PORT VILA, Friday 17 April 2026 — Pacific governments and civil society came together in Vanuatu this week as part of a key regional meeting ahead of the landmark First International Conference for the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta, Colombia, later this month, against the backdrop of a global energy crisis which has seen Pacific Island nations hit especially hard.

The meeting, held from April 13-15, saw a new landmark declaration: The Tassiriki Call for a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific. Leaders cited the energy crisis as evidence of the dangers of fossil fuel dependence and the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels. The significant climate finance gap was identified as a key constraint to the transition in the region.

The global energy crisis driven by the US and Israel’s illegal war on Iran has raised the stakes for a region that is among the most vulnerable to both climate change but is also one of the most fuel-exposed economies in the world. Many Pacific nations are grappling with fuel shortages that threaten power and basic services due to rising fuel costs, with Tuvalu declaring a 14-day state of emergency.

Shiva Gounden, Head of Pacific at Greenpeace Australia Pacific, who attended the meeting, said: “Never before has the need to end the fossil fuel chokehold been so abundantly clear, as our Pacific communities again suffer the consequences of a global economy hooked on coal, oil and gas.

“It’s always ordinary people who suffer the costs of war — whether innocent civilians killed by bombs, or our communities seeing food and power bills soar, while already bearing the brunt of a cost of living and climate crisis.

“This meeting comes at a critical moment, and was an opportunity for a renewed push for a Fossil Fuel Free Pacific. The government leaders and civil society present at the meeting continued to strongly affirm Pacific’s status as a global leader on climate action. Momentum is building ahead of Santa Marta, and as Australia prepares to preside over the next round of international climate negotiations at COP31 in Türkiye, in partnership with the Pacific. 

“Urgent action to transition away from fossil fuels is fundamental to limiting warming to 1.5°C — a survival line for Pacific communities, but also a path of liberation that frees us from expensive, extractive and polluting fossil fuel imports and uplifts our communities. The Pacific has played a vital role in getting to this point, shaping international agreements and holding the line on 1.5°C.

“The phase out of fossil fuels depends on determined international cooperation, particularly when it comes to unlocking the finance needed to support countries and communities with implementing solutions. It is vital the transition is grounded in Pacific knowledge and led by the local communities who live these realities every day.  

“The expansion of fossil fuels is incompatible with a 1.5C-aligned world — Greenpeace Australia Pacific will continue to campaign alongside Pacific nations to fast-track the transition to clean, affordable wind and solar energy, the only solution to the energy crisis we are currently all facing globally.”

-ENDS-

Media contact

Kate O’Callaghan on +61 406 231 892 or kate.ocallaghan@greenpeace.org

Pacific leaders summit highlights dangers of fossil fuel dependence and urgency of energy transition, finance

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Since Donald Trump moved into the White House for his second term as president in January 2025, you’d be forgiven for thinking the US has abandoned all action to tackle climate change and is working aggressively to undermine the efforts of other countries towards that end.

This week, at the Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington DC, US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cast doubt on the scientific consensus around global warming and pressured the two institutions to reverse what he called their “mission creep” and “myopic focus” on climate.

But this hostile rhetoric from the Trump administration and its withdrawal from the UN climate regime – coupled with its support for fossil fuels – doesn’t tell the whole story of what’s happening in the US, according to Lou Leonard, the first dean of the School of Climate, Environment, and Society at Clark University.

At the state, city and community level, as well as in business and higher education, efforts are resolutely continuing to reduce planet-heating emissions, boost clean energy and adapt to climate shocks, Leonard, an environmental lawyer, told Climate Home News in an interview from Massachusetts.

Thanks to impetus from coalitions such as America Is All In – whose predecessor group he helped launch – the US can still make significant progress towards its 2035 goals to cut emissions, research shows. Leonard, who worked as senior vice president for climate and energy at the World Wildlife Fund for over a decade, explains how US climate action and the Paris Agreement can survive Trump’s wrecking ball.

Q: Has the effect of the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine global climate action and the UN climate process been worse than you expected? 

A: A thing that is striking to me, looking at the decade of the Paris Agreement… is that over the course of that decade, the United States had a hostile sort of leadership in Washington, and the agreement has endured.

