its own account and collapses when drawn beyond it. Naming limits is wisdom, not restriction. This is the knowledge the extractive economy spent two centuries consciously dismantling, and it is this knowledge the new laboratory is built on.

The Fossil Fuel Free Pacific is what this looks like at the political scale. Renewable energy reaching outer islands on communities' own terms. Food systems drawing on restored soil and protected ocean. Sovereignty over the transition — who designs it, who benefits, who is not left carrying the cost of someone else's timeline. This is the destination. Everything that follows is navigation toward it.

What Overshoot Does to the Logic

Excellencies and distinguished delegates, you know the landscape. Paris. The ICJ. The instruments being built and the pressures working against them. What we want to offer is a reframe — because the reality of where we are changes the logic of everything already on the table, and that shift has not yet been fully absorbed into how the instruments are being assembled together.

The committed warming already in the atmosphere makes breach of our 1.5 degree survivable threshold within this decade, a near-certainty. And the emissions being counted are not all the emissions being produced. As we meet here, another new war that began six weeks ago has already produced emissions exceeding the annual output of 84 countries. Thus significant sources, notably conflict related emissions remain outside the accounting frameworks, shielded from national inventories, growing as geopolitical tensions intensifies. That gap sits, unaddressed, inside every instrument currently on the table. And that gap means we cannot adequately plan for an already uncertain future.

What overshoot means in practice: duration becomes the variable that determines whether locked-in harms are survivable or permanent. Coral that bleaches and recovers is not the same as coral that bleaches into its death. A groundwater lens under stress is not the same as one contaminated beyond use. And for the sea that rises to inundate our lands, that loss is permanent. Every year above the threshold is a ratchet. It does not reverse when the temperature eventually comes down. Generational harm is being locked in right now, by the gap between what the current system of instruments requires and what it delivers.

Paris governs the trajectory but as yet has not been able to address the source. New extraction is licensed every year within a framework that has no mechanism to stop it. Every new oil field, every new gas terminal, every new source of methane, and every coal mine, creates stranded assets that work against the demand-side commitments Paris is trying to build. The extraction side actively undermines the consumption side — and the ratchet keeps turning.

The ICJ Advisory Opinion is the legal floor the entire international system must now stand on. It establishes with clarity that state obligations are not aspirational or political choices but binding duties grounded in international law. What began here, in Vanuatu, driven by the urgency of frontline communities was carried to The Hague through the leadership of Pacific Island students, civil society and states. 

The Opinion confirmed that fossil fuel production causing climate harm constitutes an internationally wrongful act, and that reparation in all its forms is required.  The ITLOS Advisory Opinion stands alongside it — confirming that greenhouse gas emissions absorbed by the ocean constitute marine pollution under UNCLOS, and that the duty of care owed to the ocean is binding, not aspirational. This is the floor of legal obligation. 

Indigenous wisdom, Science and local knowledge systems have arrived at the same truth: certain thresholds once crossed do not allow return. This is the floor of consequence. These instruments of science, knowledge and the law — cannot be invoked selectively or superficially. If States claim to stand on them, they stand on all of what they require. 

New instruments modelled on nonproliferation frameworks are being proposed to address the supply-side gap. The Pacific brings to every such process something specific: the accumulated knowledge of what happens when accountability frameworks are built without genuine binding commitments from the most powerful parties. We have watched presence in a negotiating room become endorsement of a text written elsewhere. We have watched long timelines absorb our capacity while the activity being negotiated continued uninterrupted. We have watched false solutions — carbon capture, offsets, nuclear, critical minerals from the extraction of our oceans, managed transition pathways — written in as equivalent to phase-out, extending the extraction licence under new language. We have watched the knowledge of frontline communities drawn upon for legitimacy while those communities carried the cost of whatever the text ultimately allowed.

The Pacific has seen enough processes that looked like progress from the outside and felt like extraction from the inside. What we bring to every room — including this one — is the knowledge of that difference.

