298: Sovereignty and Survival: A Spotlight on Vanuatu

Full Transcript

Paul : [00:00:02] Hello and welcome to Outrage and Optimism. I'm Paul Dickinson.

Christiana : [00:00:05] I'm Christiana Figueres, and we have no Tom, no Tom.

Paul : [00:00:10] Where is he? Is he going to Brazil? Is that.

Christiana : [00:00:12] Right? Tom is in Brazil? Yes. Doing some cop preparations.

Paul : [00:00:17] And it's very nice to be able to spend a little time just with you, Christiana, because I think you have a simply amazing story because you have been to.

Christiana : [00:00:25] Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Yes. Are you gonna say it or am I going to say it?

Paul:  [00:00:29] You're gonna say it.

Christiana : [00:00:31] Paul, I am so excited to share with you about my recent trip to Vanuatu in the South Pacific, and it was such a meaningful trip for me personally, but also just to refresh my memory about amazing leadership of Vanuatu on climate change over decades.

Paul : [00:00:53] Can I just kick off and say, what took you to Vanuatu?

Christiana : [00:00:57] Well, one thing you probably don't know, Paul, is that I actually spend some time living and working in the region, not in Vanuatu itself, but in the Pacific region. 45 years ago I lived and work in Fiji and Samoa. So the fact that I had this amazing opportunity to return first to Fiji, because we were organising the climate retreat for Pacific Island activists and nature protectors, which was an amazing, just transformational retreat. But then also, since we were all the way over there on the other side of the world, we decided to go to Vanuatu, where I had not been. But you know, Vanuatu has been an indisputable and such courageous leader on climate change issues. For decades, this tiny, weensy little country has had continued leadership on climate change. And when I say a country has had decades of leadership, what I actually mean, Paul, is that the miracle has occurred, that several sequential political and economic leaders of the country have actually decided that they will continue the leadership. And that's the remarkable bit. It is the continuation of so many people in Vanuatu who have continued this remarkable leadership that we will be talking about today.

Paul : [00:02:48] And I've got a nasty feeling that one aspect of that leadership might be based upon Need the existential crisis that faces low lying states, which we can come onto. Ben's done some research for us, saying that Vanuatu today is home to 330,000 people speaking over 100 languages. And you said Vanuatu is in the Pacific Ocean, is that right? Roughly whereabouts?

Christiana : [00:03:12] Yeah. It is so amazing because it is 83 islands. They are part of what used to be called Melanesia. Maybe some people still call it Melanesia. And these islands stretch across 1300km in the South Pacific. What is amazing is that this country that only became independent in 1980, was colonized by both the UK and France at the same time, and they actually called it the Anglo-French condominium. So when you hear the people that we will interview. Talk about the condominium. It means this very odd political agreement between the UK and France to basically divide up between the two of them, the land and the people of Vanuatu, and claim them basically for themselves. And you have to understand. So the UK had UK law, language, evangelical religion, education, UK education and the French had the same. And when all of these tribes, because there are over a hundred tribes, when these tribes got put into the bucket of either UK or France, then they had to learn those languages. So the amazing thing is these people speak their original language, one of 120. Then they speak llama, which is the language that they use to communicate across all the tribes. Then they learned the particular colonial language under which they were either French or English, and particularly those who had to learn French, have now recently been learning English. So many of these people speak four languages.

Paul : [00:05:24] Also, as I understand it, it is exposed to have always been some extent to frequent natural disasters, you know, cyclones, floods and droughts. But these are presumably being exacerbated by climate change. And I guess that's to some the reason why the the leadership is coming forward. Is that.

Christiana : [00:05:37] Right? Yes. And I think the, the Vanuatu leadership on climate is actually quite specific and will get into into those conversations. They have been known for their international leadership on loss and damage. So because we'll be talking so much about that, I think it's good to understand what does that mean in a climate context? So listeners will know that mitigation is a huge chapter in climate, and that is all efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Then there is a whole effort or body of efforts called adaptation, which is how to locally adapt to conditions that are already changed and how to then continue with livelihoods across those changes. But then the third and the less well known and much more complicated is called loss and damage. Loss and damage. That concept is about the unavoidable Consequences that occur despite very, very delayed mitigation, as we know, and despite local adaptation. And they are usually what is known as slow onset, which means contrary to a drought or to floods which occur quickly. These are consequences that are very slow moving but very certain. So things like sea level rise, things like salt intrusion into people's agricultural fields. Destruction of property because of that loss of livelihoods. All of that is under the concept of loss and damage. And it has been a hugely controversial issue in the climate discussion That we will get into. But there is no doubt that Vanuatu has had a leadership in bringing loss and damage to the fore and insisting over decades that it get recognised in the climate convention.

