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Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will have some explaining to do when he attends the Pacific Islands Forum leaders' meeting in Pohnpei, Micronesia, this week.

Australia’s continued determination to dig up coal, while refusing to dig deep to tackle climate change, has put it increasingly at odds with world opinion. Nowhere is this more evident than when Australian politicians meet with their Pacific island counterparts.

It is widely acknowledged that Pacific island states are at the front line of climate change. It is perhaps less well known that, for a quarter of a century, Australia has attempted to undermine their demands in climate negotiations at the United Nations.

The Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – organised around an annual meeting between island leaders and their counterparts from Australia and New Zealand – is the Pacific region’s premier political forum. But island nations have been denied the chance to use it to press hard for their shared climate goals, because Australia has used the PIF to weaken the regional declarations put forward by Pacific nations at each key milestone in the global climate negotiation process.

In the run-up to the 1997 UN Kyoto climate summit, Pacific island leaders lobbied internationally for new binding targets to reduce emissions. However, that year’s PIF leaders’ statement was toned down, simply calling for “recognition of climate change impacts”.

Likewise, in the lead-up to the 2009 Copenhagen talks, Pacific island countries called for states to reduce emissions by 95% by 2050. But at that year’s PIF meeting in Cairns, the then prime minister, Kevin Rudd, convinced leaders to scale back the proposed target to 50%. Pacific media branded the outcome “a death warrant for Pacific Islanders”.

Ahead of last year’s Paris summit, Australia again exercised its “veto power” over Pacific climate diplomacy. Over the preceding years Pacific island leaders had made their climate positions quite clear, both at UN discussions in New York and in a string of declarations including the Melanesian Spearhead Group Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change, the Polynesian Leaders' Declaration on Climate Change, and the Suva Declaration on Climate Change.

Nevertheless, the official climate declaration issued after last year’s PIF in Port Moresby was significantly weaker in several key areas. Most notably, it failed to call for global negotiations to limit global warming to 1.5℃ above pre-industrial levels. This is a threshold that Pacific island states have consistently argued should not be crossed, because that would threaten the very existence of low-lying states such as Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands.

These countries are understandably very unwilling to compromise on this position. At the Port Moresby meeting, Kiribati President Anote Tong suggested that Australia should leave the forum altogether if it was not prepared to back the islands' positions in global climate negotiations.

There is little doubt that Australian attempts to gag its Pacific island neighbours in these negotiations have aroused anger in the region. This has been compounded by the fact that Australians are among the world’s highest per capita greenhouse gas emitters and the Australian government is committed to increasing exports of the dirtiest source of emissions – coal.

Pacific perspectives on Australia’s coal addiction

If Pacific islands are to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, there is little doubt that most of the world’s coal must stay in the ground. No serious policymaker disputes the basic fact that our carbon budget is severely limited. There is no scenario in which building new coal mines, and expanding existing ones, is compatible with effectively tackling climate change.

Pacific island governments are calling for a global move away from coal. In September 2015, the Pacific Islands Development Forum (a new regional body that meets without Australian representation) called for an urgent international moratorium on the development and expansion of fossil-fuel-extracting industries, particularly new coal mines.

Leaders from the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau and Tuvalu issued a similar statement on the sidelines of the Port Moresby summit. President Tong wrote personally to world leaders before the Paris talks, asking them to support the moratorium.

Australia’s view could scarcely be more different. It is the world’s largest coal exporter, and both major political parties are financially backed by the coal lobby. Rather than move away from coal, the government is seeking to expand exports dramatically, with public subsidies and taxpayer-funded infrastructure.

Australia wants to keep its coal rolling. CSIRO/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

These exports are still largely shielded from discussions about Australia’s contribution to climate change. Because Australian coal is burned in China, Japan and elsewhere, the emissions are ascribed to those nations.

In 2016 Australia will export around 1 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, embodied in coal. By some estimates, over the next five years Australia’s “carbon exports” will overtake those from Saudi oil.

Australia’s coal addiction has implications for its relations with Pacific island neighbours. For a start, it has undermined any claim that decisions made at the Pacific Islands Forum represent the “true” Pacific voice on climate change.

