Report on South West Pacific climate prompts plea to public, governments

RNZ News

2 days ago

South West Pacific region includes New Zealand.
Photo:
AFP PHOTO/Torsten BLACKWOOD
A new report into the climate of the South West Pacific - including New Zealand - shows "shocking" changes, World Meteorological Organisation's director for the region says.
Last year was the hottest year on record for the South West Pacific region.
Average temperatures in the region were about half a degree Celsius above even the comparatively recent 1991-2020 average, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said.
The WMO earlier said that 2024 was the hottest for the planet as a whole across all of its different datasets.
Dunedin's floods in October received a mention among the year's extreme weather.
WMO's director for the region Ben Churchill said the organisation's 2024 report into the
state of the climate in the South-West Pacific
showed "alarming" changes.
He said the reports "unprecedented" findings were shocking and should be used to pressure governments to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
"We keep talking about things that we've never seen before, and this [report] just continues that trend," Churchill said.
"Really what we want to see is that this report is spread far and wide by this community, by the media, but picked up by decision makers and policy makers and understood by sectors that are particularly vulnerable to climate, but even just the general community, so they understand what is at stake what is happening in their part of the world at a regional level....and perhaps they could use it to encourage their governments to take stronger climate action.
"Lives are being lost and still the economic impact continues to go up."
Both ends of New Zealand were singled out for their unusual rainfall patterns - the north being unusually dry and the south unusually wet.
The report said the Philippines was hammered by an unprecedented 12 storms during the September-November tropical cyclone season - more than double the average.
In the space of less than four weeks, five tropical cyclones made landfall in the Philippines, killing 150 people.
Nearly 40 million km2 of ocean was affected by marine heatwaves - more than 10 percent of the global ocean surface area, or almost the size of the Asian continent, the report said.
WMO earlier said every one of the years from 2015 to 2024 were one of the 10 warmest on record globally.
A slip in Dunedin on 7 October after massive downpours caused floods, landslides and road closures.
Photo:
RNZ / Charlotte Cook
Dunedin's floods in October were on the list of extreme events, along with heatwaves in Australia and Malaysia and other events. During the storms, Dunedin residents said the flooding was like
nothing they'd seen
.
The Philippines was hammered by storms.
"In the space of less than four weeks there were five tropical cyclones that made landfall in the Philippines and a sixth that didn't quite make landfall but still was close enough to have significant impacts on land, and that's a sequence that hasn't been seen before in that region," one of the report's lead authors, Australian climate scientist Blair Trewin said.
"There were 150 deaths in total in the Philippines from this sequence of cyclones and very extensive economic losses to agriculture and elsewhere."
Trewin said while said 150 deaths were tragic and shocking, early warnings had saved more lives from being lost and he urged countries to get behind implementing early warning systems.
WMO lead author Thea Turkington said 2024's record year for heating in the South West Pacific region was reflected across every indicator the WMO measures - including ice, rainfall, oceans, overall temperatures and extreme events.
Malaysia, Indonesia, the northern Philippines, northern Australia, eastern Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands were also extra wet, while the southern coast of Australia, the Cook Islands, the Marshall Islands and Hawaii were extra dry.
"For every one degree of warming in the atmosphere the atmosphere can hold an extra 7 percent of moisture, so we are seeing these extreme situations both in terms of rainfall but also on the other end of the scale we are seeing extreme drought," Churchill said.
"The global warming is actually changing the water cycle quite significantly so every fraction of a degree has an impact and it really highlights the importance of more ambitious climate action."
Churchill added that when storms were hitting the Philippines with such frequency "no one can really prepare for that," despite what he called "commendable" use of early warning systems.
He said it would be harder for the Pacific Islands to recover economically from the impacts of climate change, because of their vulnerability.
The report also provided an update on one of the world's last remaining
tropical glaciers
in West Papua, which Turkington said could be gone as soon as 2026.
"In Indonesia, glacier ice loss continued rapidly in 2024, with the total ice area in the western part of New Guinea declining by 30-50 percent since 2022," the report said.
Atmospheric concentrations of the three major greenhouse gases reached new record observed highs in 2023, the latest year for which global figures are available.
Sea level rise and ocean warming had accelerated in the region, the report said.
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