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Climate Change & Emissions

The canaries of our planet: why the Pacific Islands are our early warning

Coal miners once carried canaries underground as an early warning. Today the warning is coming from the Pacific, from nations that emitted almost none of the carbon now changing their seas, their water and their land.

Anote Tong, former President of Kiribati, Mark Riseley of DuraTerra and Fiame Naomi Mata'afa, former Prime Minister of Samoa, at Global Citizen NOW: Perth.
From left: Anote Tong, former President of Kiribati; Mark Riseley, DuraTerra; Fiame Naomi Mata'afa, former Prime Minister of Samoa. Global Citizen NOW: Perth, October 2026.

By Mark Riseley, Founder and Managing Director, DuraTerra · · 9 min read

The canary goes back underground

For most of the twentieth century, coal miners carried a small yellow bird into the pit. Mines held two invisible killers: firedamp (methane), which exploded, and white damp (carbon monoxide), which suffocated (Mental Floss, n.d.). The canary, far more sensitive to carbon monoxide than a person, would collapse first, giving miners time to get out (Smithsonian Magazine, 2016).

Britain retired its last mining canaries only in 1986 (Smithsonian Magazine, 2016). The coal they helped extract powered the industrial age, and its carbon is still in our atmosphere.

Today the canary is back, and it is not a bird. It is Kiribati, Tuvalu, Samoa, the Marshall Islands and the other small island nations that emitted almost none of that carbon. They are showing the first signs of a planet-wide failure, and, like the canary, they did not choose to go down the mine.

A conversation in Perth

At Global Citizen NOW: Perth this October, I sat down with Anote Tong, former President of Kiribati, and Fiame Naomi Mata'afa, former Prime Minister of Samoa. Both have spent years carrying their nations' case to the world.

We talked about what it means to plan for a country's survival, and about a second injustice that gets less attention: the cost of moving to renewable energy, imposed on small economies by emissions they did not produce. We also talked about land: who holds it, who decides its future, and how Indigenous land rights in the Pacific and here in Australia shape the answers. I come back to that below, because it may be the part of this story Australians can do most about.

Oceans: hotter, higher and more acidic

The ocean that sustains Pacific life is changing on every front at once. The World Meteorological Organization's report for the South-West Pacific recorded 2025 as the region's second-warmest year, behind only 2024 (WMO, 2026).

  • Sea level. Between 1999 and 2025, sea level in the region rose by an average of 3.7 mm a year (WMO, 2026). In Tuvalu, NASA found sea level was nearly 15 cm higher in 2023 than 30 years earlier, and projected that much of the country's land and critical infrastructure will sit below average high tide by 2050 (NASA Earth Observatory, 2024).
  • Flooding. NASA projects at least another 15 cm of rise for Tuvalu, Kiribati and Fiji over the next 30 years. Parts of Tuvalu that now flood fewer than five days a year could average 25 flood days a year by the 2050s (NASA, 2024).
  • Heat. Marine heatwaves covered almost the entire South-West Pacific in 2025, driving coral bleaching, fish deaths and disruption to fisheries and aquaculture (WMO, 2026; Anadolu Agency, 2026).
  • Acidity. Almost the entire region recorded its lowest-ever surface ocean pH in 2025 (WMO, 2026). The same carbon dioxide that warms the air dissolves into the sea and weakens the shells and skeletons that reefs are built from.

Fresh water: a thin lens under threat

On a coral atoll, drinking water is a thin layer of rainwater floating on denser seawater inside the sand, known as a freshwater lens (Engineers Australia, 2023). Atoll land in Kiribati is rarely more than a few hundred metres wide, so there is very little room for that lens to form (Cultural Survival, n.d.). Climate change attacks it from two directions:

  • From below. Rising seas push saltwater into the lens and turn groundwater brackish (Médecins Sans Frontières, 2025).
  • From the sky. Drought cuts the rain that recharges it. Kiribati declared a drought after three years of below-average rainfall (Engineers Australia, 2023).

The human cost is already visible. Tebunginako, a village on Abaiang in Kiribati, was abandoned after saltwater intrusion eroded the land and spoiled its water (Médecins Sans Frontières, 2025).

Food: salt in the garden, tuna on the move

Atoll soils are thin, sandy and calcareous, and have always needed enormous effort to grow food (University of the South Pacific, n.d.). Salt is now undoing generations of that work.

  • Staple crops. Pulaka (giant swamp taro, called babai in Kiribati) is grown in pits dug down to the freshwater lens. Tuvalu lists saltwater inundation of pulaka pits as a national climate impact (FAO, n.d.), and one study reports that 50–80% of pulaka pits on Funafuti have been abandoned (Tui and Fakhruddin, 2022).
  • Tree crops. Breadfruit, a staple in Kiribati, is dying in drought (APN, n.d.). As traditional crops fail, diets shift to imported food.
  • Fisheries. Under a high-emissions pathway, warming is projected to push tuna out of the waters of ten Pacific island states and into the high seas. By 2050 that means an average 20% fall in purse-seine catch, about US$90 million a year less in regional access fees, and up to 13% less government revenue for individual states (Bell et al., 2021).

The same study holds the clearest message in this whole story. Under a lower-emissions pathway, the projected catch loss falls to about 3% (Bell et al., 2021). The outcome depends on emissions made elsewhere.

The reef is the island

For an atoll nation, the coral reef is not scenery. It is the larder, the breakwater and the source of the sand the islands are made of. The fourth global coral bleaching event, which began in early 2023, had reached 84% of the world's reefs by April 2025, the largest on record (Malay Mail/AFP, 2025). The IPCC projects coral reefs would decline by 70–90% at 1.5°C of warming, and by more than 99% at 2°C (IPCC, 2018).

