Every time I go home to New Zealand, I notice the effects of climate change. I watch king tides wash over our roads and drive past brown farmland suffering from record-breaking droughts.

But as a Kiwi, I am one of the lucky ones. I live in the largest city of a high-income country in Oceania. New Zealand has already been impacted by climate change, but I have the privilege of mobility and a government that will be able to fund its own adaptation to many of the risks associated with climate change.

However, New Zealand and Australia are remarkably well-equipped compared to the rest of Oceania. Because of their limited size and available resources, Pacific Islands such as Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Niue and Kiribati have inadequate capacity and funds to deal with climate change. What is worse is that climate change’s impacts are expected to be much more severe in these countries. A recent Pentagon report predicts that sea level rise will render many Pacific islands uninhabitable by the middle of this century. This is happening rapidly, with six of the Solomon Islands deemed deemed uninhabitable as early as 2016.

This is terrifying. To me, it is even scarier than intense weather patterns or rising temperatures. For the rest of the Pacific Islands, rises in sea level as a result of climate change threaten the livelihood, culture and land that has supported numerous generations over hundreds of years.

However, this trauma also presents an opportunity to disrupt the entrenched power dynamics within Oceania that have shaped international relations within the region for generations. New Zealand and Australia need to weaken national barriers to support the nations at extreme risk in the Pacific Small Island Developing States, so as to shape our shared future in a much more collaborative manner. This entails more than sending aid. New Zealand and Australia must listen to and seriously consider documents such as the Nadi Bay Declaration on the Climate Change Crisis in the Pacific which summarise the region’s priorities and needs for rapid mitigation.

Aside from occasional aid packages and public relations visits, power dynamics within the Oceanian nations have generally consisted of cultural supremacy of the two richest countries and abuse of cheap labour provided by their poorer counterparts. These dynamics are reflected in the daily lives of Pasifika migrants to Australia and New Zealand. New Zealand, and “white New Zealand” in particular, has a long entrenched history of discrimination and exploitation of the Pasifika people. For example, in the 1970’s, the New Zealand government conducted the Dawn Raids, in a brutal crackdown on Pasifika immigrants that were thought to be overstaying their visas. Thousands of people were kicked out of New Zealand overnight, disrupting both family support networks and crucial sources of remittances for families back home. This was despite the fact that many of them were New Zealand residents, and overstayers from other nations were left untouched. Nowadays, those who migrate to New Zealand for better access to jobs and education are likely to face racism, discrimination, mental health issues and limited access to healthcare. This kind of culture is not going to be able to effectively support and empower thousands of climate refugees in the coming decades.

To combat these power dynamics, we need to recognise our shared identity as a region, and facilitate locally driven Pacific initiatives to develop adaptation programs and infrastructure. Some New Zealanders even advocate for the formation of a Pacific Union, similar to the European Union in allowing easy mobility and trade, and, by extension, the rapid diffusion of climate adaptation technologies. The Cook Islands and Tokelau are already territory of New Zealand. Perhaps weakening our national boundaries and listening to local solutions can allow for these power dynamics to even out.

These dynamics within Oceania make a good analogy for the world as a whole as it deals with climate change. It is extremely unfair that the richer countries, whose actions led to climate change, will leave the poorer to adapt to its consequences. For example, the European Investment Bank has invested 16 billion Euros into climate change adaptation for the EU. On the other hand, densely populated Bangladesh, one of the most vulnerable countries to climate change, is facing significant threats of coastal inundation and unpredictable weather events. Bangladesh will have to spend an estimated 5.7 billion U.S. dollars annually on adaptation in the next 30 years, devoting over ten percent of its annual budget. The challenge of “Loss and Damage”, and climate justice has been explored in depth in a previous Gazelle article. High-income governments around the world, similar to Australia and New Zealand, do not fully recognise the injustice and severity of the issue at hand. However, they need to actively pay reparations to threatened nations for climate change’s many injustices. This involves listening to the needs of threatened nations, providing ample funding and rapidly reducing their own emissions.