Paul : [00:08:05] It's amazing. Obviously, I've heard of loss and damage for a long time, and before this recording I was really trying to think about an aspect of language. You know, I grew up in a medical family, and there was a dispute historically between conventional medicine and alternative medicine. There was sort of fighting each other, almost, but then alternative medicine became complementary medicine. And that change of language changed a lot. Now, clearly loss and damage has a very formal meaning, and we're not going to change it. But I was just thinking about, for example, the invasion of Ukraine and how so many countries came together to support Ukraine against the invasion. And actually we call that frontline support. And actually, I think Vanuatu is on the front line of the climate crisis. And although it is loss and damage, I think this is also about providing frontline support to our sisters and brothers in Vanuatu who are at the front of of facing the climate crisis.

Christiana : [00:08:56] Yeah, there's a very good way of thinking about it. And it's not just Vanuatu, right? It is ASIS, which means the alliance of small Island states, and it is a coalition of 44 countries that are losing land and losing inhabited land because most of these people live on the coast, because they live off the sea. So it is quite a survival issue for them. And as we heard Paul while we were there, there are several villages who have had to be displaced. They have had to move away from where they have been for thousands of years now, just to understand the full impact of that. What that usually means is that the Council of Elders will have to get together and decide who moves to higher land, or to a different land, and who stays. Because the bones of the ancestors are buried where these people have lived for thousands of years. And in this culture, you don't just abandon your ancestors. There is a huge respect and deep respect for ancestors from whom these people get much of their wisdom, because it is inherited from one generation to the next. So let us just understand that when these villages are displaced, it very likely means that families are divided. Some go and some stay.

Paul : [00:10:40] If I might honor that perspective, that reverence for preceding generations, I'm sure, is deeply connected to reverence for future generations and to be able to consider your society through time. It's actually a great power and a great skill, although that the emotional and the family cost must be very significant. Listeners can hear from multiple voices because you actually had the opportunity to talk to a variety of people. And we're going to start off with Christopher Bartlett. Can you talk a little bit about him?

Christiana : [00:11:13] Well, Christopher is just amazing. So Christopher is us born. He arrived in Vanuatu when he was 18 and he completely fell in love with that island, completely fell in love. He was immediately taken into a family. He has basically grown up since he was 18, in Vanuatu, and he has become such a champion for Vanuatu. He is an amazing climate policy strategist and we will listen to him because I had the opportunity to go to a session where he was training new Vanuatu negotiations to be ready to go to the Cop in Brazil. He himself has been a Vanuatu negotiator and having been born in the United States, he has a bicultural understanding and he negotiates typically for Vanuatu against the United States on loss and damage issues. He is just an astonishing, astonishing human being. So here's Christopher Bartlett giving an exposé to his colleagues, the other Vanuatu negotiators, and Reminding them, or perhaps educating the younger ones on the history of Vanuatu leadership since 1991, which is when they started to bring to the international fora the concept of loss and damage. And Paul, I have to remind you, 1991 is before the climate convention was adopted.

Paul : [00:13:05] Before the Framework Convention came into existence.

Christiana : [00:13:08] The Framework Convention came into being in 1992, in Rio. So even before that, they were all ready, as you say, on the front lines, of both suffering loss and damage, but also in the international fight for recognition of loss and damage.

