Pacific Islands Nature Nonprofits

The Pacific is mostly water, and the islands scattered across it are small, remote, and profoundly consequential. The nations here have jurisdiction over enormous areas of ocean and very little land, which makes them, in effect, ocean countries. Palau, Fiji, French Polynesia, and their neighbours steward reefs and open water that constitute a substantial share of the marine world.

They have also become the moral centre of the climate argument, because they are where sea level rise stops being an abstraction. Atoll nations measured in metres above the water are facing not damage but disappearance, and their negotiators have been the sharpest and most uncomfortable voices in international climate talks for thirty years. Meanwhile the reefs that protect their coasts are bleaching.

The organizations here run some of the boldest marine protection on Earth, Palau closed most of its waters to commercial fishing outright, revive traditional systems of resource management that governed these reefs for centuries, and speak for people who did least to cause the problem and will pay first.