cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/6812659
In January 2004, Cyclone Heta pummeled the shores of the island nation of Niue, uprooting trees and flooding homes with 184 mile-per-hour winds and 164-foot waves. As dawn approached, after an intense night, the winds died down, and Coral Pasisi began to worry about her neighbors. The storm had been more violent than she’d expected — a tree had fallen on her roof, and the water was up to her ankles. It was 4 in the morning when she began her drive to check on her community.
Normally, when Pasisi drove down the hill of the western shore of the island, she saw the national museum with its familiar outdoor amphitheater where she’d watched so many traditional dance performances. But instead, there was a clear view of the ocean. The museum was gone.
“There was nothing left,” Pasisi said. “It looked like a war zone.”
Gone, also, were the island’s only hospital, its courthouse, and its fuel depot. Two people on the island died during the storm, then home to just over 1,700 residents, and damage was estimated to be nearly 48 million U.S. dollars — five times the nation’s annual gross domestic product. Two decades after the storm, the memory of the missing museum still brings her to tears.
“This is an unimaginable and irreparable and irreplaceable non-economic loss. One that cannot be remedied or restored,” Pasisi told the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, at The Hague in December 2024. “One that has robbed our children of their future inherent rights of traditional knowledge and cultural identity.”
Pasisi’s testimony was among more than 100 that would help propel the ICJ to issue a landmark advisory opinion that every nation on earth has a legal obligation to limit greenhouse gas emissions. Now, Pasisi is among many Indigenous Pacific advocates who are traveling to Brazil to attend COP30 — the annual intergovernmental gathering of U.N. member states — to try to ensure that world leaders adhere to that ruling.
“This is a different lens of clarity that we all have now going into COP30,” said Pasisi, who is now a director of climate change and sustainability at The Pacific Community, of SPC, a New Caledonia-based international development organization made up of Pacific nations and territories as well as global partners like the U.S. No longer are she and her fellow Pasifika advocates simply arguing that leaders have an ethical responsibility to save the planet, she said. “There’s nothing like a legal opinion to show what side of the law you need to be on.”
Pacific advocates at COP30 are demanding global leaders follow the ICJ’s ruling by phasing out fossil fuels and funding climate disaster recovery projects. Many are also calling for Indigenous peoples and traditional ecological knowledge to be included in climate decision-making and are pushing back on efforts to sacrifice Pacific seabeds for lucrative transition mineral mining operations. They argue the next COP should be held in Australia, where they hope to better convey how climate change is impacting their lands and waters.