The ramifications may go deeper still. While Pacific leaders still accept the need to meet with their wealthier and more powerful neighbour – Australia is a crucial partner in times of natural disaster and a key source of development aid – joint decisions made at the PIF are beginning to ring hollow. Island states are increasingly using other multilateral forums to pursue their interests.

Pacific leadership and global climate diplomacy

To be sure, Pacific island states have long pursued independent diplomatic strategies to tackle the root causes of climate change. The first UN proposal for multilateral climate action – which later became the Kyoto Protocol – was proposed in 1994 by Pacific diplomats working through the auspices of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS).

Twenty-one years later, Pacific leaders were again crucial in securing the Paris Agreement, the first truly global agreement for tackling climate change. Last week US President Barack Obama told Pacific island leaders in Hawaii that agreement would have been impossible “without the incredible efforts and hard work of the island nations”.

Pacific island states have been able to exercise global climate leadership despite Australia’s efforts. How Pacific island countries pursued recent climate diplomacy is instructive. In the lead-up to the Paris talks, Pacific ambassadors to New York met regularly as the Pacific Small Island Developing States (P-SIDS) grouping, where previously they were more likely to meet under the auspices of the PIF.

Last year, the P-SIDS ambassadors wrote a “zero draft” of a Pacific island declaration on the global climate change negotiations, which ultimately became the strongly worded Suva Declaration on Climate Change. It had been finalised at the 2015 Pacific Islands Development Forum leaders’ meeting and released just days before the watered-down Port Moresby statement. Unsurprisingly, Pacific states pursued the Suva position once they arrived in Paris.

These tactics proved crucial to the advancement of Pacific islands' position in the global climate talks. But Pacific states also acted on their own. Remarkably, the Marshall Islands was almost single-handedly responsible for the successful negotiation of an ambitious Paris Agreement.

Six months before the December Paris conference, the Marshall Islands government convened a series of private meetings that paved the way for the formation of a “high-ambition coalition” of climate-progressive states. By the second week of the summit, this group had swelled to include the United States, the European Union and more than 100 other countries. This coalition ultimately had a crucial say in formalising the agreement’s 1.5℃ goal.

In the months before the Paris talks, Australia was not invited to join the high-ambition coalition. It attempted to join right at the summit’s tail end, but was later snubbed by coalition members at the Paris deal’s signing ceremony in New York in April.

There seems little doubt that Australia was left out in the diplomatic cold precisely because its climate “ambitions” are so dismally low. Indeed, when Australia announced its intended emissions targets for the Paris Agreement, the Marshall Islands' foreign minister, Tony de Brum, complained that if the rest of the world followed Australia’s lead, his country, and other vulnerable nations on Australia’s doorstep, would disappear.

The contrast could not be starker. While Pacific leaders are praised for their efforts to develop global climate solutions, Australia faces ignominy. Unless Australia changes direction, it will continue to be seen as an irresponsible middle power – a rogue state undermining global efforts to tackle climate change.

Australian governments will also find it increasingly hard to convince Pacific island countries they are a friend as well as a neighbour.

Wesley Morgan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Exclusive: Department of Environment confirms agency’s ‘mid-September’ move from Melbourne ‘to improve operating efficiency’

The Climate Change Authority will be moved from Melbourne to Canberra within the next fortnight, putting its independence from government under the spotlight.

A spokesperson for the Department of Environment has confirmed the move in “mid-September” to Guardian Australia, and said it was being done “in order to improve its operating efficiency”.

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Shipping routes across the Arctic are going to open up significantly this century even with a best-case reduction in CO2 emissions, a new study suggests.

While the call by Pope Francis that religions should take far more responsibility for rampant environmental damage is most welcome (Environmental destruction is a sin, says pope, 2 September), he should be reminded that by far the most damaging cause of impending crisis is the huge near-threefold increase in the human population over the last 75 years to more than 7 billion.

