PINA

The Covid-19 death toll continues to rise around Papua New Guinea,with the biggest hospital recording 35 in three weeks, officials say. Port Moresby General Hospital (PMGH) chief executive officer Dr Paki Molumi said the deaths at the hospital were from Sept 27 in the Covid-19 wards and in the emergency department. At the Mt Hagen Hospital, the 30 people who had...

By Lotte Schou-Zibell, Regional Director of the Asian Development Bank’s Pacific Liaison and Coordination Office in Australia. The risk of "de-risking" – the process of international banks disassociating from financial partners, such as small remittance providers and local banks – is that it could push people out of the financial system completely. In the Pacific, where many countries are just...

New Zealand has carved off a sizeable chunk of its foreign aid budget towards combating climate change, committing NZ$1.3 billion(US$920,000) to support vulnerable communities. The pledge, over four years, is being made in the run-up to November's climate change conference in Glasgow, known as COP26. Half of the commitment will go towards Pacific nations. New Zealand’s previous commitment was $300 million (US$212...

Papua New Guinea will join hands with its Pacific neighbours to strengthen and amplify the voices calling for global action to address climate change leading up to the COP 26 Meeting in Glasgow, Scotland, next month. Minister for Environment, Conservation and Climate Change Wera Mori, said this in Parliament while presenting the Climate Change (Management) (Amendment) Bill 2021 which was...

By Kalolaine Fainu Francis Tony is buried on an island that is shrinking. The sea breaks on a shoreline that is now less than five metres away from his simple gravesite on Toruar Island in the Solomon Sea. But his son Christopher Sese says the family have no plans to move Tony’s bones to a new gravesite. “My father will be...

Projected sea level rise would mean 40 percent of the buildings in the Marshall Islands’ capital of Majuro would be permanently flooded and entire islands would disappear, potentially costing the Pacific country its status as a nation, according to a devastating new report from the World Bank. The report, Mapping the Marshall Islands, containing grim visualisations of the impact of...

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison's announcement that he will attend the COP26 Climate Summit, after weeks of threatening not to attend, has been labelled “meaningless” by Greenpeace Australia Pacific unless he commits to a strong climate target to take to Glasgow. Greenpeace Australia Pacific CEO David Ritter said that Morrison, as a world leader with a crucial role to play...

The General Secretary of the Pacific Conference of Churches(PCC), Reverend James Bhagwan, says its vital Pacific voices are heard at the UN's Climate Change Conference in Glasgow which begins at the end of this month. The conference, also known as COP26, is billed as the most important climate meeting since Paris in 2015 when countries reached the landmark agreement to...

The British High Commissioner to Fiji is hoping that COP26 will be a turning point in which the world’s governments and leaders start taking climate change seriously. George Edgar said as the presidency of the 26th Conference of Parties, there is an urgent need to do away with rhetoric and speeches and focus on action. “There’s been a growing realisation over...

A group of experts are imploring the Pacific community to take inspiration from how Fiji has dealt with COVID-19 and increase their vaccination rates. Currently the Pacific community is slightly lagging behind the New Zealand statistics for vaccination rates with 77 percent of the eligible Pacific population having received their first dose and 53 percent fully vaccinated. So far, 82.7 percent...