Christopher Bartlett: [00:13:27] Who are our ancestors? When Vanuatu became independent? The Prime Minister, Lini, asked Robert van der Venue vote to be our ambassador to the United Nations. And it was this gentleman that was the founding chair of AOC. So our bloc, the Alliance of Small Island States, was founded by Vanuatu. And one of the very first things we did as AOC was to start negotiating this treaty, which didn't exist then. So back in 1991, Vanuatu made a proposal that the convention had to do two things. We had the first of all, have an international climate fund which would finance small island states, small island developing states who were suffering from loss and damage. That was Vanuatu's proposal. We also said we needed an insurance mechanism that would give us payouts after sea level rise was decimating our villages. That's what Vanuatu suggested in 1991. Do you think either of those two proposals made it into the convention? Neither. Neither made it in. But Vanuatu was the first to fight to say this is back. Before anybody was even talking about loss of damage, Vanuatu was saying this is what this convention needs to do. Fast forward then, no action whatsoever on loss and damage until we get to 2012. And this is when we started to finally recognize that mitigation was nowhere near enough. Greenhouse gas emissions were absolutely skyrocketing, and all the adaptation that we were doing still wasn't enough.

Christopher Bartlett: [00:15:05] We were still losing. We were still suffering damages in heart. So that's when a cop in 2012. Finally, there was this recognition that there needed to be lasting damage in the convention. So then we came to 2013, where we set up the Wim, this Warsaw International mechanism, which was supposed to do everything. All it had, though, was an executive committee sitting around the table talking about loss and damage. Now, how can that ever do what we needed the international community to do to help us address these impacts. And so we went for years and years with this ex-con, this executive committee not serving the needs of Vanuatu. They were just talking. They were writing reports and sending, you know, technical analyses. But they weren't actually helping countries like Vanuatu. So then we came to the review of the whim, and this is when Vanuatu really stood up and said, hey guys, this is ridiculous. We set this thing up in 2013. It's done nothing. So we demand now an arm, a technical arm of the whim that's going to come down and help us like our communities need. And that's when we set up the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage. And I should recall, and this is Cristina's work, that in the Paris Agreement, this almost didn't happen in the Paris Agreement. We have an article on loss and damage.

Christopher Bartlett: [00:16:29] Now, this is a big deal, right? To make loss and damage a part of the Paris Agreement when most countries around the room, particularly those who are responsible for the problem, never wanted to see this, but we landed it. We got this article finally in the Paris Agreement. However, we also got a cop decision that accompanied the agreement and there was this ridiculousness in that decision. Paragraph 51, we call it the notorious paragraph 51, which said, okay, you can have loss and damage in the Paris Agreement, but it doesn't mean anything about our liability or compensation. You have to pay you. So the rich countries, the only reason we got lost in damage in the Paris Agreement was because they got this article to say, we're not responsible for paying. We can acknowledge that it's happening, but it's not our fault. So we were ridiculously upset about this. And so when Vanuatu ratified the Paris Agreement, we did something really special. We put in a declaration along with our ratification. We also put in a declaration. We said, we accept the Paris Agreement, but we reserve the right to come back to you under any other international laws to get what we need for loss and damage. One of the few countries in the world that did that, we said yes. Para 51 exists, but don't expect that you've heard the last from literati.

Christiana: [00:17:44] Wow.

Christiana : [00:17:45] The magical word. Under any other laws? That is the magical piece about this, because we are not going to get into the depth of it here, Paul, as we know. But Vanuatu has taken, I think, the most groundbreaking climate legal case to the International Court of Justice, which is the highest court in the world. Why? Because they got so frustrated that they weren't getting the recognition through the legal agreements that are on the table. So they are just extraordinary in their determination. Asian, well justified, deeply justified determination to get loss and damage recognized and compensated. And just to understand the other side, the reason why there's such resistance on the part of the United States in particular, but all other global North countries, the reason why there's so much resistance is because they know that loss and damage, it's very difficult to quantify. And the slower the mitigation, the more loss and damage costs there's going to be. And so because it is, as they call it, a bottomless pit, they do not want to sign up to compensation of costs that are currently impossible to assess what the costs are going to be. That's why there is such resistance.

Paul : [00:19:20] But I mean, there's absolute genius in the creation of this formulation, the Association of Small Island States, and Christopher Bartlett mentioned Robert Van Leer, who was the founding chair of ASIS. And I just want to share with you two little quotes from him, because they're fascinating. One was, he said, what made the developed countries, the developed countries was their attitude of greed and me first ism. Me first ism. But he went on to say part of the work came from my experience as a civil rights lawyer in the US, when we would try to always keep in mind a goal, which would be to change the dynamics of the power relationships that we were negotiating. So deep thinking about power relationships being very much at the heart of of the challenge of the small island states.