Organised religion has stubbornly resisted all realistic forms of birth control and must take its share of the blame for this catastrophe. Worse still, even in the face of this evidence they persist in treating control as a sin. Is this not time for a rethink?
Emeritus Professor Colin Green
University College London, Northwick Park Institute for Medical Research

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Major savings reported across all sectors before 2020 goal but analysts warn UK could reverse gains after Brexit

Europe has met a landmark goal of slashing its energy consumption six years ahead of time, cutting greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the switching off about 400 power stations.

In 2014, the EU’s 28 member countries consumed 72m tonnes of oil equivalent less than had been projected for 2020, according to a report by the EU’s science arm, the Joint Research Centre (JRC). The figure matches Finland’s annual energy use.

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Campaigners say the government intends to charge business rates for small solar installations on schools, but academies, private and free schools will be exempt due to charitable status

State schools with solar panels will be hit with a tax hike that exempts private schools, free schools and academies, according to campaigners.

The government proposes to end an exemption for small solar panel installations (less than 50 kilowatts) and charge business rates on them from April 2017. The charity 10:10 has calculated this will cost schools more than £820 a year for the average 10kW installation and, combined with recent cuts to the subsidy paid for rooftop solar energy, make future projects risky or uneconomic.

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Two judges are asked to leave a Swedish panel that picks the Nobel prize for medicine in a scandal over a disgraced Italian transplant surgeon.

All flights at London City airport were disrupted on Tuesday morning by a Black Lives Matter UK protest on the runway. Nine people chained themselves together on the runway to highlight the environmental impact of air travel on the lives of black people locally and globally

• Nine Black Lives Matter protesters arrested after City airport travel chaos
  
• Protesters lie in chains on London City airport runway – aerial video
  

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Climate Home: Leaders back rapid implementation of the Paris agreement and ramping up of green finance, but fail to set timeline for phase-out of fossil fuel subsidies

Leaders of the world’s biggest economies reaffirmed their commitment to tackling climate change as the G20 summit came to a close in Hangzhou on Monday night.

What they did not agree on were hoped-for deadlines to ratify the Paris climate agreement and phase out fossil fuel subsidies.

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Campaigners and politicians say discussion is a matter of urgency following fresh revelations of superbugs in UK supermarket meat products

Tougher regulations on the use of antibiotics on farm animals are needed as a matter of urgency as part of Brexit negotiations, campaigners and politicians have urged, after fresh revelations of superbugs found in UK supermarket meat products.

E coli germs resistant to all of the currently used antibiotics have been found in UK supermarket meat, with a quarter of chickens found to contain the deadly superbugs, in research from Cambridge University.

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New studies show that climate polarization is on the rise in the US; WSJ climate coverage is full of denial.

A new study by a team of sociologists at Oklahoma State University has found political polarization on climate change is growing in the United States. Today’s Republicans are less likely than they were a decade ago to accept that the effects of global warming have begun, that humans are responsible, and that there is a scientific consensus on these questions. Democrats and independents are slightly more likely to answer these questions correctly today than a decade ago.

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At three times the size of California, the scope of the Papahānaumokuākea reserve has also highlighted how little of the world’s oceans are protected

As a grand gesture in the dying embers of a presidency, Barack Obama’s decision to create the world’s largest marine protected area in Hawaii was a chance to flex American exceptionalism with little downside.

“I love our president,” said Kevin Chang, of conservation group Kua’aina ulu ‘auamo. Chang said Hawaiians who successfully lobbied for Obama’s extension of the Papahānaumokuākea (pronounced Pa-pa-hah-now-mo-koo-ah-keh-ah) monument are “ecstatic”.

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West Australian man in his 50s, whose name has not been released, bitten while kitesurfing inside the reef at Koumac

A shark has bitten and killed an Australian kitesurfer off New Caledonia in the second fatal attack in the South Pacific territory in six months, officials say.

“The man in his 50s was kitesurfing inside the reef at Koumac. He fell and was bitten,” Nicolas Renaud, head of the archipelago’s marine rescue coordination centre, said on Tuesday.

