Australia commits $9 million to help Pacific neighbours meet climate targets

The Australian government announced on Monday that it was contributing $9 million to the Regional Pacific Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) Hub in an effort to further support the country’s Pacific neighbours respond to climate change.

The Hub, a Pacific-led initiative representing 14 Pacific Island nations, helps find the data, resources, and expertise that is needed to implement Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) required by the Paris Agreement.

Each signatory to the Paris Agreement has been required to set NDCs, a commitment to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change. Launched in 2017, the Hub has already helped deliver access to climate support including for investment planning, low-emissions strategy development, and emissions reporting.

Announced at the Pacific Islands Countries Climate Change Ministerial Talanoa, the new $9 million in funding is intended to support the next phase of the Hub as countries seek to submit new NDCs in 2025.

“Climate change is no longer a threat, it’s a reality, and Australia is committed to supporting our closest neighbours to deliver on their ambitious emissions reduction targets and manage investment planning for low emissions development,” said Chris Bowen, Australian minister for climate change and energy.

“Each step we take to fight climate change is a step back from the brink, and Australia is dedicated to working with our Pacific neighbours to make sure our next steps are the right ones.”

Australia is one of four regular supporters of the Hub, alongside the governments of New Zealand and Germany and the wider European Union.

Will the Earth warm by 2°C or 5.5°C? Either way it’s bad, and trying to narrow it down may be a distraction

Climate change is usually discussed in terms of rising temperatures.

But scientists often use a different measure, known as “equilibrium climate sensitivity”. This is defined as the global mean warming caused by a doubling of pre-industrial carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels in the atmosphere.

We use this measure to describe the range of potential temperature increases on longer timescales, and to compare how well climate models reproduce observed warming.

But the predicted range of rising temperature has remained stubbornly wide, somewhere between 2°C and 5.5°C of warming, as assessed in several generations of reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is despite concerted efforts to narrow it down.

Measuring long-term climate sensitivity is central to future predictions, but we are already seeing the effects of warming across the world with extremes in weather, even at the low end of the range. We argue efforts to boil down Earth’s response to climate change to one number may be unhelpful.

The continued uncertainty could be seen as a failure of climate models to converge on the correct value. Using equilibrium climate sensitivity as a metric for “precisely” predicting the amount of warming expected from a given amount of greenhouse gases is, at best, ambiguous.