The losses overshoot is locking in — our health, our futures, language, culture, the relationship between a people and their homes— cannot be priced. They are the accumulated legacy of generations, and once gone they are gone. Reparation is the only honest frame. The ICJ confirmed the legal basis. The Vanuatu UNGA resolution — establishing a registry of harm, operationalising reparation —would have given this institutional form. But has been fought against and the states in this room by whom and why. How we tell this story — whose framing holds, whose language enters the record, who gets to define what accountability means — that is where the power is. Narrative sovereignty is not separate from political strategy. It is a political strategy and one which requires us — your communities.

It Grows from Here

We want to be specific about what civil society networks across this region offer — because it is not simply advocacy. It is infrastructure.

Our networks hold ecological knowledge that no instrument record contains. What the reef looked like before the baselines were set. This is carried across generations in communities that the science needs and cannot reach any other way. We move technical language into outer islands and bring community reality back into the spaces where commitments are made — and that two-way flow is what makes ambitious positions hold under pressure. 

We are present in the long months between meetings, when commitments are either honoured or quietly set aside. And we are growing the next generation of negotiators and thought leaders from within these communities — people who carry the knowledge of this ocean, this land, in their bodies. That is not something the multilateral system can manufacture. 

It grows from here.

One System, One Perimeter

The Fossil Fuel Free Pacific cannot be achieved by addressing emissions while the ocean floor is stripped for transition minerals and the petrochemical economy continues through plastic. But the connection runs deeper than that.

Each of these frontiers follows the same pattern. Fossil fuels generated the crisis. Deep-sea mining and critical mineral extraction are now proposed as the solution — the raw materials for the clean energy transition that will fix what fossil fuels broke. Plastics were themselves a solution once, to the industrial logistics of a growing economy. Each iteration produces consequences that land in the Pacific while the productive economy moves to the next resource frontier. The Pacific does not receive separate problems. It receives the full arc of each cycle — the extraction, the consequences, and then the proposal of the next extraction as the solution to the last one's damage.

This is why the people of the Pacific hold the line across the whole perimeter simultaneously — in the world's courts, at the ISA against deep-sea mining dressed as green transition, at CBD COP where the 30x30 commitment cannot coexist with opening the Pacific seabed to fund someone else's energy transition, and at the INC against a plastics treaty that is trying to manage consequences without addressing production. The same question at every frontier: who carries the cost of this cycle, and when does the cycle end.

The answer the new laboratory proposes is not a better extraction. It is a different economy entirely — one that runs on the example of the sun, in equilibrium, and has no next frontier to move to when the current one is exhausted.

Recommendations 

As you journey from this room to Santa Marta and Beyond, we call on all Pacific Small Islands Developing States to: 

1. Commit to advocating for supply-side measures as the necessary complement to Paris demand-side commitments in the Santa Marta outcome — explicitly naming that phase-out of fossil fuel production is required.
   

2. Reaffirm the 1.5 degree threshold as non-negotiable. When this hard fought target was won, it was won with the understanding that every degree of warming up to 1.5 was harm we would absorb. Reaffirming 1.5 is not despite the near and certain breach of it and its locked-in consequences, but because of it.  We urge this to be scientific reality, framing all positions going into Santa Marta, and demanding that the science underpinning any transition instrument or framework reflects the full emissions picture, including sources currently excluded from national accounting frameworks, and is free from the influence of energy industry-affiliated modelling assumptions. No instrument built on compromised baselines can deliver adequate response.
   

3. Ensure that any fossil fuel transition instrument you support must be consistent with and build upon both the ICJ Advisory Opinion and the ITLOS Advisory Opinion The same legal framework that holds states accountable for climate harm governs the ocean floor. It cannot be selectively invoked. The just and equitable transition itself must exclude false solutions such as CCS, nuclear and questionable offsets and not open new frontiers of extraction — deep-sea mining, critical minerals, geoengineering — that compound the marine pollution ITLOS has already named, and strip the common heritage of humankind for private gain. The precautionary principle is not optional where the harm is irreversible. These opinions were won by Pacific peoples — States, students, communities, together — who refused to accept that the law had nothing to say about what was happening to their ocean. That work belongs to this region. Every instrument built from here must stand on it.

Tankyu tumas.