And it has endured despite the United States, not because of the United States – at least from a federal standpoint. The US was really important in the formation stage but has not been as vital to the endurance of the agreement.

Q: Is it not fair to say though that the current US abandonment of the UN climate process could reduce the impact and influence of the Paris Agreement?

A: The nature of an international cooperative framework means that the aggregate ambition is as strong as the countries that make up it, right? I’m not saying that, in the dream scenario where every country was in a really aggressively positive place that we would not get more out of the international framework. There’s no question that that’s true.

I think it’s just when we’re thinking about the singular role of one country – even the United States – there’s much more in play here than that theory of how things were going to work; the centrality of the United States to all this, especially at the Washington level. I think that turned out to be wrong – at least in the longest sweep of the progress that we’ve made.

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I think the reason why what’s happening in Washington didn’t have as great an impact as it might have in the rest of the world is because the story of what’s happening in the United States is not limited to what’s happening in Washington.

And that’s the second part – which is the things that sometimes frustrate people about the American political system – the sharing of power and the federal system, and all of those things which were intentionally built into the US system.

In these moments, that structure has helped create a reality… and then the rest of the world can see for itself that there’s all these efforts through America Is All In and in other places to bring those actors and that leadership and analysis of the impact of that effort to the rest of the world. I think that that has been an important part of the story of why the Paris Agreement has endured.

Q: What have some of the most important of those subnational efforts been in your view?

A: California’s the most obvious example, because it’s the world’s sixth largest economy and it’s certainly one of the most aggressive states moving forward on climate action. But it’s more than that: if you look at the America Is All In analysis that was released at COP30 in Belém, it shows a roadmap to maintain US trajectories, as a way to keep things from really collapsing when you have these changes in federal leadership.

There’s a parallel there to what’s happening globally – this is a distributed effort. We need all of society, all over the world, to be moving in this direction in order to reach our most ambitious goals.

And I think the fact that the US has over half of the economy, at least, really leaning in this direction really helps. And then if you just look at the energy transition in the US, we have begun to reach this tipping point where the role of the markets and the role of politics are shifting to some degree.

We really needed the policy incentives, and a lot of that [earlier] signal coming from Washington and then the states to get us to a point where renewable energy penetration was significant enough to begin to have momentum on its own, and I think we’re starting to see that. In just the last two years, over 90% of the new generation capacity in the United States has been renewables.

Q: Where do you see real momentum on US climate action continuing or gathering pace despite what Washington is up to?

A: What I really think is going to take us to another level than just relying on state governments… is the catalysing of more of a collaborative “all of society” approach here.

That’s what led me to higher education. I felt like there was an understanding and an alignment within higher education of the importance of these topics – and then the bench within higher education is filled with some of the top experts in the world on climate who were already leading as it related to climate science and talking about the problem. But if we could take that capacity and bring it into more direct relationship with businesses, municipalities and states, then that has the potential to unlock more of the impact of those actors together … that’s the reason I made the move.

The thing that drew me to [Clark] was you had a small university with really a national research capacity. And in Massachusetts, you have the only state in the country that has a chief climate officer that reports to the governor. You’ve got policy that’s been put in place related to green banks and zoning rules related to decarbonisation of buildings. And a state-based climate law that’s aligned with the Paris Agreement goals and has decarbonisation or net zero emissions by mid-century. You’ve got that policy piece in place, and then it’s how can you begin to catalyse some more of the collaboration that’s going be necessary to actually meet those goals? I think that’s really exciting.

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Another place where we’re seeing these ingredients come together is Pennsylvania. Just a month ago, the state of Pennsylvania created a new programme called Prepare PA, which is both about preparing for climate impacts and reaching goals related to the energy transition and the like. And they’re putting Penn State University at the centre of trying to help them implement a plan that involves businesses and municipalities. I think you’re seeing more and more of this kind of experimentation.

… This was always going to be an all-of-society effort, and the more we can see that, and the more we can make it real – how we all have roles to play at the local level, at the state level, in the private sector, in universities, in civil society, the more we have the opportunity to avoid this sense of powerlessness [about climate change] that can lead us to nihilism.

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Q&A: Look beyond Trump for the full story on US climate action, says university dean