Lavetanalagi Seru - claiming space for Pacific islanders at climate talks

Youth activist Lavetanalagi Seru speaks for some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations. He has spent much of this year pressing the global shipping industry to cut its carbon emissions. But is it listening? Karen Thomas went to meet him

This summer, the marine-environment protection committee of the London-based International Maritime Organization (IMO) finally agreed emissions targets for shipping. The United Nations agency regulates global shipping. It has set a 2050 deadline to align industry emissions with Paris Agreement targets to limit global heating to within +1.5°C of pre-industrial temperatures.

The IMO deal includes a basket of suggested ways to decarbonise shipping that include a carbon levy on shipping fuels. That proposal came from climate-vulnerable Pacific island nations, which urged the UN body to back emissions-based taxes for shipping, facing down strong opposition from Australia, China and Brazil.

The Pacific island delegation included youth activist Lavetanalagi Seru, co-founder of the Alliance for Future Generations Fiji, who works as climate-justice project officer for regional civil-society body the Pacific Islands Climate-Action Network.

Diffident and softly spoken, Seru has a quiet confidence that reads older than his 30 years. Meeting UN officials, diplomats, business owners and journalists is all in a day’s work. He agreed to meet The Environment in London, midway through the IMO shipping-emissions talks, in a hotel near the UN body’s Southbank headquarters.

Young Fijians such as Seru have learned to fear the next big storm. More frequent cyclones and rising seas are reshaping their lives and future prospects. It’s surreal to discuss the very survival of island states like Fiji in a disco-lit hotel atrium. More apt is the rainstorm of biblical proportions that strikes as we speak, turning the Albert Embankment into a lake.

Fiji tourism economy

For tourists, Fiji feels like paradise, but like many islanders, Seru has had it tough. His mother raised five children single-handed, working in a bar to support them. Money was so tight that Seru dropped out during both primary and secondary school, missing two years of education.

It’s also why he started – but didn’t finish – a degree in tourism. Seru had little interest in tourism; his ambition was to study economics. But the industry is Fiji’s lifeblood and tourism was the only degree course that offered him a scholarship.

When he dropped out of university, Seru volunteered for cash-strapped groups and charities that couldn’t pay him. That tough start shaped his passion for social justice. “It’s why I’m moved to give back to those who need it – to provide opportunities to children and communities in need,” he says.

“Volunteering in civil society gave me life experience. I was looking for my own space – for a platform where young people could come together, to speak out about their experiences. Young people’s issues were compartmentalised – we needed to bring them together.”

Climate change has haunted Seru since childhood. Three-quarters of Fijians live on the coast and depend on it for their food and income. It’s a country of more than 320 low-lying islands. None of it sits more than 1,323m higher than the sea. As sea levels rise, Fiji is already struggling to manage shrinking coasts, seawater contamination of drinking water and more frequent cyclones and floods.

Nine years ago, 140 people living in the village of Vunidogolao became the first Fijians to relocate, as floods and saltwater claimed their ancestral homes. Five more communities have moved since then; 50 are on a priority list to move.

This has cultural impacts. It isn’t just moving house; for many people, relocation cuts ancient ancestral and economic bonds with their land – ripping them away from their farmland, fishing spots and family burial grounds.

With his mother at work, Seru lived for three years with relatives in her family’s ancestral village. He witnessed its sea walls crumble as more storms and coastal surges came ashore. “Back then, it didn’t occur to me that this was climate change,” he says. “We only learned about it at the end of high school. It was at university that I began to connect the dots.”

Cyclone Winston impact

In February 2016, the full force of Cyclone Winston – a category-five tropical storm – hit Fiji. Winston was the most devastating cyclone ever recorded in the Global South. It tore through 40,000 Fijian homes, causing US$1.4 billion worth of damage. That single storm cost Fiji a third of its GDP and affected 40 per cent of the country’s population.

“We had to evacuate,” Seru recalls. “In my own community, 85 per cent of homes were damaged. We were in the city by then, living in a hole underneath the church hall. And that went on for months. There were food shortages. It was a disruptive experience for everyone – even trying to get the support we needed.

“That was my moment to reflect – to think, what is this? What can I do to highlight this? It pushed me to learn about what climate change is.”

For a generation of young islanders, Winston was a wake-up call, a glimpse into Fiji’s future. In 2018, Seru co-founded the Alliance for Future Generations Fiji to do this, taking the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals as its framework to give young people a voice.

