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Showing 9 of 503 news items in Climate Action

Climate ActionOctober 17, 2025

Barbados is an Earthshot Prize 2025 Finalist

Excerpt from earthshotprize.org Barbados is responsible for just 0.01% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it stands on the climate frontline. Rising seas, stronger storms, droughts and floods threaten lives, livelihoods and ecosystems, jeopardising decades of social and economic progress. Across the Caribbean, unchecked climate impacts could cost as much as US$22 billion per year by 2050. The crisis is compounded by a debt trap. Climate-vulnerable nations are forced to borrow heavily simply to recover from disasters, pushing their economies deeper into unsustainable debt. This weakens their resilience and makes it harder to invest in sustainable development. What’s more, current international finance structures often limit rather than enable climate and nature spending. Without systemic reform, vulnerable nations like Barbados will remain under-resourced and exposed, caught between escalating climate hazards and financial systems that hold back progress. But Barbados is not waiting to be rescued, its leaders are shaping the changes needed to make the global financial system fairer and more effective for climate action.

Climate ActionOctober 17, 2025

Invasive Beetles Are Overrunning Oʻahu. Could New Methods Offer Relief?

Excerpt from civilbeat.org Kimeona Kane drives his pickup truck around his neighborhood on the Windward side of Oʻahu pointing out dead and dying palm trees along the road. Nearby, the copious piles of mulch and rotting wood littering lots and private properties host the culprit: coconut rhinoceros beetles. Kane has been trying to get a handle on the infestation for the past four years as chair of the Waimānalo Neighborhood Board, but he said his calls to the state’s reporting hotline, 643-PEST, went nowhere. “I think at this point for Oʻahu, everyone’s kind of on their own,” he said. As the Department of Agriculture and Biosecurity focuses on stopping the spread of coconut rhinoceros beetles on Hawaiʻi island and Moloka‘i residents fight to block it from reaching their shores, resources to deal with Oʻahu’s growing invasion have been diverted elsewhere. Money allocated by the Legislature last session for the CRB Response Team offers some hope. According to the team’s Mike Melzer, the $500,000 will fund mitigation efforts on all of the islands, paying for things like pesticides, netting and biocontrol research. The team recently returned from a trip to the Southern Hemisphere with samples of the Malaysian-borne nudivirus, which has shown promise in controlling beetle populations but may also have a negative impact on native species. While officials tap into limited resources to help all the islands, they’re also trying to empower local communities to fight the problem on their own.

Climate ActionOctober 13, 2025

Metabolism of Islands Documentary

This 34-minute documentary explores the provocative question: Can a small island truly achieve sustainability? Drawing on the powerful analogy that islands, much like living organisms, metabolize materials and energy to sustain their populations, the film reveals how unsustainable resource-use patterns—an “island metabolism” out of balance—can weaken resilience and amplify vulnerability to climate shocks. The Metabolism of Islands introduces a groundbreaking, evidence-based systems perspective that moves beyond short-term fixes toward holistic strategies for long-term sustainability. Featuring voices from across the world’s small island nations, the documentary brings together science, storytelling, and lived experience to illuminate both the challenges and pathways to resilience. Conceived and directed by Simron Singh, and edited by Alexandra Ulacio, the film is a collaborative global effort produced and funded by the International Society for Industrial Ecology (ISIE), in partnership with Metabolism of Islands (MoI) and the Climate Adaptation and Resilience (CLARE) program of the U.K. and Canada.

Climate ActionSeptember 30, 2025

‘You don’t get to aim big when you are somewhere small’: A teenager’s fight to end single use plastics on her Scottish island

Excerpt from theguardian.com Tabby Fletcher, a 17-year-old from the Isle of Jura, off the west coast of Scotland, lives in what many people would probably assume is a pristine wilderness. Yet she regularly sees dead birds, their bodies entangled in plastic, among piles of waste washed up on the island’s beaches after powerful storms. “In January, we had Storm Éowyn,” she says. “Huge storm surges brought piles of plastic on to the beach close to my house. I saw dead birds wrapped in plastic. It was obvious from little bits inside their decomposing bodies they had eaten plastic. A stag with big orange and red plastic hanging off its antlers as two men hold the animal down View image in fullscreen Islanders untangling fishing floats from a stag’s antlers on Jura. Photograph: Tabby Fletcher “There was a dead goat too – its head stuck in a plastic fishing net. It’s really horrible.” She decided to start a petition calling on the Scottish government to ban all single-use plastics. This has now received more than 26,000 signatures and the backing of MSPs in the Highlands and Islands. “Around 50% of the plastic we use in the UK is single use, and by cutting these items out it creates a more sustainable footprint in the natural world,” she says. She describes images she has seen of red deer, which feed on seaweed, entangled in washed-up fishing nets. “If they are left to their own devices, they can starve to death. There are fibres of plastic that come off the netting too,” she says. Plastic endangers seabirds, seals and other wildlife through ingestion, entanglement and toxic contamination, while microplastics – tiny particles from broken-down plastic – pose a long-term threat to wildlife and human health. It can contain any of more than 16,000 chemicals, many of them linked to health issues. The teenager says that although her community organises beach clean-ups, plastic pollution is a growing problem that will only worsen unless action is taken nationally.

