For Pacific nations, climate change is now far from a political debate, we are already experiencing changing coastlines, oceans, weather patterns, food systems and the future of communities across the region. And as the Pacific heads into another potentially extreme El Niño, the warning signs are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
The World Meteorological Organisation has reported that sea-level rise across the South-West Pacific is occurring faster than the global average, while ocean temperatures in the region have increased at roughly three times the global average rate since 1980. Marine heatwaves have also become more frequent, more intense and longer-lasting.
Now, as the climate crisis accelerates, ACT is proposing to take New Zealand’s climate policy in the opposite direction. The party’s latest climate policy, released in September, proposes scrapping New Zealand’s current net-zero approach and repealing the Zero Carbon Act. ACT also wants to renegotiate New Zealand’s commitments under the Paris Agreement and says the country should be prepared to leave the agreement if a different arrangement cannot be reached.
The Pacific is warming and El Niño isn’t helping
El Niño a naturally occurring climate pattern in which unusually warm surface waters develop across the central and eastern tropical Pacific, altering weather patterns around the world.
The current 2026 El Niño is already being described as exceptionally strong. The WMO has warned that it could become one of the strongest events ever recorded and has given a near-100 per cent probability that it will continue through February 2027. Recent research published in Science has also found evidence that human-caused warming is intensifying El Niño events. Researchers reconstructed historical El Niño activity using coral records and found that the variability of these events has increased since industrialisation.
El Niño can contribute to drought, extreme rainfall, tropical cyclones, marine heatwaves and disruption to fisheries and agriculture. When those natural climate fluctuations occur against a backdrop of already-warmer oceans and rising seas, the consequences can become considerably more severe.
August 2026 was the joint-hottest August on record globally, with the average global surface temperature reaching 1.65°C above the pre-industrial level for that month, according to the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The 1.5°C threshold is a long-term climate target rather than a limit that is technically “broken” by a single month. But the numbers are still significant. They demonstrate just how far the planet’s temperature has shifted from the climate in which modern societies developed.
Meanwhile, ACT wants a different climate deal
ACT’s argument is not that climate change does not exist. Its new policy explicitly describes itself as “science-based” and says New Zealand should reduce emissions. The disagreement is over how quickly, how much and at what economic cost. ACT proposes replacing the current approach with a policy it says will reduce emissions at lower cost, while protecting jobs, reducing household costs and keeping productive land in production. It wants to permanently keep agriculture outside the Emissions Trading Scheme and introduce a “split-gas” approach that treats carbon dioxide and biogenic methane differently.
ACT argues that methane should be managed according to whether it contributes additional warming rather than treated in the same way as long-lived carbon dioxide.
It also argues that New Zealand’s agricultural sector is unusually emissions-efficient compared with international producers, and that reducing domestic production could simply shift food production overseas to countries with higher emissions. Those are legitimate policy arguments that deserve scrutiny.
New Zealand produces a small proportion of global emissions – ACT puts the figure at 0.17 per cent – but that does not mean emissions reductions are meaningless. If every country with a small share of global emissions decided its contribution was too insignificant to justify ambitious action, global emissions would not fall.
The uncomfortable Pacific reality
The WMO has described the Pacific’s situation as a “triple whammy” of accelerating sea-level rise, ocean warming and ocean acidification. Rising seas threaten coastal communities and infrastructure, while warmer and more acidic oceans damage ecosystems that Pacific communities rely on for food and income. This creates an awkward contradiction for New Zealand.
Aotearoa positions itself in this region and has deep political, cultural, and economic relationships throughout. Yet ACT’s climate policy would move New Zealand towards weaker domestic climate obligations while Pacific neighbours are dealing with the consequences of a warming world they did little to create.
The cost of doing nothing is still a cost
Climate change itself carries enormous economic costs through damaged infrastructure, agricultural losses, disrupted supply chains, extreme weather, insurance costs, and pressure on public finances. The choice is therefore not between spending money on climate action and spending nothing.
It is increasingly a choice between paying to reduce and adapt to climate change now, or paying for increasingly severe consequences later. ACT’s criticism of existing climate policy is that New Zealand should not impose costs on households and industries for negligible global benefit. But the Pacific provides a reason to question whether “negligible” is the right way to understand New Zealand’s responsibility.
A country does not have to be the biggest emitter to have a responsibility to act.
The Pacific is already living with the consequences of a warming planet. Oceans are heating. Sea levels are rising. Marine ecosystems are under pressure. Extreme weather is becoming a more serious threat.
And now El Niño is adding another layer of uncertainty to an already-warming Pacific.
None of this means every climate policy is automatically good, or that ACT’s concerns about economic impacts should be ignored. Governments still have to consider affordability, agriculture, energy security and the competitiveness of New Zealand industries.
The atmosphere is not waiting for a better policy framework. The Pacific is not waiting for another election cycle. And rising seas are certainly not waiting for politicians to agree.