Christiana : [00:20:05] Yeah. Paul and I you know, I always has been the voice of ambition and the conscience of the climate convention for decades. And as I was spending time in Vanuatu and learning from these are truly heroic people. I was remembering almost every day I was remembering Tony de Brum. So Tony was the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands in the years leading up to the Paris Agreement, and he was just such a eloquent and compelling voice for the low lying states. He practically single handedly, over several years, wove together a coalition of countries that spans both Global North and global South. That was called the High Ambition Coalition, and they are responsible for having landed the aspirational 1.5 degree as a temperature ceiling in the Paris Agreement because for a long time. The only temperature ceiling that was in the draft text was two degrees, and they kept on saying two degrees means we will not survive. We will simply not survive. Our islands will go underwater. So we need 1.5. And it was the leadership of Tony and Paul. Were you in the room in Paris when everyone was still looking at the last details in the draft text that was going to be adopted, and all of a sudden there was this silence in the room with 5 or 6000 people there in plenary. And Tony, the Room and so many other lead negotiators from the High Ambition Coalition walked in, arm in arm, literally arm in arm. They walked into the plenary and as they walked in. That's all they had to do because the group was so large. The pace was so forceful. Their intention was so clear that everybody knew they are not going home without 1.5.

Paul : [00:22:38] It is a very good thing that very fine playwrights are writing about Kyoto next Copenhagen and then Paris. I hope we will get an opportunity to see this on the stage in due course, because it is an extraordinary moment of theatrical power. Christiana. Absolutely and and beautifully told. If I might pay you that compliment. Okay, let's hear a little bit more of Christopher Bach. But digging into the real moves that they make on loss and damage, how it how it works.

Christopher Bartlett: [00:23:06] We showed up in Madrid saying we need money to deal with loss and damage. The rich countries don't want to give us money. So instead they said, well, we'll give you technical assistance. We'll send our experts, our international people to go and help you without any money. Help you think about loss and damage. So we got this Santiago network now. It was set up at Cop 25. We got the functions of the network. Negotiated Cop 26. And it wasn't even operationalized in Cop27. So this just shows you how slow this international process is. We needed this thing, and it took three years before it was even set up. So Vanuatu became then the very first country in the world to request assistance from the Santiago network after it was operationalized. And we asked for four things, we said, first of all, we need help defining what loss and damage means for Vanuatu. It's a confusing concept. The second thing is we needed to undertake capacity gap assessments. There are a lot of people doing work on loss and damage, but there are a lot of gaps. We asked also for knowledge brokering so we could explain loss and damage and get loss and damage views from fishermen and farmers and people around the country. But most importantly, we said we need help to develop a funding proposal so we can get the big money that we need to address loss and damage. Now that was back in 2023, and I can announce that two days ago they finally started this technical assistance.

Paul : [00:24:29] Well, perseverance works I guess to some extent. I mean, you can hear both their the frustration and the absolute relentless commitment combined.

Christiana : [00:24:41] Yeah. God bless. Right. They're not giving up because it is about survival. That's the point, right? This is not about luxury. This is not about having your third car parked in the garage. This is survival. And that's why they're not giving up.

Paul : [00:25:01] Mm.

Christiana : [00:25:02] God bless.

Paul : [00:25:03] You've spoken a little bit about the role of these islands, these communities, these coalitions in the UNF process. They were a significant force in the period that you oversaw leading to Paris.

Christiana : [00:25:15] Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. No. Vanuatu. Marshall Islands. And, Paul, you have to understand. Directly. Inversely proportional to their size of country. To their population. Right. These are tiny, tiny countries with tiny populations, huge leadership, huge moral authority. And above all, as you put it, this deep, long, long historical determination to stay the course. They know that this is not easy. They know that they're not going to get what they want out of every cop, but they are going to stay the course no matter what. And I have such admiration for that.