Beyond climate change, the group campaigns for health, education and sustainable jobs, for gender equality and for human rights. Members clean beaches and protect the islands’ wildlife and ecosystems. “Our society is patriarchal – there’s a strong Christian faith,” Seru explains. “We have to navigate that. Traditionally, even in village meetings, young people are seen and not heard.”

Seru speaks for his region as a youth climate delegate to the UN. It’s why he spent so much time this spring and summer shuttling to and from IMO headquarters in London with the Pacific nations’ negotiating team. When delegates gather in Abu Dhabi for COP28, he’ll be pressing the world’s richest countries to pay for loss and damage directly to the hardest-hit communities in climate-vulnerable states.

Young people are making waves across the Pacific. This spring, the governments of Fiji, Vanuatu and Tonga signed up to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, demanding an end, globally, to oil, gas and coal production and use. But the IMO talks left Seru frustrated and disappointed.

“The IMO has basically kicked the can further down the road by not setting concrete and ambitious targets under the 2023 IMO Strategy on Greenhouse Gas Emissions Reduction, to align to a 1.5°C pathway,” he says.

“In doing so, they have sent a very weak signal to the shipping industry, investors and financiers on the urgency to decarbonise the shipping industry. It is also incompatible with the pace and scale that climate science requires for rapid, deep and immediate emission reductions across all sectors, including shipping.”

Seru and his generation of Pacific islanders, raised in the debris of Cyclone Winston, already see how fossil-fuel emissions are reshaping their prospects. Climate change isn’t abstract – it’s real, it’s here and it’s heartbreaking. Islanders are losing more than their property; their past and their prospects are also at stake.

“It’s a community relocating,” Seru concludes. “It’s a community losing ancestral lands to rising seas. It’s people struggling for food and livelihoods. It’s seawater intrusion that prevents us planting our arable lands. It’s taxing our bodies – especially the bodies of women and the elderly. They have to take that extra mile to plant or to fish as our oceans get warmer.

“It’s children being too afraid, after the cyclone, to go out to play in the rain. It’s the sound of thunder bringing it all back.”

POLLUTER PAYS – HAS THE IMO DEAL MISSED THE BOAT?

In July, countries finally agreed the first net-zero targets for international shipping “by or around 2050”, in a deal brokered at the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) headquarters in London. Before the deal was agreed, global shipping was on course to blow its well-below-2°C carbon budget by 2037.

The deal sets emissions checkpoints in 2030 and 2040, and pledges to scale up low-carbon technologies by the end of this decade. It pledges to find new ways to decarbonise shipping, including a proposal to fine polluters through a carbon levy on shipping fuels. It presses shipping firms to improve their energy efficiency and to accelerate the switch to less-polluting fuels.

Climate-vulnerable Pacific nations pushed for the levy – despite fierce opposition from China, India, Australia and Brazil – to force shipping to decarbonise more rapidly. They wanted to tax every ship based on the greenhouse gases it emits from its fuel.

They proposed a universal, mandatory emissions levy from 2025 of US$100/tonne of carbon-dioxide equivalent that could raise US$60-100 billion a year.

The levy is among several options that the IMO has agreed to “develop and finalise” by next July. However, the IMO targets aren’t yet legally binding. Critics, including Carbon Brief, Greenpeace and WWF, say the shipping industry targets offer too little too late. Global heating is already at +1.2°C. Critics say the industry is dragging its feet.

Shipping emissions are returning to pre-pandemic levels, research shows. New research from the European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E) shows that, far from cutting emissions, European shipping increased its emissions by three per cent last year. T&E says the industry is heading “for a point of no return”.

“Carbon emissions are at a three-year high as shipping companies go all-guns-blazing,” says T&E shipping manager Jacob Armstrong. “Europe’s shipping giants are up there with coal plants and airlines as the continent’s biggest polluters… Without stricter regulations, shipping companies will continue to spurn investments in efficiency and green fuels… quickly moving to a point of no return.”

Did you know?

Last year, European shipping lines emitted nearly 130 million tonnes of carbon dioxide – and cruise-ship emissions nearly doubled year-on-year.

Last year, the European shipping lines that emitted most carbon dioxide were:

• Mediterranean Shipping Co10.2 million tonnes
• CMA CGM5.5 million tonnes
• Maersk5.2 million tonnes
• Cosco Shipping 3.8 million tonnes
• Hapag-Lloyd3.3 million tonnes

Source: Transport & Environment, 2023