Kavita Naidu: You cannot destroy the Global South for the Global North’s renewable transition

Kavita Naidu is an international human rights lawyer and feminist climate activist from Fiji. She delivered this speech at the No Cop-Outs at COP31: Climate Action Now rally at Sydney Town Hall on Gadigal Country, on October 24.

For the Pacific, going above 1.5 degrees is a death sentence we will not be quiet about. 

The 1.5 degree threshold is not only anchored in the International Court of Justice (ICJ), it was also what the Pacific pushed for in the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

For the first time we have a very powerful legal floor, and you can see in Australia there are legal cases which will establish what these advisory opinions mean in practice. 

Pacific community service organisations met in Tuvalu ahead of Pre-COP in Fiji to issue the Funafuti Call for Climate Justice, which speaks for Pacific peoples. The rallying cry was “Lose Tuvalu, Lose our World”.  

The Pacific is calling for an immediate phase out of coal, oil and gas and an end to new exploration, licensing, expansion and subsidies, with developed states phasing out first and fastest. 

We are rejecting all false solutions, including carbon capture and storage, nuclear energy, offsetting, geoengineering and “managed transition pathways” as substitutes for cutting production.

We reject deep-sea mining, we reject a “just transition” based on green and blue colonialism, opening frontiers of dispossession of land and oceans to sate the need for developed states to transition. 

A transition for who? And a transition for what? We are not questioning the consumption of energy as a problem, we are simply looking at the source of energy and we need to beyond this. 

You cannot destroy and extract from the Global South to suit the transition needs of the Global North, that is not just and equitable. 

We do not understand, because so much of it is greenwashed, but the rush for critical rare earth minerals is not just for solar panels, it is tied to the militarisation of this region. It is tied to missiles and drones.

You just need to see the billions the Australian government is putting into militarisation, because they want to go for our land and oceans and they need a military to protect those resources.

The Funafati Call rejects a securitised, militarised and nuclearised Pacific. It names AUKUS, the Papua New Guinea–Australia Mutual Defence Treaty (Pukpuk Treaty) and the Vuvale Union as attempts to seize control of our economic resources and make us beholden to what the Australian government demands of us.

We condemn all missile testing in our waters and we condemn any future weapons testing in our waters. 

We assert our right to remain on our islands with dignity. We reject mobility deals traded against the sovereignty and security of our people. 

The Pacific is a region that is still occupied. Struggles for self-determination continue in West Papua, Guam, Kanaky and Tahiti.

We cannot talk about climate justice without recognising self-determination of the indigenous people who continue to be on the frontlines of the worst climate impacts in this region. 

This is why we must call out our Pacific leaders for endorsing Zionism by supporting Israel at the United Nations, opening Israeli embassies in the region and signing “development cooperation” deals. 

We reject endorsing a genocidal state and commit to tackling the scourge of Zionist fundamentalism on our islands. 

The other thing about the Pacific that people don’t understand is that we have among the highest rates of violence against women in the world. We recognise that we must incorporate gender justice into our climate justice campaigns. 

That includes recognising and redistributing unpaid care, social protection guarantees and attention to gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health rights.

The Pacific has also been very progressive in recognising how artificial intelligence and data centres are coming for us. We already have data centres being built, subsea cables and other digital infrastructure in the region, but their energy, water and emissions footprints are not being disclosed. 

The Pacific asserts data sovereignty and the protection of indigenous knowledge from AI. We also question the duality of purpose of AI and its use for military surveillance and intelligence. 

We will not be complicit in killing people in other parts of the world by providing the infrastructure in our region.  

According to the ICJ ruling, a state that fails to protect the climate may be committing an internationally wrongful act. A state in breach must stop, guarantee it will not repeat the conduct, and make full reparation. 

We charge Australia with breaking not just its word, but its law and its neighbours’ trust. It tells the Pacific it is “family”, but hypocritically keeps on approving new fossil fuel projects that drown our home. 

Australia’s climate policy is a fossil fuel export policy with a climate strategy stapled to the front. It offers climate solutions with one hand, while driving the crisis with the other. 

Australia has spent $62.6 billion on military this year, and has promised to lift military spending to 3% of gross domestic product by 2033. AUKUS will cost more than $400 billion over 30 years.

And the war machine is burning the planet. The Department of Defence produces the majority of public sector emissions, but has refused to publish detailed emissions data since 2012. That reporting never includes the emissions generated through military supply chains. 

This is not an oversight. Governments go on about net zero but don’t count their military emissions. 

The Australian government  keeps paying polluters rather than giving climate reparations it owes to the Pacific and others for the harm that it has caused. It spent $16.3 billion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2025–26, while claiming there is no money for care, for disability, for loss and damage. 

In October last year, Australia and the United States signed a critical minerals framework to secure supply chains for defence and advanced technology. It backed in $8.5 billion worth of projects including a gallium refinery in WA. 

We charge the Australia government, public pension funds and extractive industries with committing violence across the Global South. 

Research by an international consortium of investigative journalists identified more than 150 publicly-traded Australian mining companies holding roughly 1500 licenses across 33 African nations. 

These firms have been implicated in hundreds of worker and community deaths, environment pollution, displacement and labour abuses. 

OK Tedi poisoned a river system in Papua New Guinea; BHP was behind the Mariana Dam collapse in Brazil; the Panguina mine, owned by Rio Tinto, left Bougainville with a toxic legacy and the company spent five decades refusing to own it; Rio Tinto mines have poisoned drinking water in Anosy region, one of Madagascar’s poorest; 70 people were massacred at Kilwa in the Democratic Republic of Congo by a Perth-based company called Anvil, which used its employees to transport soldiers, with no accountability in Australia; and the list continues. 

Australian companies get away with behaviour offshore that they would never get away with here. They do it to my home and across the Global South. The harm always falls on Indigenous peoples, on women carrying the work of survival and recovery and on island nations.

This is a deliberate design of a settler-colony obsessed with protecting capitalism.

The Pacific named climate change the single greatest threat to their security. Canberra heard them and bought nuclear submarines. 

Militarism and extractivism are not two separate stories. One digs the resources. The other guards it. Both treat the Pacific as territory to be secured rather than as peoples to be protected. 

When the Pacific asks for loss and damage finance, it is told the coffers are bare. There is always another billion for the war machine. We are not asking for ambition. We are demanding cessation. No new coal and gas. No licenses. No approvals. End the subsidies. Pay what is owed.

We need to follow what Gen Z is doing all over the world, we need to mobilise at scale, disrupt and get angry. And we need it now.