Climate Change

That's why activists, backed by some big names such as actor, bodybuilder and former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, are taking a gentle approach at this year's United Nations climate summit in Paris to tackling the world's greenhouse gas-intensive love affair with meat, ranging from offering lookalike plant burgers to suggesting a gradual weaning off animal protein.

The representatives met ahead of the second week of United Nations climate change negotiations

“Last week, the international community moved another step closer to adopting an effective and durable climate change agreement, but, make no mistake, our work is far from complete. “We are acutely aware the survival of our members is hanging in the balance in Paris and that a bad deal may be worse than no deal at all.”

To ensure success, we must accelerate the pace and ensure the final agreement maintains meaningful outcomes on all of the pillars from the Durban mandate:

Tuvalu Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga called for the small island developing states to band together and fight off “serious attempts” to drive a wedge between them.

The call highlights the tensions emerging between even the most tight-knit collections of countries in Paris after days of lengthy and slow negotiations.

The Prime Minister is upset he wasn't invited to a meeting between some Pacific Island nations, including Kiribati, and United States President Barack Obama last week.

The commissioner, Dame Meg Taylor, who also heads the secretariat of the Pacific Islands Forum, says the world leaders meeting on climate change in Paris must set ambitious targets and limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees celsius.

She says the ocean, climate and weather are all linked with the impacts of climate change on the Pacific already being felt by many.

Prime Minister of Tuvalu Enele Sopoaga said the negotiations are painfully 'slow,' as he went onto accuse the bigger countries of employing delaying tactics.

This has been clarified by officials of an advisory group on climate change and human mobility.

The postgraduate students are part of a team of 10 from the USP, which includes both a legal and a science expert.

Each of the eight students have been accredited to six different Pacific island country delegations and are providing support on issues that are important to the Pacific such as climate finance, loss and damage as well as the Enhanced Durban Platform for Action.

Over 150 leaders from across the globe met in Paris, France to demonstrate their support to save the Planet through a new climate change agreement. The form of this is to be finalised by the end of the two weeks of negotiations. The Cook Islands are uniting with the Alliance of Small Island States and are calling for a legally binding agreement that limits global warming to below 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The survey was also conducted in Kiribati and Tuvalu where seventy per cent of households said they would migrate as well.

It’s the first and largest survey of its kind to be done in the Pacific by the United Nations University, and the results were released at the margins of the UN’s 21st Conference of the Parties currently underway in Paris.

A total of 6,852 individuals in the three islands participated in the study, who represented 852 households in Kiribati, Nauru and Tuvalu.

President Anote Tong is among leaders of some of the world's most vulnerable islands calling for big polluting nations to stand up at the United Nations summit and ensure their survival.

As the richest country in the region, Australia faces Pacific calls to push for a strong deal that limits global warming to 1.5 degrees.

But so far, Tong hasn't seen evidence of that from the Australians.

“They've not been doing any batting at the moment for us,” he told AAP in Paris on Tuesday.