Climate change is a pressing existential threat to the Pacific region, and to the way of life of Pacific Islanders. While many islands are threatened by sea level rise with impacts on land, freshwater, and cultural heritage, increasingly frequent extreme weather events such as 2020’s Tropical Cyclone Harold have caused significant damage. Changes in temperature and rainfall patterns are affecting agricultural yields, impacting livelihoods, food security and nutrition. Sea-level rise, storm surges and king tides are affecting fresh drinking water availability specially in atoll nations, with knock-on effects on health. Ocean acidification is affecting marine biodiversity and the communities that depend upon it for their livelihoods. Climate induced displacement and loss of livelihoods are becoming severe.
The regional climate justice situation in the Pacific Island Countries (PICs), including Fiji, Vanuatu, Tuvalu, Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and others, is shaped by a shared experience of high vulnerability, low emissions, and a strong moral and legal claim for global accountability. Collectively contributing less than 0.03% of the global emissions, PICs face severe and escalating climate threats.
These impacts are exacerbated by persistent social inequality, economic fragility, and governance limitations. The PICs are on the frontlines of climate impacts, yet face structural barriers to adaptive capacity, recovery, and inclusive policymaking. Economic vulnerability remains a defining feature, with Pacific economies heavily reliant on climate sensitive sectors such as agriculture, fisheries, and tourism. The compounding effects of COVID-19, inflation, and global energy market volatility have exacerbated debt burdens and heightened vulnerability to both economic and climate shocks.
Governance challenges include low political representation and insufficient investment in climate mainstreaming. Insecure land tenure, limited access to new land, and inadequate government support are undermining the rights of displaced Indigenous peoples. The participation of women, youth, people with disabilities, LGBTQIA+ individuals, and Indigenous communities remains limited. Social protection systems are fragmented, which amplifies risks in rural, remote, or outer island communities where access to services is sparse. Following disasters, recovery assistance often fails to reach the most marginalized, deepening inequality and exclusion.
The climate crisis is also exacerbating existing inequalities. Pacific women are more likely to live in poorer and more remote areas and to depend on natural resources for their livelihoods. They are more vulnerable to disasters and cannot easily access the resources they need for recovery. Climate induced disasters have also been shown to worsen existing social tensions through increasing pressure on land and resources.
While the impacts of climate change are particularly acute within the Pacific, the causes of climate change arise largely from outside of the region, making climate change not only an environmental and economic issue, but a profound matter of justice, sovereignty, and human rights. Advocacy in the Pacific emphasizes the right to life, land, culture, and self-determination, the need for loss and damage compensation and the intergenerational equity and protection of future generations.
To address these injustices, Oxfam works together with communities across the PICs to build resilience, particularly for women and girls, so they can withstand and flourish in the face of climate change and disasters. We support regional efforts towards climate justice, including regional recognition of diverse local level priorities in the Pacific. We also promote the representation, participation and recognition of the diverse voices of the Pacific at national, regional and international policy and programming levels.
The Pacific region is a global moral force in the climate movement. Pacific leaders, civil society, and Indigenous Peoples have long championed climate justice grounded in Indigenous knowledge, intergenerational justice, and custodianship of the ocean.
Recent successes underscore this leadership and demonstrate the power of Pacific diplomacy and civil society mobilization:
A key upcoming opportunity for the region lies in the fact that Australia is bidding and very likely to secure an Australia–Pacific co-hosted COP31 in 2026. This creates a huge opportunity for the Pacific to influence Australia and the world for a progressive COP. In addition, Australia has elected a progressive government creating space for greater climate action in the region.
There is an urgent opportunity to amplify these efforts and ensure that the most vulnerable communities can withstand the impacts of climate change, improve their wellbeing, and hold duty bearers accountable.
1) Strengthening Movements and Activism
Oxfam in the Pacific works as a convenor, broker and facilitator, bringing together a wide ecosystem of stakeholders, civil society, women’s rights organizations, Indigenous networks, youth groups, and national and local governments to address climate change.
Our partners include PICAN, SICAN, KiriCAN, VCAN, and TUCAN respectively. In addition, we work together with WARA (West ‘Are’Are Rokotanikeni Association), a women’s organisation in Solomon Islands, and DIVA for Equality, an LGBTQIA+ organisation in Fiji. These partners are actively engaged across community-led advocacy spaces, particularly around women’s leadership and climate justice. We are also working with Pacific Youth Council and Indigenous women’s networks in Vanuatu, who are increasingly active in regional and national dialogues. We prioritize support for partners that shift power, challenge hierarchies, and enable diverse leadership.
Many of these partners are highly experienced in climate justice action and provide inspiration and learning opportunities. Our partners not only mobilize people but are actively working to change policy and practice. For example, in 2023, SICAN members in Solomon Islands collaborated with the Ministry of Finance to advocate for climate-sensitive agriculture provisions in the national budget – demonstrating how movement building can translate into tangible outcomes.
Our approach to partnership, prioritizing the climate justice goals and aspirations of partners rather than simply delivering projects and programming via in-country partners, offers a unique modality to advance Pacific-wide climate justice priorities informed by the diverse communities, movements and organizations with whom we work. We prioritize Pacific-led strategies that challenge power imbalances and connect community struggles to global demands.
