Catching the last wave

Our guest for this episode of Catching the last wave is Paulo Baleinakorodawa, a peace practitioner and educator who has worked in peacebuilding for more than 20 years in Fiji, the Pacific region, and internationally.

He is currently Transcend Oceania Programs Director, and his role includes program designs, implementation and monitoring, evaluation and learning for the organization. Paulo champions work in peacebuilding education and training, masculinity and non-violence, climate change, conflict and peacebuilding, trauma awareness and healing and he is also a mediator and facilitator in situations of social conflicts and injustices. He is a co-founder of Transcend Oceania, a non-Government peacebuilding and human development organization working in Fiji and the Pacific.

Transcend Oceania, in partnership with other peacebuilding stakeholders, is currently working in communities in Fiji affected by the impact of climate change focusing particularly on the social impacts of climate change.

In this episode, we will hear from Paulo about the social dimensions, mediation, and conflict resolution related to climate change.

Our guest for this episode of Catching the last wave is Sharon Bhagwan-Rolls, a well-renown Pacific Island feminist working on the nexus between peace, development, and climate change.

Sharon is the Pacific Regional Representative of Shifting the Power Coalition, an alliance of 14 diverse Pacific women-led organizations which works to create feminist solutions for climate justice. She also acts as the Regional Representative of GPPAC(Global Partnership for the Prevention of Armed Conflict).

Sharon has more than 30 years of experience in women's movements, as well as supporting and contributing to the progress of the feminist peace and security agenda. Among other things, she led the development of a feminist media network through innovative actions which allowed for women’s participation and leadership in all levels of decision-making.

In this episode, we will hear from Sharon about the gender equality perspective on climate change and security, with a focus on the inclusion and empowerment of women and girls in climate actions.

Our guest for this episode of Catching the last wave is Sainimili Tawake, who works as inclusive development advisor for the Pacific Disability Forum.

The Pacific Disability Forum is a constituency of 71 organizations of and for persons with disabilities spread across 22 Pacific Island countries and territories. The organization has the main objective of advocating for the recognition of human rights of all persons with disabilities, as well as for the needs and interests of Pacific persons with disabilities with respect to political, social, economic, and cultural development.

Our guest Sainimili Tawake, who also works as the climate change focal point, has more than twenty years of experience in the areas of social inclusion and disability-inclusive development.

In this episode, we will hear about the perspective of persons with disabilities on climate change and security, and what can be done to include persons with disabilities in the climate security discourse.

Our guest for this episode of Catching the last wave is Mia Kami, Tongan singer, and songwriter currently teaching at the Tupou College Toloa in Tonga.

Mia is passionate about gender equality, indigenous sovereignty, climate change, and the Pacific region. She attended the University of the South Pacific (USP), where she majored in Law and Politics.

Mia channels her passion into songwriting and uses her music to tell stories as a young Pacific woman. She believes that art is the strongest form of storytelling that connects Pacific and indigenous people to their ancestors and descendants

In this episode, we will hear about climate security from her perspective as a young Pacific islander committed to advocating for climate justice. In particular, we will learn more about how art, especially songwriting and storytelling, can help raise awareness of climate change and climate security.

Check out her latest songs here.

In this episode, we'll have the chance to hear from a guest who needs no introduction: Mr. Anote Tong, a world-renowned leader in the battle against climate change.

Mr. Tong served as President of Kiribati from 2003 to 2016. Since leaving office, he has continued to speak about the realities of climate change, including the urgency of the issues, the complexity of the causes, as well as possible solutions.

For over 20 years, Mr. Tong has been at the forefront of raising global awareness about catastrophic risks caused by climate change, especially drawing attention to the human dimension by highlighting the existential threat faced by his people and those of other vulnerable countries on the frontline of climate change. He is responsible for a number of initiatives to combat climate change and protect the environment, such as calling for a global moratorium on using coal in 2015, as well as overseeing the creation of the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, one of the world's largest marine conservation areas that has also been recorded on the UNESCO World Heritage List. As part of his global advocacy on climate change, Tong has met with various world leaders to discuss the plight of small island states, including Pope Francis and former US President Barack Obama.

Mr. Tong has been awarded a number of environmental prizes for his work, including the 2015 Sunhak Peace Prize, the Leadership Award from the Hillary Institute of International Leadership, and the Peter Benchley Ocean Award in 2012.

