The Pacific's big pre-summit gathering has wrapped in Denarau, Fiji, and the region is heading to COP31 in Türkiye with one overriding demand: climate money needs to arrive faster, bigger, and directly in the hands of island communities.
Green Climate Fund chief Mafalda Duarte told Pacific leaders that a visit to Tuvalu changed her perspective more than any scientific report. Tuvaluans, she noted, face the possibility of losing their homes — and their country — within their own lifetimes. She pointed to the Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project, funded by the GCF and completed in 2024, which created reclaimed land that held up during recent king tides. Two further phases aim to reclaim about 20 hectares, roughly 20 percent of the island's land area. Her argument: climate finance is not charity but an investment in shared security, and if the world can spend nearly US$3 trillion a year on the military and fossil fuel subsidies, it can fund seawalls and water systems too. The GCF has doubled its Pacific portfolio in three years, from US$500 million to US$1 billion, with another US$300 million going before its board this month.
Money is also the sticking point closer to home. The Pacific Resilience Facility, a new regional fund designed to back small, community-led projects that big international funds often overlook, is still US$320 million short of its US$500 million minimum target. Fresh pledges came in around the meeting — US$10 million from Fiji, £10 million from the UK, and smaller sums from Denmark, the Netherlands, Ireland and Solomon Islands — but Tonga's Lord Fakafanua said pledges must convert into actual contributions before COP31.
There was solidarity from the other side of the world, too. Antigua and Barbuda's environment minister Michael Joseph drew a direct line between Tuvalu's plight and Barbuda, left uninhabitable by Hurricane Irma in 2017. He endorsed the Taku Pakasoa Declaration, the region's joint position paper calling for the 1.5C target to stay within reach, protection of island statehood and sovereignty, and finance that is accessible, concessional and predictable. "Different oceans, but the same determination," he said.
For travellers, this is the backdrop to any Pacific trip right now. The islands pushing hardest for climate money — Tuvalu, Kiribati, low-lying parts of Fiji and Vanuatu — are the same places whose beaches, reefs and communities make the region worth the long-haul flight. Rising seas and king tides are not an abstraction there; they shape the coastlines visitors come to see. If Pacific travel is on your list, go sooner rather than later, spend locally, and choose operators who put money back into the communities on the front line.
