The South Pacific lives in interesting times—a ‘crowded and complex region’ is the phrase of the moment—and the times made for an interesting Pacific Islands Forum meeting earlier this month.

Climate change roils. China pushes. Australia emphasises security. And the 18 forum members decided on a new cash formula to pay for their secretariat: Papua New Guinea showed ambition, Fiji doubled up and France stepped up.

The island leaders wrangled with Australia about climate, which was the starting point for the Nauru summit’s security declaration.

The islands listen to Australia on security, as they should; but that merely launches the discussion. To have its security perspective accepted by the islands—if not adopted—Canberra needs to mix sincerity and some sensitivity with security smarts.

The smarts thought is a reminder of the childhood lolly lesson—Smarties come in many colours, just as security has a range of hues. The leaders wore the same colour shirt for the team photo, but the Smarties rule usually rules: different colours, different preferences. The forum declaration spoke of the many shades and tones in play, describing ‘an increasingly crowded and complex region’.

Echoing the declaration, Australia’s new foreign minister, Marise Payne, dryly observed that it’s a ‘strategically crowded Southwest Pacific’, naming the external powers now crowding in as India, China, Japan, Indonesia and Russia.

In a tougher, rougher game, Australia proclaims its traditional aim to be what Senator Payne calls the ‘partner of choice’ on regional security matters, from law enforcement and the protection of rights under international law to crisis response.

The cut-through message to the islands is: take China’s cash with caution, remember the value of Canberra’s commitment.

Senator Payne pointed to the hierarchy of importance in Australia’s foreign policy white paper: ‘a resilient Pacific was clearly described as one of five fundamental policy priority objectives for Australia’. In the contest with China over interests and influence, Australia is arguing that it rates the South Pacific as a fundamental priority in a way that China never will.

As always in the South Pacific, the problem for Canberra is to maintain focus and live up to the fine words. See how that played out in the new security statement from the forum, the Boe declaration, in the first two points of the statement:

(i) We reaffirm that climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific and our commitment to progress the implementation of the Paris Agreement;

(ii) We recognise an increasingly complex regional security environment driven by multifaceted security challenges, and a dynamic geopolitical environment leading to an increasingly crowded and complex region;

Australian climate denialists blithely urge an Oz desertion of the Paris Agreement on the basis that Donald Trump did it and so should we.

The denialists/skeptics need to note that for Australia, this would affect neighbourhood status as well as international standing. That first point of the Boe declaration on climate change— ‘the single greatest threat’—is a South Pacific position that Australia has signed up to, however reluctantly.

In the wrangling over the language on climate change, some Pacific nations privately accused Australia of trying to water down the final declaration. Senator Payne said she had ‘robust and frank discussions’ with her colleagues.

Making climate the first point of the security declaration was an expression of island fears and lived experience, not simply a poke at Australia. Just as the second point about the crowded and complex region describes a shared reality; it’s not just Australia expressing alarm.

‘Security’ can be rendered in rainbow hues, and the declaration offered an expanded concept:

• human security, including humanitarian assistance, to protect the rights, health and prosperity of Pacific people
• environmental and resource security
• transnational crime
• cybersecurity, to maximise protections and opportunities for Pacific infrastructure and peoples in the digital age.

Acting on its ‘top partner’ security principle, Australia is to establish a Pacific Fusion Centre ‘to strengthen information sharing and maritime domain awareness’ to get better regional responses to illegal fishing, drug trafficking and other transnational crimes.

The summit also followed the money, deciding on the budget future of its working arm, the secretariat of the Pacific Islands Forum.

The leaders agreed to increase contributions to meet 60% of the primary/core operating budget of the secretariat; and to make the first change in the way payments are shared among members since 1996, by adjusting the percentage of costs each member pays.

Australia and New Zealand currently pay more than 70% of the secretariat’s budget (35.85% each). By 2021, that’ll reduce to 24.5% each. So the kangaroo and kiwi go from paying the lion’s share of the secretariat budget to just under half. Note the symbolism of that 49% share rather than 50%—the islands certainly do.

Who steps up to pay the gap?

The country that’s made the most noise about kangaroo/kiwi dominance of the forum reaches into its wallet to double up: just enough to match its rhetoric. Fiji’s share goes from 2.16% to 4.35%. Fiji’s leader, Frank Bainimarama, still has nasty memories of the forum ejecting Fiji over his military takeover.

Fiji and the forum: it’s complicated. But Suva does host the secretariat. Frank will pay some more as host, and to cash up for his argument about reducing Oz/NZ control. PNG doubles its contribution with more enthusiasm (going from 5.29% to 10.66%), expressing its view of itself as the natural islands leader.

