Pacific nations seek to entrench 1.5-degree target in COP climate talks

By Peter Hobson

NADI, Fiji, Oct 7 (Reuters) - The world must increase its efforts to reduce emissions in order to keep global temperature rises beneath 1.5 degrees Celsius and limit the impact of rising seas and extreme weather, delegates gathered at a climate conference in Fiji said on Wednesday.

Pacific nations that are among the world’s most vulnerable to climate change are trying to lock their priorities into global climate negotiations at the ministerial meeting, 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 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 1.5-degree 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, a group of mostly Pacific Island leaders 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."

"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 1.5 degrees — 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 of additional median sea level rise by 2300 compared with the pathway without overshoot."

Turkey's environment minister Murat Kurum, who is president of COP31, said limiting overshoot of 1.5 degrees 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)