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MPs and campaigners warn new amendment could open the door to dirty, harmful coal projects with no means to demand environmental assessments

Turkish coal plants are in line for eye-watering public subsidies and exemptions from environmental regulations, under an amended energy package delivered by the country’s parliament, late last week.

Turkey is a member of the G20, whose two leading economies – the US and China – agreed to ratify the Paris climate change agreement on Saturday.

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Seven people from a ministry of environment team documenting illegal forest fires were taken hostage and threatened, ministry says

Up to 100 Indonesian men, believed to have been hired by a palm oil firm, took a team of official environmental investigators hostage on Friday and threatened to burn them alive, Indonesia’s environment ministry has said.

The government team of seven were documenting illegal forest fires, which are often set ablaze deliberately by agriculture firms to clear land for replanting during the dry season.

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A law has been passed in Wales that obliges politicians to listen to anyone who asks for safe walking and cycling routes to be built in their area

To negotiate parts of the Cardiff Bay trail by bike on a sunny day is, if not an art, then at least a good test of spatial awareness. Among those on foot and two wheels are families with pushchairs, older people on bikes, kids running, and kids on go-karts and scooters. It’s a picture postcard of the pent-up demand for safe walking and cycling routes away from motor traffic.

While many of us know our towns and cities could look like this – more people-centric and less car-centric – in reality, a lack of political will and consistent funding often puts that out of reach. Here in Wales, a piece of legislation which places people friendly streets is within grasp – if people speak up and tell politicians what to do.

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Federal court hears crash site was contaminated with paint particles tainted with tributyltin but carrier’s owner says cleanup cost ‘unsubstantial and unrealistic’

The Australian government is seeking at least $120m from the owners of a Chinese coal carrier that destroyed part of the Great Barrier Reef.

Shenzhen Energy Transport is arguing against paying for the clean-up of the Douglas Shoal, which was severely damaged when the Shen Neng 1 went off-course and grounded in April 2010.

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Homeowners across Australia will be flinging open their doors this Saturday and inviting curious visitors in to inspect their credentials on Sustainable House Day. Guardian Australia takes a closer look at a few of the inspiring properties that have upped the energy efficiency ante. Visit sustainablehouseday.com for for more information

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For the first time since the Coalition dumped the carbon price, energy combustion emissions fell in June 2016.

Australia's oceans are feeding grounds for many wildlife species, including seabirds. Ed Dunens/Flickr, CC BY

More of Australia’s oceans should be placed under high protection, according to the long-awaited review of Commonwealth marine reserves released yesterday. The review, launched in 2014 by then prime minister Tony Abbott, largely vindicates the original planning process. It recommends zoning changes to 26 of 40 reserves, and reductions to the area available to mining, while reducing the impact on commercial fisheries.

The Commonwealth marine reserves were meant to be an easy win for the then-Labor federal government when they were declared in November 2012. All are in Commonwealth waters, from three nautical miles (about 5.5km) from the coast to 200 nautical miles (370km). Their generally remote location meant that few people would be affected.

Declaring the reserves fulfilled national and international commitments, a feat achieved by very few marine jurisdictions in the world. Australia was leading the way.

The reserves were also hugely popular. A sophisticated social media campaign run by international and national environmental groups had harnessed massive public support, especially for the declaration of a huge, no-fishing (or “no-take”) zone in the Coral Sea.

But criticisms of the parks emerged quickly leading up to and following their declaration. Predictably, commercial and recreational fishers protested the loss of fishing access. But some scientists also questioned whether these huge parks were the best way to protect our seas.

These same concerns have been raised in response to the world’s largest marine park – the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawaii, announced last week by US President Barack Obama.

So in 2013 the incoming Abbott government suspended the parks' management plans, making the reserves, at least temporarily, “paper parks”.

The review has restated the importance of no-take zones and recommended an increase in some of the reserves and a decrease in the Coral Sea.

So will the recommendations appease the critics?

Australia’s marine reserves as proposed in 2012. Department of Environment, CC BY Balancing act

The review panels had a challenging job of balancing conservation with emerging uses of marine space. Planning marine reserves is far more complex than agreeing to protect a certain amount of our oceans.

