The Fundraising

Via Save the Children, our journey will fundraise for projects in the South Pacific focused on climate resilience and adaptation. Our neighbours in this region are very much at the frontline of climate change - from increased storm activity and encroachment due to rising sea levels. As neighbours we have a strong responsibility to support them, both by reducing our own emissions and assisting them in combating the challenges ahead.

The initial fundraising via Alpine Odyssey Aotearoa will support the production of books for primary school children talking about the issues around climate change, its causes and its local impacts.

Of course the mountains we will travel through in New Zealand are changing rapidly too, due to a warming planet, with glaciers on the retreat and a reducing snowpack. Connections abound too, beyond just as neighbours. The Māori, the original settlers of Aotearoa/New Zealand originated from the South Pacific, from such places as Tonga, Samoa, and Tahiti.

A Pacific Island Visit

In late 2024 I visited Vanuatu and Fiji to look at some climate resilience projects, to support students from Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change and to understand some of the threats these nations are facing. It was an all too brief but instructive visit.

CASE STUDY 1 – Act Local - Food security in Vanuatu

In Vanuatu I visited the island of Nguna, to see how Fareavau village has developed its own food drying and secure storage facility. In early 2023 Vanuatu was hit by not one but two severe cyclones in the space of 48 hours, Cyclones Judy and Kevin. Much of the country was impacted, islands cut off and communications down. Even in a relatively accessible island like Nguna, it took some 6 weeks to receive food aid.

With the assistance of Save the Children, the villagers began experimenting with solar food dryers and growing extra crops in a community plot. Now, stored in a cyclone proof, concrete room, they have enough dried food for up to 2 months, local foodstuffs that they enjoy and eat.

CASE STUDY 2 – Think Global – Human Rights & Climate Change at the International Court of Justice (ICJ)

In 2019 a group of 27 law students from the University Of The South Pacific sat in a classroom in Vanuatu. Having seen climate change materially impact their villages, their countries, they pondered what they might do to secure their future.

Fast forward to December 2024 and, at the world’s highest court, the ICJ in The Hague, Netherlands, oral hearings began from over 100 countries, asking the court to issue an advisory opinion on individual country’s responsibilities for the human rights impacts of climate change.

All this brought about by Pacific Island Students Fighting Climate Change, some of whom I met to discuss the case and the journey. We await the court’s determination in 2025.