Climate ActionSeptember 30, 2025

From the frontlines of climate change: Survey investigates stances of small-island states

Photo credit: phys.org Excerpt from phys.org Small island states are among the most vulnerable to climate change, but there's surprisingly scant research revealing what such residents think about these threats, says Parrish Bergquist, assistant professor of political science in the School of Arts & Sciences. "This segment of the population is pivotal to global conversations around climate change. Their leaders are front and center when these discussions happen, but we know so little about what members of the public in these places think and feel." A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences closely examines exactly that issue. Through a first-of-its-kind survey completed by Bergquist and national colleagues, the researchers gained insight into how residents across 55 small-island states and territories are approaching climate change.

Climate ActionSeptember 16, 2025

On the front line of the climate crisis in Kiribati

Photo credit: discoverwildlife.com Excerpt from discoverwildlife.com Dozens of island nations and thousands of individual islands are threatened by rising sea levels all over the world. They are at the frontline of the impacts of carbon emissions as a result of burning coal, gas and oil, though almost all of them are tiny, if not negligible contributors to the overall ‘pot’. The Marshall Islands, for example, could disappear by the end of the century without radical action, but are responsible for just 0.01 per cent of emissions annually and have emitted 5 million tonnes of greenhouse gases since 1990. Here are some of the island groups most at risk.

Climate ActionSeptember 10, 2025

Relocating communities: Tonga and the Solomon Islands call for more action now

Excerpt from tvniue.com Relocating communities is already happening in Tonga and the Solomon Islands. During the regional dialogue on Loss and Damage earlier in Samoa earlier this month, it was evident that the emotional toll of having to relocate because of the rising waters or forced displacement due to a natural disaster, communities are left with very little choice but to move. It’s been four years since the volcanic eruption in Tonga and subsequent tsunami forced displacement of communities from the outer islands to the mainland. Maikolo Fonua says there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of emotional trauma support. “Every time there is a tsunami warning like that earthquake in Europe. It triggers the memory of the tsunami so there is still a lot of work to be done in terms of the support, emotionally, mentally,” he said. “Assessing the impacts on the children, still a lot of work to be done to deal with the trauma” Maikolo Fonua says: “Some of them, they experienced shock, in terms of the changes of their livelihoods. Some of them rely on fishing for example, for their day to day subsistence but since they moved to the main island they can’t do fishing like they used to. There’s an extra cost of traveling out from the mainland to fish.” In the Solomon Islands, relocating communities is already being done because of the rising sea level however relocating entire communities is very complicated according to its National Coordinator for Loss and Damage, Derek Mane.

Climate ActionSeptember 2, 2025

Fifteen new local projects launched under the Kiwa Initiative to strengthen Pacific resilience through Nature-based Solution

Photo: Group photo - kiwa inititiative local projects launch from iucn.org Excerpt from iucn.org Today, the International Union for Conservation of Nature in Oceania (IUCN-ORO), through the Kiwa Initiative, marked a significant milestone with the launch of 15 new locally led projects designed to harness Nature-based Solutions (NbS) in addressing the impacts of climate change across the Pacific. The event, held in Suva, Fiji, was attended by donor representatives, members of the diplomatic corps, and regional partners, reflecting a strong commitment to collaboration in building resilience for Pacific communities

Climate ActionSeptember 2, 2025

British Virgin Islands Calls For Brazil COP30 To Deliver Climate Justice For Caribbean SIDS

Excert from thestkittsnevisobserver.com Brasilia – British Virgin Islands Special Envoy Mr. Benito Wheatley has emphasised the importance of Latin America and the Caribbean’s support for the Brazilian Presidency of COP30 in delivering a just outcome at the upcoming climate change talks in Belem, Brazil where the Caribbean and other Small Island Developing States (SIDS) will continue their fight for climate justice as global attention has shifted away from the climate crisis to tariffs and conflicts in recent months