Introduction by Croakey: World leaders are calling for a moratorium on deep sea mining to prevent devastating and irreversible environmental harm.
This week, governments are meeting in Jamaica at the 30th Session of the International Seabed Authority to discuss deep sea mining in the first gathering since The Metals Company submitted the first application to commercially mine the international seabed – encouraged by an executive order signed by United States President Donald Trump in January.
At the recent United Nations Ocean Conference in France, Secretary-General António Guterres said he supports the work on the International Seabed Authority on seabed mining. “The deep sea cannot become the Wild West,” he said.
Deep sea mining is a contentious issue in the Pacific Islands region, as highlighted below in this month’s Pacific Islands focus column.
Isabelle Zhu-Maguire, PhD candidate at the Coral Bell School of Asia and Pacific Affairs, Department of International Relations within the Australian National University, also reports on concerning experiences of pregnant people and parents participating in the Pacific Australian Labour Mobility scheme.
The quotable?
In other US-Pacific news, citizens of Guam, a North Pacific territory of the US, joined Americans in hosting their own ‘No Kings’ protest. Rally attendees showed solidarity with Los Angeles, demanded democracy and equal rights and protested militarisation and American arms being sent to Israel.”
Isabelle Zhu-Maguire writes:
In early June, I had the privilege of travelling to Suva, Fiji for two weeks to scope my PhD research which is investigating ‘listening’ between states in international relations, using the Australia-Pacific climate change relationship as a case study.
I am grateful to have had the opportunity to experience many of the things that I have been writing about in the monthly Pacific Islands focus column. It was so wonderful to meet activists, academics and development practitioners from across the Blue Pacific continent.
The feelings of regional solidarity, and a deep desire for respect and pride in independence were constantly palpable. I want to reiterate and emphasise that the Pacific region should be granted the respect to be viewed as a large, diverse region, bursting with life and filled with people striving for recognition of the issues that matter to them.
In this spirit, this month’s Pacific Islands focus column, will cover recent health, environment and political issues experienced by different people across the Pacific Islands.
Infectious disease outbreaks
A new campaign called ‘Vaine Toa‘, which aims to increase breast screening among Pasifika women, was launched in Aotearoa-New Zealand in June. Breastscreen Aotearoa’s Lisa Te Paiho told Radio New Zealand (RNZ) that the campaign will highlight stories of Pasifika breast cancer survivors to improve screening rates.
Previously I have reported that Pasifika – people from Pacific Island groups living in Aotearoa-New Zealand or Australia – have been under-represented in New Zealand medical research and experience worse health outcomes than the general population.
This is often due to lack of education targeted at these communities and/or a lack of trust in government and healthcare due to long-standing colonial legacies in the country.
Early in June, Senior Research Officer Lindy Kanan from the Development Policy Centre released an impactful report, ‘It is not illegal to be pregnant’, exposing the experiences of pregnant participants of the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility (PALM) scheme.
A summary of the report can be found on the DevPolicy Blog which highlights the personal shame, lack of education, and professional discrimination faced by pregnant PALM workers.
Among many other damning facts, the report revealed that pregnant participants of the PALM scheme face a 12-month waiting period for pregnancy-related services under the PALM private health insurance policies and lack of access to maternity protections such as Parental Leave Pay.
Unfortunately, dengue fever is still prevalent in the Pacific Islands. In early June, Samoa announced 56 new cases of the viral infection in a single week. Later in June, Tonga reported six new cases of dengue fever, bringing the total to 879 cases reported in Tonga this year, including three deaths.
Samoa’s Ministry of Health and Fiji’s health ministry reported that healthcare workers are managing the outbreaks well, as only limited cases are becoming severe and numbers of new cases are expected to drop with the cooling weather.
Tonga’s National Health Information System was victim to a cyber attack with the hackers demanding payment. The system was set up in 2019 with the support of the Asian Development Bank but Tongan police have long warned of its vulnerabilities and its unpreparedness to deal with threats. Radio New Zealand (RNZ) reported that a team of Australian cyber security experts has arrived in Tonga to help with the situation.
Transnational organised crime groups are exploiting the Pacific region’s “vast, under-patrolled waters to traffic drugs and other illicit goods”, according to a United Nations Commission on Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice side event, held in Austria in late May.
The Pacific risks becoming a gateway for transnational crime syndicates, according to Matthew Watson, UN Office on Drugs and Crime Pacific Regional Transnational Organised Crime Advisor. Watson called for international cooperation, coordinated action and holistic support to prevent the issue from worsening.
The event was just weeks before Fiji’s largest drug trial began in June and several high profile arrests for possession of illicit drugs were made in Papua New Guinea and Tonga. Earlier in the year, I reported on the significant increase in HIV diagnoses in 2024, mostly due to increasing methamphetamine use, homelessness, unemployment, “coupled with disconnection from traditional land and culture”.
Toxic environments
In a story highlighting the clear intersection between environmental and human health, ABC journalists reported that Timor-Leste’s largest rubbish dump is causing significant public health issues.
Local residents said the burning of waste – only a few hundred meters from residential housing – is causing stomach aches, fever, gastroenteritis, and tuberculosis amongst the local population. Residents also told journalists that the dump causes their food to spoil quickly and has made them feel like they are being treated like “animals”.
It was noted that in response to concerns raised last decade, the Timor-Leste Government had promised to move the dump in 2012 – nothing has happened.
In early June, a key United Nations conference, the UN Oceans Conference (UNOC) saw Pacific leaders once again at the forefront of global calls for more ambitious action on environmental protection.