He is now a member of the Pacific Elders' Voice, an independent group of prominent leaders dedicated to serving the Pacific's current and future challenges and opportunities.

In this episode, Mr. Tong enlightens us on the unique security challenges related to climate change in the Pacific, including loss and damage and climate-induced migration.

Distinguished Professor Steven Ratuva, award-winning political sociologist and global interdisciplinary scholar, is Director of the Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies at the University of Canterbury.

He was elected into the NZ Royal Society-Te Apārangi in 2020 for research distinction and awarded the 2020 Metge Medal, the country’s highest award in social science research excellence. Co-winner of the 2019 University of Canterbury research medal, the university’s highest academic honor, Prof. Ratuva the world’s first Pacific Islander to be promoted to Distinguished Professor, the highest rank in academia.

He has transdisciplinary across sociology, anthropology, political science, development studies, economics, philosophy and history and has published widely on a range of issues including Pacific societies and culture, indigenous knowledge, development, conflict, peace, political change, ethnicity, security, COVID-19, and climate security.

In this episode, we will explore Prof. Ratuva's perspective on climate security and its implications for the Pacific region, including how the climate crisis is creating and fueling conflicts and which actions can be undertaken to address it at the local level.

Dr. Volker Boege is Toda Peace Institute’s Senior Research Fellow for Climate Change and Conflict. He has worked extensively in the areas of peacebuilding and resilience in the Pacific region and he is also a Director of the Peace and Conflict Studies Institute in Australia.  

Dr Boege is also an Honorary Research Fellow at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland and a Research Associate at the Bonn International Center for Conversion. 

In the past, he has been, among other things, a research fellow at the Unit for the Study of Wars, Armaments and Development of the University of Hamburg, and a Research Officer with the parliamentary group of the Green Party in the German Parliament (Bundestag) as a peace and security policy advisor in the 1980s.

In this episode, the expertise and knowledge of Dr. Boege enlightened us on climate security, peacebuilding, resilience and climate action in the Pacific. 

In this episode of Catching the last wave, we are honored to hear from Caleb Pollard and Belyndar Rikimani, respectively the President and Vice President of the youth-led organization Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change (PISFCC). 

PISFCC began in March 2019 when students from 8 Pacific Island countries decided to begin a campaign to persuade the leaders of the Pacific Island Forum to take the issue of climate change and human rights to the International Court of Justice. They now have members in every Pacific island country from all levels of education. Their core campaign remains convincing the governments of the world to seek an Advisory Opinion from the International Court of Justice answering a question that will develop new international law integrating legal obligations around environmental treaties and basic human rights.

PISFCC is also committed to educating and encouraging all Pacific island youth to become aware and take action to help prevent and fight against climate change.

Together with Caleb and Belyndar, we will explore the Pacific youth perspective on climate change and security, and learn more about the commitments of young people who are dedicating their life to climate activism. 

Ken Kassem is the acting interim Regional Programme Coordinator for IUCN Oceania. Ken is a half Egyptian and half American passionate conservationist who has worked for IUCN for 3 years as Strategic Partnerships Officer. His background is in marine sciences and geography with an emphasis on natural resources management, economics and policy. His experience includes working for environmental NGOs in the USA, Malaysia, Indonesia and Fiji. He is an avid SCUBA diver, bird watcher, and author numerous popular articles on marine conservation.

Together with Ken, we will explore how nature-based solutions and traditional knowledge can help addressing climate change and increasing resiliencein the Pacific.  We will also analyze how they can be integrated and implemented by development partners working on climate and security.

Janani Vivekananda is Head of Programme Climate Diplomacy and Security at Adelphi, where she specializes in climate change and peacebuilding. As a peacebuilding practitioner with a background in peace and disaster risk reduction field research and operations, the aim of her work is to connect ground realities with policy processes and vice versa to promote the linked goals of peace and climate action. Her work to date involves designing and conducting participatory and inclusive research on climate-related security risks and responses, promoting risk-informed responses, and increasing the capacity of governments and civil society to integrate climate and conflict risk into policies and field projects. Janani holds master’s degrees from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and from the University of Oxford.

Together with Janani, we will explore Adelphi's work on climate change and security risks, with a particular focus on the Pacific and their initiative Weathering Risk. We will also analyze how climate security differs in different contexts around the world.