France steps up too. French Polynesia goes from 2.23% to 4.45%, while New Caledonia goes from 2.79% to 5.57%. France will pay much more than Fiji. So, in future, PNG will pay 10% of the forum budget and France, too, will pay 10%.

Lots of colour and movement as times change in a crowded Pacific.

A major cyclone recently passed by Samoa. The Category-5 Cyclone Winston recently devastated Fiji, resulting in more than 44 fatalities and dislocating 350,000 people.

Natural disasters will continue to ravage our Pacific neighbours. Nearly 10,000 people have been killed, and as many as 9.2 million people have been affected by natural disasters in the region since 1950.

Australia should be supporting the islands recover from such disasters through catastrophe risk insurance. Given their size, borrowing capacity and restricted access to insurance markets, Pacific island states have real problems in raising post-disaster finance. Advancing the islands capacity to meet post-disaster funding requirements by using insurance to immediately access cash should be a top regional priority.

Some years ago, the Caribbean established a catastrophic risk insurance facility with the assistance of the World Bank. The insurance facility is a parametric insurance scheme: payments of claims aren’t based on actual losses or damage following natural disasters but are instead calculated according to predefined indexes based on the intensity, period and location of a disaster. Countries can buy coverage limited to specific events and specific areas, and for a specified amount of time. States can alter the amount they allocate for each disaster.

In the Pacific, there’s been a similar pilot project led by the World Bank operating for the last three years. The pilot’s made two payouts in the last couple of years, to Tonga and Vanuatu, totalling US$3.2 million. Both payments were made within 10 days of the disasters. The scheme provides rapid cash injection to bankroll urgent recovery costs. But it doesn’t cover all losses, including more frequent—but less severe—events.

The Pacific pilot has been unable to provide the range of insurance products that the Caribbean scheme’s been able to provide to its member countries. The Caribbean scheme pays out on the intensity of the event, rather than an evaluation of specific damages.

The Pacific disaster insurance pilot concludes this October. But there are regional plans to establish a Pacific entity, connected to the Pacific Catastrophe Risk Assessment and Financing Initiative, to advance a regional disaster insurance arrangement. Countries such as Vanuatu, Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands and the Republic of the Marshal Islands have expressed willingness to be part of such a scheme.

The initiative requires a pool of funding. Germany is already on board. Australia should also make a respectable contribution to funding in order to assist the disaster resilience of regional countries.

Humanitarian relief efforts, like the $15 million we recently gave Fiji after Cyclone Winston, are certainly appreciated by island governments and the affected communities. But we could assist in sponsoring regional catastrophe risk insurance or support access to immediate funds through guarantees to short-term loans that are necessary for national liquidity.

We can work here with Japan under the bilateral strategy for cooperation with the Pacific that both countries concluded in February. The strategy recognises the need to help the islands better respond to natural disasters.

Supporting a regional insurance scheme would also allow us membership of any catastrophe risk insurance board. We’d be able to shape sustainable regional disaster financing.

The opportunity to support a regional disaster insurance entity also allows Australia to provide more than just immediate relief efforts—it can help give Pacific island countries ownership of their own financing and sustainability. However, this may require a change in our mindset over how we provide assistance. Humanitarian relief efforts make popular headlines and are relatively easy to sell to the electorate—disaster risk insurance isn’t as marketable.

Pacific disasters are occurring with greater frequency so the costs of Australian relief efforts will grow in the coming years. Given most island communities don’t have adequate private insurance schemes, there’s a need to help our island neighbours rebound after natural disasters by incorporating a financial safety net into their disaster management arrangements.

We should also be working to implement the recommendations that came out of the first Pacific Islands Forum Foreign Ministers’ Meeting last July in Sydney. At that meeting, the issue of Disaster Management was discussed by Ministers. The recommendations from the meeting (available here) should be progressively implemented to support improvements in preparedness, capacity, legal and institutional issues and to respond to calls for flexible and accessible funding.

Ultimately, Australia should do more to help Pacific island countries with access to flexible and accessible funding post disasters. This will support long term sustainable ownership to build resilience through preparedness, relief and reconstruction. Australia has an opportunity to show regional leadership on this, at a time when our neighbours are facing the brunt of climate change.  

What were once considered ‘non-traditional threats’ to continental regions of Eurasia and the Americas are now central security challenges for the Pacific island nations. The South Pacific is a region under siege as climate change and other non-traditional security threats like spurred migration, piracy intensify.

As islands in the world’s biggest ocean, those sovereign nations are constantly under threat from the waves via erosion, super-cyclones, and the infiltration of salt water into underground freshwater tables.