In particular, Tuvalu prime minister Feleti Teo called for a global treaty on sea level rise. Palau’s president Surangel Whipps Jr said financing is key to ensure a sustainable ocean economy and French Polynesia’s President Moetai Brotherson announced his Government’s plan to establish a network of highly protected marine areas (MPAs).
Interestingly, Asterio Appi, a Member of Parliament from Nauru, claimed at UNOC that environmental protection and deep sea mining can “coexist”.
However, Solomon Islands Prime Minister Jeremiah Manele used his speech to condemn the pursuit of deep sea mining in the Pacific. Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister James Marape similarly said his Government does not support deep sea mining due to potential environmental consequences.
The story of deep sea mining goes beyond this conference. In mid-June PNG landowners lobbied Prime Minister Marape after New Irelands’ (a province of PNG) Governor, Walter Schnaubelt, had begun calling for deep sea mining to be investigated for his province, claiming that technology would minimise environmental impacts. However, as mentioned, Marape at UNOC reaffirmed that his Government was maintaining an anti-deep sea mining stance.
In other ocean news, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a swirling gyre of marine debris between California and Hawai’i, was discussed at the 32nd Pacific Islands Environmental Training Symposium. Bradley Nolan, waste management adviser at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP) said the issue was “complex” and has “no simple solution”. This is despite NGOs already working to clean the patch.
More water safety tests in the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) have revealed high levels of per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS, commonly referred to as ‘forever chemicals’) in drinking water – some of the highest levels in the United States.
Radio New Zealand reported that PFAS contamination “near the Francisco C. Ada/Saipan International Airport, previously used for firefighting training, had concentrations exceeding more than 1,700 times above the new federal maximum contaminant level”. The CNMI is now in discussions with the US military and the Federal Aviation Administration – both historically linked to PFAS use – to investigate partnerships for funding.
Finally, ABC journalist Scott Waide provided an excellent analysis of the impact tourism has on the Cook Islands’ environment. One stand-out anecdote in the article comes from Cook Islands conservationist Jacqueline Evans, who explained that the accommodation development near the once-pristine Muri Lagoon caused a toxic algae bloom, which saw negative health impacts for swimmers.
This bloom also caused flow-on environmental impacts; when the algae die and decompose, they consume oxygen, which has the devastating potential to cause fish die-offs and hinders the growth of coral.
Waide’s article highlights the importance of tourism (which makes up 70 percent of the Cook Islands’ economy) but the need to balance economic gain with environmental protection.
Economic and geopolitical instability
The impact of global geopolitical and economic instability is always felt by the Pacific region in one form or another.
The Trump Administration continues to disrupt and hurt many in the region. Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu have reportedly been included in an expanded list of 36 countries that the Trump Administration is considering for travel restrictions.
This is key given how important remittances are for these countries – in particular for Tonga as around 80,000 Tongans live in the US. As of 17 June, RNZ reported that the governments of Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu have yet to respond to the issue and not much is known as to why these three countries were being considered for the ban.
In other US-Pacific news, citizens of Guam, a North Pacific territory of the US, joined Americans in hosting their own ‘No Kings’ protest. Rally attendees showed solidarity with Los Angeles, demanded democracy and equal rights and protested militarisation and American arms being sent to Israel.
In a ‘No Kings’ rally in Salt Lake city, a renowned Samoan fashion designer, Arthur Folasa Ah Loo, was shot and killed by Salt Lake City Police.
Some international partnerships with Pacific nations were strengthened in June.
PNG’s Prime Minister James Marape met with French President Emmanuel Macron – according to RNZ Pacific, for France, this meeting was about strengthening its long-term ambition to become a stronger Pacific power. For PNG, it was to continue its endeavours for diversification, economic benefit and independence.
Marape offered France a Special Economic Zone in Port Moresby (SEZ) for French businesses in an effort to attract French capital to PNG.
Australia, in its similar endeavours to be a Pacific power, has agreed to a $20 million support package to the Solomon Islands, which will assist in cyber security infrastructure, illegal fishing in surveillance and support Honiara’s hosting of the next Pacific Islands Forum.
Palau’s President Surangel Whipps Jr too has worked to strengthen Palau’s partnership by calling for Taiwan to be given full access to the Pacific Islands Forum.
While some partnerships grew stronger, the rift between the Cook Islands and Aotearoa-New Zealand has continued, with former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark blaming the Cook Islands for these tensions by not consulting Wellington before signing a deal with China back in March. On 19 June, it was announced that New Zealand had halted financial assistance to the Cook Islands also due to this reasoning.
Whilst I do not personally agree with many of Cook Islands’ Prime Minister Mark Brown’s actions and general attitudes, I can’t help but agree that New Zealand is being “patronising” and revealing its true intentions here.
This is to ensure the Cook Islands remains submissive to New Zealand and to not allow its “former colony” to make partnerships with China, which it technically should be able to do, as an independent nation within its own right, according to ABC. Regardless of your opinion on China’s intentions in the Pacific, it is hard not to also see this interaction as dripping with dangerous colonial leftovers.
As I was preparing this edition of Pacific Islands focus, it was reported that over a third of Tuvalu’s citizens have applied to be one of the 280 annual Australian visa recipients, bestowed on Tuvalu in the Falepili Union treaty.
This is an important story with many potential social ramifications, which we plan to cover in more detail in future editions of the Pacific Islands focus. You can read more in this SBS article.
Croakey thanks and acknowledges Isabelle Zhu-Maguire for providing this column as a probono service to our readers.
Bookmark this link for future editions of the Pacific Islands focus column.
