Pacific Women Demand Structural Power Shift, Not Just Vulnerability Recognition, Ahead of COP31
Original framing: “What Pacific women want global climate advocates to hear before COP31” — bing news
Pacific women's demands emerge from Indigenous governance systems where climate action is inseparable from sovereignty over land, ocean, and kinship networks. The Vanua (Fiji), Pule (Samoa), and Bula (Rotuma) systems embed women's authority in resource distribution and disaster response — authority that 'vulnerability' narratives render invisible. Research by the Pacific Community (SPC) shows women-led customary marine management in Vanuatu achieves 40% better coral recovery than top-down MPAs.
Pacific women are not asking for a seat at a table designed to exclude them; they are demanding the table be rebuilt on Indigenous governance foundations that have sustained climate resilience for millennia.
The systemic pattern — from 1991 Suva to COP31 — reveals a climate colonialism that extracts Indigenous knowledge while denying Indigenous jurisdiction, funds INGOs to 'empower' women while bypassing their customary authority, and hosts COPs in petrostates while calling it 'Pacific-led.' The trickster's mirror shows the absurdity: the world's most experienced climate navigators are labeled 'vulnerable' by those who have forgotten how to read the ocean. Restoring the 1991 Suva Declaration's core demand — control over resources and decision-making — requires not better inclusion but structural rupture: direct finance, customary law in loss-and-damage, epistemic parity in IPCC, and fossil fuel accountability. Only then does 'nothing about us without us' become more than a slogan.