Trouble in Paradise highlights climate in the Pacific is launched at CHOGM today.
Trouble in Paradise highlights climate in the Pacific is launched at CHOGM today.
Climate change threatens the future of Pacific islands
Sea level rise accelerates and is above global average
Ocean heating and acidification harm ecosystems and livelihoods
Early warnings are integral part of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction
The following is an extract from AUT Vice-Chancellor, Professor Damon Salesa’s contribution to a new book to commemorate the Trouble in Paradise - Climate Change in the Pacific exhibition, which will officially be opened today at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Samoa.
OPINION
Those who live closeto the waters of the Pacific, in traditions that go back thousands of years – in some cases tens of thousands - know that there are new troubles in our world. These troubles, now evident to so many of the peoples of the Pacific, are climate and sustainability-centred, and are the catalyst for the photographs and creativity that are brought together in Trouble in Paradise: Climate Change in the Pacific.
Through the power of visual media, a group of new, often young, Pacific creatives have turned their lenses towards capturing the ways that this climate and sustainability trouble has come to them, in their parts of the world. These photographs – and their creators – come as authentic voices speaking to our shared global challenge, offering powerful and unique insight, vision and critique, coming in parts sombre, poignant, celebratory and defiant.
Trouble in Paradise highlights climate change in the Pacific.
These are voices, and a vision, we need.
Pacific ways of both being in and seeing the world have always been marginalised when others have held the pen, the paintbrush or the camera. This has even been true when – as so often has happened – the Pacific and its peoples are not only central, but essential, to the story. By putting Pacific voices at the centre, we not only allow authentic Pacific voices to be heard with integrity, but to hear and see what we would otherwise not.
I have written elsewhere about the uniquely Indigenous nature of the Pacific Ocean (see my recent book, An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays). As an Indigenous Ocean, the Ocean of (Over) a Thousand Languages, it is a uniquely diverse place, where more than a fifth of the world’s linguistic and cultural diversity is held among less than 1% of its people.
A picture from the Trouble in Paradise book.
It is little wonder that the Pacific brings distinctive and complex contributions that often challenge the way the world sees climate change. This is fed by the unique oceanic context in which Pacific people live as guardians of land and sea at a vast scale (the Pacific is nearly one-third of the world’s surface). Once seen as small and remote, the renewed framing of these archipelagos as Large Ocean Nations invites a new vision, one supported by the shared regional vision of the “Blue Pacific Continent” (now laid out in the Pacific Island Forum’s 2050 strategy). These are all unique Pacific contributions to addressing global climate change.
In 2015, at the UN Climate Change Conference (COP21) in Paris, we clearly saw how the world itself needed Pacific leadership. The contribution of the Pacific region, its leaders, and its individual nations, emerged to lead the world with the kind of courageous and ethical leadership that it was desperately in need of. It was to Pacific capitals like Majuro, Tarawa, Suva, Ngerulmud and Avarua that the world turned, not Washington, Beijing or Berlin, and Pacific leaders, particularly the late Tony deBrum, were the animating force behind the 1.5C target, and the “coalition of high ambition”.
In a very real sense, in 2015 (as we have seen at times since) the continent that mattered most was the Blue Pacific Continent – an Indigenous Ocean. Part of the search for new leadership in our world, is not only turning to the political and cultural leaders of the Pacific, but to other wellsprings of leadership also marginalised. On the issues of sustainability and climate change, perhaps the most determined and eloquent of new voices have been those of the young, and this is particularly true of the indigenous Pacific.
Climate change is having a global effect - especially in the Pacific.
In a range of ways, through advocacy, activism, consciousness-raising and protest, youth have staked their claim on the issues of climate leadership. For Pacific youth in particular, the ways of tackling these challenges are notably diverse; they are increasingly digital, especially social media, but perhaps most interestingly they are very often artistic.
This intersection of the unique vision of the young with the astonishing cultural variety of the Pacific, and with the creative and critical spirit, is at the heart of Trouble in Paradise.
The art of photography has, as a visual medium, a unique power to capture and narrate the impacts of climate change. For our Pacific photographers represented here, it is clear that many of these impacts are already present in their everyday lives. Trouble in Paradise gives this group of artists a platform to capture these images and to tell their stories, and to tell them in their own ways.
In Trouble in Paradise, the range of images, the array of stories, is as broad as the Pacific and as diverse as these peoples’ worlds. While outsiders’ views and images of Pacific climate change are attracted overwhelmingly to catastrophising images – of dead coral, inundation and flooding, for our artists here this is only one kind of image, one kind of story. And while there is plenty of attention given to the damage and harms, the risks and pains of climate change, from people who know it intimately and best, there is a broader range. These images make clear that these impacts of climate change are all very different when they are happening to you, to your family, and to your home.
But the range of images here make equally clear that, as we have already seen, Pacific people – including these artists and their art – are themselves leading, responding, and acting. Young Pacific people are rightfully concerned and angry at the challenges they face, which are not of their own making. But these young artists and those they image are not passive or simply victims. As the Pacific Climate Warriors have put it, “we are not drowning, we are fighting”.
Here art is action. And art as an action is not simply symbolic, but in alignment with the unique climate leadership contribution that the Pacific has made and will continue to in the future. The climate science is in, and we know exactly what we need to do to secure our future in that sense; the challenging part remains the “human and social science” of how we get people to commit, to change, to act in ordinary ways that make a sustainable world real.
A big part of that is to tell stories that move people, from inaction, indifference or complicity, to sustainable climate action.
Following the exhibition in Samoa, these photographs will be hosted at Auckland University of Technology Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau. Here at AUT, a grateful caretaker of this powerful collection, we have found it speaks both to who we are, and the role we must play in our shared existential challenge. We are a university that is not just in, but of the Pacific, with an indigenous past and present that defines us, and where a third of our students are indigenous to Aotearoa or the Pacific.
In our new strategy – Te Kete – AUT has committed, after extensive consultation with our people, to a net zero carbon future. Our people, in their hearts and minds, are highly committed; but realising this in the day to day, in our ordinary business will be the deeper and ongoing challenge. This collection will help us on this voyage: a voyaging star that will help keep our course, through a continued life at AUT, inspiring our staff and students and our teaching, learning and research.
The exhibition was presented by the British Council New Zealand and the Pacific in partnership with AUT, the British High Commissions in Wellington and Apia, the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, and the Samoan Ministry of Education and Culture.
