How Can a Country Survive Losing Its Land?

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A ship rams a canoe. The canoe starts to sink. The ship's crew lean over the rail and offer a loan to repair it. That is how Surangel Whipps Jr., President of Palau, describes climate finance in the Pacific, a region responsible for around 0.03% of global emissions. He speaks to Christiana Figueres a few weeks into his year as Chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, and as pre-COP talks wrap in in Fiji and Tuvalu ahead of COP31. In Palau, on his islands, high tides are already flooding the taro patches with saltwater, and the main hospital sits at the water's edge. This week, Christiana returns to the fight that wrote 1.5°C into the Paris Agreement, a limit the small island nations won while…