Paul : [00:26:09] Yeah, well, 100%. Me too. Someone said something like 0.03% of global emissions. So not not responsible for emissions, but with a history of dealing with colonization, a history of dealing with problems that are caused outside the country but impact the country. And I think that that's that's the experience that in the sense that they bring and they've they've dealt with this before. I know the Marshall Islands, wherever it was, had these terrible nuclear tests. You know, the the world has behaved badly but is learning from inspired leadership. Well, let's come on to that because you also spoke, I believe, to the climate change minister, Ralph Regenvanu Regan. Can you say what triggered the conversation?

Christiana : [00:26:47] Well, we wanted to speak to him because he is the representative of Vanuatu, who gave the formal speech at the International Court of Justice when this case was presented. And and we will go deeply into the case in another episode. So we had the opportunity to sit with Minister Ralph Regenvanu Regan in his office and hear straight from him the roots of the courageous struggle that the Vanuatu people have had over so many years.

Ralph Regenvanu: [00:27:22] We had a very similar experience of colonization to all indigenous peoples in the world. Our population was reduced down to 10% from 90% reduction. People killed off by diseases and warfare and all sorts of things. Archaeologists estimate, you know, close to a million people. So we're still nowhere near that now. But can you imagine the loss of cultural knowledge and one great legacy of that time, which is still very evident today and is one of our major things holding us back, is this I call it a psychology of dependency. This perception that we are not good enough because on the back end of this massive depopulation came missionaries conversion to Christianity, moving us away from our traditional ways of saying they are not good in the context of people dropping like flies. So coming from a base of around an estimated 40,000 people between the two world wars, our lowest population point, then having to in a period of massive mechanization in a period of colonial government that was established very late. Joint Naval Commission of the UK and France was established the condominium of the New Hebrides in 1906. And the reason they did that was to defend the large landowning interests of two major companies, one French company and one Australian company. So it was all about creating a legal structure to enforce the rights of these big companies, to own the land that they'd taken, basically from indigenous people.

Paul: [00:29:03] Wow, what incredible trauma to have 90% of your population wiped out by colonists, who then assert the rights of the nation in support of two large companies. It's like science fiction. And it happened.

Christiana : [00:29:18] But it isn't fiction exactly. It isn't fiction. And they're still recovering from that, right? They went from, as you said, from 1 million population to 40,000, and now they're slowly recuperating their population there at 300,000. But it's not really just about the numbers. It is about coming back to the rescue of their self-identity through their customary practices, beliefs and traditions, which is such a beautiful process to see them doing. And and, you know, Paul, we were there on a Sunday and we were so privileged to go to a Catholic mass ceremony in one of the tiny villages. And to listen to these people sing in harmony. Acapella.

Christiana : [00:30:30] What is fascinating about that mass ceremony is witnessing how the French Catholic missionaries came imposed Catholic traditions and rituals on these people. And however, in order to get there by endless call, it allowed them to sing. Paul, you may remember that actually my profession is anthropology, Mhm. And I was a very young anthropologist when I was in this region. And when we went to this church ceremony, I honestly walked in there with my anthropology hat on because I was witnessing what anthropologists call cultural syncretism, which is when you blend elements from different cultures, from different traditions, from different roots, and you create something new. So that ceremony was the evidence of this cultural syncretism, that blending of elements that then create something new and honestly quite beautiful.

Paul : [00:31:53] Well, if it's half as beautiful as the music, it's a very, very beautiful thing. Let's hear a little bit more from Minister Ralph Regenvanu Reagan about the anti-colonialism movement and how it shaped up.

Ralph Regenvanu: [00:32:04] In the 70s. This first cadre of mission educated new Vanuatu people. In those days, they weren't in Vanuatu, but educated indigenous people starting to get these ideas about why are we subjugated under these people from a different place of the world? And there were some mission people who encouraged that thinking. And the 70s was basically a decade of political awareness, growing anti-colonial sentiment. Formation of the first political parties in the kind of form that could actually progress towards independence. And then by the late 70s, popular movement pretty much focused on the land issue, getting back the land as the thing that united people. Very diverse population, of course, one of the most diverse cultural regions in the world, so that united us to be able to get independence in 1980. And then we inherited two colonial administrations. So there was a parallel French system. A parallel English system. They had separate prisons, separate.

Christiana : [00:33:07] Educational.