Loss and Damage: SPREP engage with regional journalists 

Climate change is the highest priority of the region. It is no secret that one of the biggest frustrations of Pacific leaders about climate change is the excessive bureaucracy and having to navigate the many processes to achieve a few small wins after decades of talking and attending meetings.

Meanwhile,  the people they lead want to know why their elected leaders and government officials are always traveling to climate change meetings yet there is very little outcome to show.

The regional agency, Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme ( SPREP) based in Apia, felt the need to amplify the Pacific stories about loss and damage and to help inform the public of what is happening in this space. With funding support from the New Zealand government, SPREP made the bold move to engage directly with journalists from the Pacific islands, bringing them to Apia to a training workshop to build understanding about Loss and Damage.

This week, twenty reporters from around the region will be able to help answer these questions. In his opening address to the journalists on Monday morning, the Director General of SPREP Mr Sefanaia Nawadra said that he too, has heard many times the questions about why leaders are always traveling to these meetings. One way to help address this is to bring journalists together and through this training build a better understanding of Loss and Damage and climate change in order to develop ‘better knowledge brokers for our region’. “We recognise the key role that you play in keeping our people informed.”

Nawadra said that those who work in this space understand the need for  government leaders and politicians to travel to the climate change meetings but the constituents or the voting public often don’t understand these reasons. Politicians often face criticism “why are they spending three weeks away when they should be doing important work in their own countries. 

“What our people need to understand is that sometimes the most important work needs to be done away from our region and I guess there’s no  one better to inform them (the public) than our own media and people who work in communications” said Sefanaia Nawadra.

It has taken thirty years since Vanuatu in the early 1990s first raised the issue of loss and damage, to finally achieve recognition in 2022 at the Conference of Parties (COP 27) and the subsequent creation of the Loss and Damage Fund which now stands at USD$731 million.

Nawadra said SPREP is dedicated to enabling the media to ‘get our media people fully informed, fully enabled and sometimes even going beyond getting the news out by getting involved in the negotiations itself by joining the delegations to COP and different global meetings’. 

While journalists may not be experts in climate change but as Pacific islanders living in one of the most vulnerable regions of the world, facing the harshest impacts of climate change, those lived experiences are not insignificant.

Journalists from Fiji, FSM, Niue, Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, Cook Islands, Tuvalu, Tonga and Samoa are joined by journalist students from the National University of Samoa at this first ever training for the media about Loss and Damage.