When reefs weaken, the losses compound. Fewer reef fish means less protein for coastal families. A degraded reef breaks fewer waves, so storm surges reach further inland, into the gardens and the freshwater lens.

When a homeland becomes a question

These are not just ecosystems under stress. They are societies with thousands of years of navigation, language, land tenure and custom, now planning for the possibility that their territory may not last.

In 2023 Tuvalu and Australia signed the Falepili Union, which entered into force in August 2024. For the first time, a legally binding treaty recognises a nation's continuing statehood and sovereignty notwithstanding sea-level rise, and it creates a migration pathway to Australia (DFAT, n.d.). When the first ballot opened in 2025, about 8,750 people entered for 280 places, roughly 90% of the population (Giannini, 2025). The treaty also gives Australia a say in Tuvalu's security agreements with third countries, which raised sovereignty concerns in Tuvalu (Giannini, 2025). The canaries are being asked to negotiate their own rescue.

Land, rights and who decides

In the Pacific, land is not just an asset. In Samoa, about 81% of land was estimated in 2002 to be customary land, held under the authority of families and their chiefs, and the Constitution makes it unlawful to alienate or dispose of an interest in customary land (Corrin, n.d.). Land is bound up with identity, title and obligation. When the sea takes land, it takes more than ground.

Australia's story is different, but it rhymes. As at June 2025, about 4.4 million square kilometres, more than half of Australia's land mass, was subject to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's rights or interests (Productivity Commission, 2026). Those rights vary widely: AAP FactCheck puts the share under Indigenous ownership or control at around 30%, with the rest made up largely of non-exclusive native title that sits alongside pastoral and other interests (Driver, 2025).

The common thread is that decisions about land, including how it is used, protected and repaired, increasingly sit with the people who have the deepest connection to it. Any serious conversation about climate and land in either region has to start there.

Restoring country

Much of the land that needs restoring in Australia, whether degraded pasture, eroded catchments or former mine sites, sits on or alongside Country with Indigenous rights and interests. Indigenous Protected Areas alone grew from 2% of Australia's landmass in 2004 to 11% in 2024 (ABS, 2025), and Indigenous rangers already manage fire, weeds and water across vast areas.

Restoration that lasts depends on what happens below ground. Degraded and disturbed land can lose the soil structure and biology that native plants need to establish and persist. Rebuilding that takes time, local knowledge and the right tools, and the knowledge part is not ours to bring. It belongs to Traditional Owners, who have managed this land for tens of thousands of years.

Where science and new soil technologies can help, they work best in support of that knowledge, on terms set by the people whose Country it is. That is how we think about our own place in this work.

Who pays for the canary?

Pacific small island developing states produce less than 0.03% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions (UNESCAP, 2022). Yet they are among the first to bear the cost, twice over.

The first cost is damage: lost crops, salted water, eroded coastlines, displaced villages. The second, which came up repeatedly in Perth, is the bill for a transition they did not cause. Small economies must fund renewable energy, sea walls and relocation planning from thin budgets, budgets that warming oceans may also strip of tuna revenue (Bell et al., 2021).

  • The Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage, long championed by small island states, has about US$800 million in pledges, but only US$321 million had been paid in by April 2025 (Eco-Business, 2025).
  • Its start-up phase commits US$250 million for 2025–26, with at least half reserved for small island states and least developed countries (Climate Analytics, 2025).
  • Estimates of developing countries' loss and damage needs run to around US$400 billion a year (CARICOM, n.d.).

There is a counter-argument, and it deserves a fair hearing. Contributions to the fund are voluntary, and many governments argue that today's large emitters, including major developing economies, must share the burden alongside the countries that industrialised first. That debate is real. It does not change the arithmetic for nations built on atolls a few metres above the sea.

Heeding the canary

Miners never argued with a collapsed canary. They left the pit and fixed the air. The Pacific is giving the same signal, and one of the fastest levers we have is the gas that once filled the pits as firedamp: methane.

Methane is short-lived but powerful. The UN Environment Programme found that cutting human-caused methane by up to 45% this decade would avoid nearly 0.3°C of warming by the 2040s. Agriculture accounts for about 40% of human-caused methane, fossil fuels 35% and waste 20% (UNEP and CCAC, 2021).

That puts farming and land management squarely in the story, as both a source and a solution. Soils that hold more carbon, nutrient systems that waste less nitrogen, and landscapes restored rather than abandoned all reduce the pressure on the air we share.

At DuraTerra, we work on the soil side of that equation, developing ways to deliver nutrients and soil biology to farming and restoration landscapes, and testing them before we make any claims. We do not claim to save an island. But the canary is telling all of us, growers, landholders, investors and governments alike, that the time to act on the land beneath our feet is now.

Frequently asked questions

Why are the Pacific Islands called a climate early warning?

Low-lying island nations are among the first to experience rising seas, saltwater in their fresh water and gardens, marine heatwaves and coral bleaching, despite producing less than 0.03% of global emissions.

How is climate change affecting food in the Pacific Islands?

Saltwater is damaging pulaka (giant swamp taro) pits, drought is killing breadfruit, and warming is projected to push tuna away from some island states' waters, cutting catches and government revenue.

How much of Australia is subject to Indigenous land rights or interests?

As at June 2025, about 4.4 million square kilometres, more than half of Australia's land mass, was subject to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people's rights or interests. Around 30% is under Indigenous ownership or control.

References

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