There’s no doubt that climate change poses serious challenges for hundreds of millions across the world, and to the international system itself. But for most other countries and regions, climate change doesn’t alter strategic calculations in the way it does for the nations of the South Pacific.

As regional states become more desperate for security and the livelihood of their peoples, their governments may be forced to make agreements that have wider strategic implications. In that way, the growing climate-induced insecurity of the South Pacific may ripple out and affect the balance of global prosperity and security.

As the UNFCCC’s 21st Conference of Parties (COP21) wraps up at the end of this week and attempts are made to achieve unprecedented global commitments to meet the impacts of a warming global climate, Pacific Island nation is at the frontline of this epic battle—both physically and politically.

But even if ambitious targets like cutting global emissions to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees are agreed at COP21 and subsequently implemented, the worst effects of climate change may not be immediately curbed; they merely offset challenges to the safety and security of the people of the region.

In the meantime, the region must look to its defences, be they military, economic or political. And with that, the game opens for new, more complicated partnerships which will further complicate an already complex region. In turn, such a pivotal region affects the future for global security, and so a new dynamic may develop that will upend idealised relationships.

Previously, the Pacific had been thought of as a strategic backwater for regional and global powers like Australia and the US. But the new challenges have compelled the region to look for more solvent, ‘freer’ opportunities from abroad.

Perhaps the most notable new partners in the region are China, and more recently, India. The US Rebalance, welcomed by most countries in the region, has so far failed to make a mark on the current trajectory of events in the region.

The way the Pacific looks and assesses threats is important for effective response to security threats in and of the region.

Islands are key components of maritime security architecture, and their appearance and disappearance cause complications for diplomacy, international law and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Recently, the US Navy conducted Freedom of Navigation operations in the South China Sea, just across from the Kiribati archipelago.

In the South Pacific, the critical issue is the disappearance of islands. The country of Kiribati bought land in Fiji as a standby refuge in the event that inundation renders its islands uninhabitable. Given China’s ever-warming relations with Fiji, this may give China an inroad to relations with two countries in one go. Kiribati’s location is ideal for satellite launch and monitoring positions. China used to have a listening post there, until Kiribati switched to recognising Taiwan. China may be keen to resurrect the post, and Beijing’s friends in Fiji may influence Kiribati to allow that to happen in exchange for helping Kiribati in its time of climate crisis.

Another anomaly exists if countries lose their land to increased erosion via sea-level rise, storm surges, and so on. Should they continue to retain those coordinates and still be regarded as a legal sovereign state (as per the Montevideo Convention)? The people of Kiribati will believe that they have a right to the location of their country, and the resources it contains, even if the land itself is gone. What will become of international legal conventions?

A new set of challenges emerge as islands disappear, including the potential to move the mark of territorial waters. In the case of the South Pacific and Kiribati in particular, with China a close guarantor of Fijian national interests, and the soon to be nested Kiribati government, those questions will strain resolve. Will the PLA Navy finally break out of the Second Island Chain, and the South China Sea, to be a true blue-water navy in the Pacific?

If that were to happen, other powers’ own strategies in the pivotal Pacific may be severely flanked.

The spectrum of challenges that bigger countries understand as threats to their security is different from that which challenges survival of smaller states. Traditional security challenges for continental regions are also different from maritime regions. For example, traditionally for countries in Eurasia and the Americas, security challenges are focused around sabotage and aggression from other neighboring countries or from abroad.

But for the Pacific, there’s a lot less probability of inter-state violence. What will compel strategic behavior, and underlies the survival of Pacific island states, are the elements that make them unique and strategically valuable: that they’re dots of land embedded in vast oceans.

In the flurry to find new and inspiring solutions, infusing the centrality of security into the politics of emissions, the science of global warming, energy and global business mightn’t be appealing enough.

However, survival compels rational behaviour and actions.

COP21 may achieve global targets in emissions and energy standards. It may also entice the Pacific to look at the summit as a source of free capital for adaptation and mitigation. Such mitigation and adaptation efforts, however, will need to be customised to the security realities of the South Pacific.

The colonial and postcolonial institutions installed in the Pacific aren’t fit for the dynamic challenges of the maritime 21st century. And conditioning the region to survive by handouts has proven counter-productive.

The best ways forward may not be just ‘adaptation’, but an evolutionary jump: especially for traditional development partners of the region to guarantee and facilitate (or at least not impede) new industries, viable economies, and more effective institutions that can handle the rapidly changing environment.

Climate-proofed growth for Pacific economies is the best pathway to a stable region, and a secure pivot for global security in the future.