PACIFIC youth helping shape the region’s climate agenda ahead of COP31 in Türkiye have been challenged to look beyond policy frameworks and reconnect with indigenous knowledge, culture and spirituality as tools for tackling the climate crisis.
Speaking at the opening of the Pacific Youth Talanoa at Pasifika Communities University in Suva yesterday, vice-chancellor and president Professor Upolu Luma Vaai said Pacific communities possessed knowledge systems that offered practical and holistic solutions to climate change.
“The whole idea is for us, climate activists, climate policy makers and development mix to go back to learn from the place of cultures or communities,” he said.
“There’s a lot in there that can provide solutions for the climate crisis today.”
The three-part dialogue series, which began on Tuesday, brings together young people from across the Pacific to develop a collective youth advocacy agenda ahead of COP31 and beyond.
The initiative seeks to amplify youth voices in climate decision-making, with almost 60 per cent of the Pacific population under the age of 35.
Prof Vaai said climate discussions had become disconnected from the values and worldviews that had sustained Pacific communities for generations.
“We cannot eliminate spirituality from the climate crisis, especially when we are in the Pacific,” he added.
“Spirituality is at the core of our well-being.”
He said modern approaches had become very compartmentalised, separating people from the land and ecology from the economy.
“We have severed the person from the land. Now the land destroys the person, the person destroys the land.
“We have severed ecology from economy. Now economy is really utilising and destroying ecology.”
The Pacific Youth Talanoa is co-designed by the Pacific Youth Council and the United Nations, in partnership with Pasifika Communities University and regional organisations, and will help shape youth contributions to climate discussions leading into COP31.
