Pacific nations insist world must increase efforts to meet global warming limit

By Peter Hobson

NADI, Fiji, Oct 7 (Reuters) - Global governments must increase efforts to reduce emissions because the planet is "hurtling past" a critical temperature target that would restrain sea level rises and extreme weather, delegates at a major climate conference in Fiji said on Wednesday.

Pacific nations, which are among the world's most vulnerable to climate change, are trying to lock their priorities into global climate negotiations at the ministerial meeting in Fiji, a precursor to the COP31 forum in Turkey in November.

Among those priorities are securing better access to climate finance, protecting oceans, and making sure the target of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels is honoured, despite projections from the UN that it will soon be exceeded.

"We are hurtling past the 1.5-degree temperature limit," Fijian climate minister Lynda Tabuya told representatives from more than 50 countries at the start of pre-COP ministerial negotiations.

The data simply confirm what Pacific nations can see, she said: "The tide that reaches our homes, the pale reef our grandmothers no longer recognise, the villages we have already had to relocate."

"Overshoot (of the target) is not a verdict we accept quietly ... keeping 1.5 alive is the primary legal obligation and duty we are here to uphold."

On Tuesday, representatives from around 30 nations gathered in Fiji after a visit to the vulnerable atoll nation of Tuvalu and adopted a declaration calling for "deep, rapid and sustained emissions reductions."

The delegation, which includes Pacific island leaders and representatives from countries including France, India and the United Arab Emirates, saw heavy machinery digging sand and creating new land that can withstand rising seas.

"Every fraction of a degree of warming accelerates the impacts of climate change and increases the risk of irreversible loss and damage," said the declaration, whose title, Taku Pakasoa, is the Tuvaluan concept of the strength found in unity and collective action.

Exceeding a 1.5-degree rise — and significant environmental damage — was now unavoidable, said Dechen Tsering, director of the Regional Office of Asia Pacific at the UN Environment Programme.

"Pacific risks will outlast the temperature peak," she said. "Each additional 100 years above 1.5 degrees would commit the world to around 40 centimetres (15.8 inches) of additional median sea level rise by 2300 compared with the pathway without overshoot."

Turkey is hosting COP31 in the coastal city of Antalya and Australia is leading the negotiations.

The pre-COP events in Fiji and Tuvalu this week will shape what is possible at COP31, said Australian climate minister Chris Bowen.

"This region is home to some of the world's strongest climate voices," he said, adding that Pacific advocacy was vital in the adoption of the 1.5 degree goal at COP21 in Paris in 2015. "It's also experiencing the most direct impacts."

Turkey's environment minister Murat Kurum, who is president of COP31, said limiting overshoot of the target was the summit's clear common goal.

"I believe in this wholeheartedly," he said.

(Reporting by Peter Hobson in Nadi and Renju Jose in Sydney; Editing by Sonali Paul and Kim Coghill)