Overview:
The Pacific is warning that the 1.5°C climate target is not simply a global policy benchmark — it is a matter of survival. At a New York Climate Week event, Marshall Islands Climate Envoy Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner and climate scientists highlighted the rising seas, disappearing islets and other irreversible impacts already affecting Pacific communities.
NEW YORK, 28 SEPTEMBER 2026 (SPREP)—For many countries, climate targets are policy goals. For Pacific Island nations, they are a matter of survival.
That message echoed throughout the ‘Defending 1.5°C in an Age of Instability: Science, Strategy and Global Solutions,’ event hosted by Climate Analytics during New York Climate Week. Scientists, policymakers and climate advocates discussed the future of the most critical goal of the Paris Agreement.
Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) Climate Envoy and panelist at the event, brought the focus from global climate projections to the daily reality experienced across Pacific communities.
“There are some changes that are going to be baked in and that we can’t go back from,” she said, describing the loss and damage that rising seas are already inflicting on her country.
Some islets in the Marshall Islands have already become uninhabitable because of sea level rise. Across the nation’s 29 atolls, teams are documenting the growing impacts of climate change, from disappearing islands and inundated graveyards to ball fields now underwater.
“They are witnessing and seeing, as many islets across all of our 29 atolls are disappearing,” she said. Schools are also increasingly under threat. Assessment teams have been surveying facilities across remote atolls to determine which schools are already being affected by rising seas and which may have to relocate inland.
“So for us, every degree, every fraction of a degree matters,” Jetnil-Kijiner told participants.
Her remarks highlighted the reality Pacific leaders have warned about – climate change is no longer a future threat. It is already disrupting lives and livelihoods across the world’s most vulnerable nations.
That urgency was reinforced by Dr Bill Hare, Climate Analytics CEO and Senior Scientist. He warned that the consequences of overshooting 1.5°C will not simply disappear even if temperatures are brought down. “We are going to suffer irreversible damages, from sea level rise, ocean acidification, ice melting and coral reef loss,” he said.
For Pacific Island countries, those impacts are real – threatening food security, freshwater supplies, coastal loss and entire communities that depend on healthy oceans.
Rueanna Haynes, Climate Analytics Head of Diplomacy, reflected on the struggle by Small Island Developing States to keep 1.5°C alive in international climate negotiations. She shared the pain many felt at the thought of an overshoot. “I cried because I felt we had failed. Coming out of this reflection, I’ve realised that it is too early to say that we have failed.”
For Haynes, the seriousness of 1.5°C has not changed. “1.5°C has always been about protecting people, saving lives, preserving critical ecosystems that sustain life on our planet.”
It is “a defiant rallying point of hope” and “the only scientific, legal, morally defensible temperature limit worth discussing at the multilateral level today.”
As countries prepare their next round of climate commitments, Pacific leaders continue to remind the world what is at stake. For nations like the Marshall Islands, the debate over 1.5°C is not about numbers or negotiating positions. It is about whether future generations will inherit thriving island communities or witness their slow disappearance from rising seas.
Jetnil-Kijiner made clear that every fraction of a degree matters. And Haynes reminded participants that “1.5°C is more than a temperature. It remains a line in the sand for humanity itself.”….PACNEWS