We don’t yet know a lot about ocean ecosystems. Researchers are trying to understand in more detail how marine species are connected and how they reproduce and feed in water and seabed habitats. Different species and communities have different needs and vulnerabilities.

A precautionary approach would suggest protection of large areas. But this begs the question of whether it’s most effective or fair to stakeholders to close large tracts of remote ocean to all forms of fishing, compared (for example) with infrequent, often seasonal, surface trolling of open ocean species by commercial or recreational fishers.

It is easy for planning processes to get caught up in a highly polarised debate between fishing and conservation interests. Part of the problem comes from a narrow understanding of benefits and impact, which focuses purely on numbers of people using an area and economic losses versus benefits.

Focusing on these questions alone fails to recognise the important role that values, emotion and identity play in framing the ways people respond to marine reserves.

For example, conservation groups have been perplexed by the opposition of recreational fishing groups to remote marine parks. Why would recreational fishers oppose parks that are well outside the usual fishing spots for the average fisher?

Conversely, fishing groups often feel that their interests should be prioritised over the tens of thousands of people who made submissions in support of the reserves – many of whom may never visit these areas.

A better understanding of why people fish, sail, dive, surf, do business, get involved in conservation campaigns and care about marine management will improve our understanding of what drives individual, group and community values and attitudes. We need to understand these emotional responses better before we can adequately evaluate the impact of marine reserves.

Without these data available now, the review panel has recommended adapting to new knowledge as it becomes available. It remains to be seen how fishing and environment groups will respond to these proposed changes. But it is likely they will still spark opposition despite the huge amount of time and resources that have gone into them.

How do you look after a remote marine park?

Another problem with large remote marine reserves is the high cost of managing and monitoring them.

Having people actively engaged in making use of these remote areas in low-impact ways can contribute to monitoring environmental health and discouraging illegal activities.

Other cost-effective solutions include technologies such as vessel-monitoring systems (which automatically track and survey boats), satellite monitoring, remote instruments and voluntary citizen science.

Along with the benefit of understanding how people use and value marine reserves, vessel-monitoring systems would increase safety and reduce costs of search, rescue and routine surveillance. While all Commonwealth-managed fisheries have these systems as a management requirement, most state fisheries do not. This is one example of the potential and the challenge of developing a coordinated system for managing and funding Australia’s coastal and ocean waters.

Inshore areas and many fisheries operating in Commonwealth waters are state and territory responsibilities. Many of the impacts affecting remote marine reserves come from these coastal areas.

So the success of the final zoning arrangements in achieving conservation objectives will require looking beyond state versus Commonwealth and fishery versus environment disputes.

Humpback whales migrate along Australia’s coasts. Whale image from www.shutterstock.com Where to from here?

Regardless of where you sit in this highly polarised debate, the final zoning of Australia’s marine reserves should not be seen as the end of the story.

There’s growing interest in Australia’s “blue economy”. It is time to revisit the need for a national oceans policy – a partnership between states and the Commonwealth that addresses the complexity of managing our seas. The development of Australia’s Oceans Policy in 1994 came close.

This was originally designed to address a range of issues, which included, but were not limited to, biodiversity conservation and the Commonwealth marine reserve network. Issues with negotiations prevented the policy coming to fruition.

With the reserve network now close to completion, it is time to turn attention to the range of other challenges that lie on the horizon for our oceans. No-take marine reserves provide sanctuaries and reference sites for understanding our impact on marine environments and are part of the solution to sustaining them.

It’s now time to move on, provide certainty for industry and stakeholders, and shift attention to the challenge of managing these reserves and the waters that surround them in a sustainable, productive and inclusive way. A great deal of work remains to be done.

Michelle Voyer has been involved in a number of projects that have received funding from the Commonwealth Fisheries Research and Development Corporation, the NSW Recreational Fishing Trust and the NSW Department of Primary Industries.

Richard Ambrose Kenchington has received funding from CSIRO as part of a Coastal Cluster study of barriers to the application of science in Coastal Zone management.