While fragmented regional coordination on migration, adaptation, and advocacy continues to limit collective action, through effective relationship building, policy dialogue, and cross-national convenings, we are strengthening the Pacific climate justice movement from the ground up.
2) Mobilizing Climate Finance for Fair Climate Action
Pacific nations receive limited international climate finance, and the process to access it is slow and complex. The insufficient finance provided is often shaped by donor-driven agendas and bureaucratic requirements. Local communities and organizations are significantly underfunded despite being the custodians of knowledge and ability to lead the adaptation resilience work. Infrastructure and technical capacity gaps limit the ability of the local actors to access much-needed adaptation finance. Legal uncertainty, particularly around climate displacement and sovereignty, further complicates efforts.
Our work on climate finance includes providing grants to partners and communities directly, building the capacity of communities and partner organisations to access available climate finance themselves, holding duty bearers to account to ensure that promised finance reaches those most in need along with advocacy to increase the volume and flow of climate finance, and evidence generation and research to support advocacy, campaigning and programming needs.
Our climate finance work in the Pacific focuses on improving direct access to climate finance, particularly for women, and strengthening governance systems. This includes promoting greater transparency in climate finance decision-making, allocations, and impact, ensuring that adaptation policies and programs consider the rights and roles of women and other marginalized groups, and advocating for more finance to be directed toward their specific needs. We also work to ensure that national-level climate finance decisions are informed by evidence on the impacts and needs of these groups, that civil society organizations are recognized and consulted for their analysis and expertise, and that women and other marginalized communities are meaningfully included in consultations at national, municipal, and community levels. In addition, we support partners who have faced persistent barriers in accessing funding due to technical capacity gaps or legal registration challenges. Many local groups have struggled to navigate GCF or bilateral proposal processes, despite being at the frontline of climate resilience.
We also draw from Oxfam’s global climate finance research, including the shadow reports, which have informed regional discussions about the quality of finance, particularly the push for grant-based, gender-just funding models.
In Australia, Oxfam is working to shape a Make Big Polluters Pay Alliance made up of development, climate, faith, social sector, and climate affected community organizations. It will influence the economic reform debate and push for a climate pollution levy on fossil fuel corporations and climate compensation fund for impacted communities in Australia and the Pacific region.
3) Supporting Local Adaptation to Build Resilience
Pacific island countries are working hard to address the escalating realities of climate change, including the impacts on land, livelihoods, and on the food and water security and seed sovereignty of their most vulnerable communities. Oxfam is fostering a collaborative and inclusive response to climate change and disaster preparedness in the Pacific by partnering with local climate networks. We act as a facilitator to help these networks directly influence government, the private sector and civil society, and we provide them with the knowledge and skills they need to advocate for sustainable solutions.
Our programs uphold the principles of locally led adaptation by using multifaceted approaches to build resilience and promote equity, inclusion and traditional knowledge. This includes providing skills and materials to local communities to support climate-resilient agriculture and improve water security; strengthening the capacity of local partner organizations to implement climate change programs that address structural barriers and injustices, including gender inequality; and working with local authorities to ensure that equity considerations are integrated into climate adaptation planning and action. Examples of how we are fostering locally led adaptation include our support to partners in Malaita, Solomon Islands, who piloted a climate-resilient seed bank and supported the local council to develop bylaws ensuring water access points for women-headed households, in coordination with provincial officials and traditional leaders.
Recognizing that social protection systems are weak or fragmented, we advocate for linking climate adaptation to inclusive social safety nets and addressing systemic inequality.
Our initiatives aim to empower rural communities to influence and contribute to climate adaptation planning and policies at local, national, regional and global levels. At the national and regional level, we are supporting our partners have in consultations for NAPs and are tracking how adaptation investments align with the needs of youth and rural women. We are also linking our adaptation initiatives to emerging social protection tools. In Vanuatu, our partner integrated cyclone recovery with long-term resilience planning through a “cash plus” model, combining emergency transfers with livelihoods and housing reconstruction support.
4) Advancing a Just Energy Transition
Most Pacific Island countries remain highly dependent on imported fossil fuels, which undermines energy security and economic resilience. There is an urgent need to transition to renewable energy to provide energy to remote island communities that is community-owned and democratic.
The unique aspect of the Just Energy Transition in the Pacific is to pressurize the historically responsible rich countries in the region including Australia and New Zealand to significantly increase grant-based funding to support access to renewable energy for all, including direct support for community-owned projects, and to make a clear commitment to end all coal, oil and gas project finance.
Across the region we are supporting communities to advance renewable energy solutions. In Vanuatu, our partners are running a women-led solar training hub, supplying basic solar lanterns and charging kits to remote communities. These are being managed by local cooperatives. In Fiji, Oxfam convened a dialogue in 2023 with feminist economists, community elders, and engineers to explore community-owned energy models and their role in a just energy transition.
Our advocacy on JET aims to end fossil fuel subsidies and increase direct support for community-managed renewable energy that enhances both gender equity and energy access.