European Society for Oceanists 2022 Conference

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Session Detail (parallel)

Dealing with Double Exposure: Global Energy Transitions, Climate Change and Resource Extraction in the Pacific

Coordinator(s)

Emilka Skrzypek, Nick Bainton

Session presentation

The Pacific is at the frontline of a ‘double exposure’ to climate change and the consequences of economic globalisation. The region is exposed to rising sea levels and catastrophic cyclones and droughts. It also hosts numerous large-scale mines and enormous undeveloped deposits of energy transition metals such as copper, nickel and cobalt to name but a few, but remains energy poor and struggles to convert its mineral wealth into human development. Increased demand for these metals to build clean-energy systems, expected to grow dramatically over the next twenty years, is both a consequence and a driver of climate change and economic globalisation – exacerbating the social, economic, political, territorial, and ecological pressures of extraction. Addressing a major contradiction in current ‘just transition pathways’, this panel explores ways in which Pacific peoples and nations experience and navigate the challenges of the double exposure and considers justice issues arising in the Pacific from increased resource extraction under conditions of climate change. We welcome papers addressing various aspects of, and the relationship between, climate change, resource extraction and global energy transitions in the region.

Paper submissions are closed

Accepted papers

Global energy transitions and justice convergences in the Pacific

Emilka Skrzypek (University of St Andrews)

In this paper we examine the justice dimensions of extracting and supplying energy transition metals. We present a framework of elements built on five core forms of justice – distributive, procedural, restorative, recognition, and cosmopolitanism – and apply it to the Pacific Islands region to examine specific issues, impacts, activities, and considerations where injustices can arise, converge and transform.

Using comparative evidence from Papua New Guinea, New Caledonia and Cook Islands, we demonstrate that increased pressure to extract energy transition metals to meet global demand will amplify existing patterns of injustice across the five forms. We stress the need to analyse how these justice dimensions intersect dynamically and mutually shape one another over time, space and scales. We employ a more Oceanic imagery of persons or groups of persons caught in a vortex of converging currents, what we call ‘justice convergences’.

Resource Extraction and Climate Change in Papua New Guinea: The Role of the Pacific in Planetary Phenomena

Jerry Keith Jacka (University of Colorado Boulder)

The impacts of climate change and the increasing demand for clean energy minerals are two recent phenomena that are fundamentally reshaping spatial relations around the planet. Emergent scholarship calls into question the utility of the notion of the “global” with its emphasis on divisions – the Global North and South, urban and rural, consumption and production, and so forth – arguing instead that the processes occurring today are “planetary.” This vein of research acknowledges the uneven terrain of neoliberal capitalism, yet insists upon the complex ways that humans everywhere are connected, be it through sprawling commodity supply chains or the very atmosphere. This poses important considerations for how the Pacific region, its people and places, will engage with the planetary. Papua New Guinea and other islands in the Pacific are repositories of rich mineral wealth that will need to be mined for clean energy technologies. At the same time, though, the very mining of these minerals, both land- and sea-based, will contribute significantly to the increased production of greenhouse gases. In this paper, I examine the paradoxes of mining our way to sustainability, and the climate and environmental justice issues surrounding this in Papua New Guinea.

Energy Transitions in Papua New Guinea: Mining, Biomass Plantations and Local Inequalities in the Markham Valley

Tobias Schwoerer (University of Lucerne)

Papua New Guinea has pledged to connect 70% of the population to electricity by 2030 and to become carbon-neutral by 2050. At the same time, planned large-scale mining projects will require additional massive amounts of electricity. The proposed Wafi-Golpu copper-gold mine in Papua New Guinea’s Morobe province, for example, will need at least 100 MW, which is more than double the electricity generation capacity in the Ramu grid currently supplying the industrial centre of Lae and other towns in nine provinces. New power sources are therefore needed, and while most of the electricity will come from gas turbines or new hydro-power plants, there is also a different low-carbon project currently taking shape in the Markham Valley. The energy company Oil Search, through its subsidiary PNG Biomass, has started planting 16’000 hectares of eucalyptus trees to eventually fuel two wood-fired power plants producing 30 MW of electricity.
This paper looks at the resulting energyscapes (Howard et al. 2013) in the Markham Valley in Mobore Province. It examines how these new energy projects intersect with the lived reality of the local Wampar population, who while only partly able to access electricity are surrounded by power pylons and plant hectares of eucalyptus trees. While these large-scale energy projects create new jobs and economic opportunities for some, they also disenfranchise others, increase existing inequalities, and generate new conflicts over land and political power.

Tongas Environmental Dilemma? Challenges of Climate Change and the Increase of Cars

Norbert Pötzsch (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)

The Kingdom of Tonga is challenged by the impacts of climate change. To countermeasure carbon emissions as well as cutting economic and ecologic costs an energy road map was designed. One of its goals is the energy transition from nonrenewable resources to renewable ones, such as solar and wind power. This process is progressing steadily and a growing number of households are using sustainable energy. At the same time, Tonga witnessed a rapid increase of cars over the last decade. This development questions the aforementioned efforts to reduce carbon emissions all along. In my presentation I will investigate this environmental dilemma and its social as well as energetic implications from an anthropological viewpoint. Based on a total of 12 months of fieldwork over the past eight years I aim to examine these challenges Tonga is facing through climate change, the increase of cars and in pursuing its own energy road map. In particular I will address the following questions: What are the social, environmental and energetic implications of climate change and the growing number of cars in Tonga? What price has Tonga to pay economically as well as ecologically for these aforementioned challenges? How do views of ministries and people in Tonga differ on these issues?

Waiting for the day after: Energy transition and late-industrial disconnections in Nickeltown (Thio/ Cöö, Kanaky/ New Caledonia)

Martino Miceli (EHESS - Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales)

Nickel plays a key role in international energy transition. Demand seems to be constantly growing, as New Caledonia has one of the largest nickel reserves in the world. Given the long history of mining exploitation, it is not incredible to find out that CO’2 newcaledonian emissions per capita are estimated to be in the highest in the world. In this paper, I explore how the process of extracting a “clean” and “futuristic” resource unfolds within an area of longer-standing exploitation, one socially perceived as part of inexorable process of ecological (and moral) “decay”, the municipality of Thio, in the xârâcùù region. Thio is a mining hub with a Kanak and politically independentist majority site owned by the historical colonial-era company Le Nickel-SLN, linked to Eramet group. As the first mining centre and old nickel “capital” in the world, Thio now lives in an ambiguous late-industrial present: industrial heritage renewal, the restructuring of inhabited and agricultural areas due to continuous flooding and economic reconversion projects failures relate to the contemporary rhetoric over the need to increase production intensity. What are competing regimes of ecological and industrial temporality of a social and environmental space heavily shaped by the extractive industry and increasingly exposed to the risks of climate change?

Justice dimensions of seabed exploration and exploitation in Cook Islands

Nick Bainton (University of Queensland)

Cook Islands is one of several Pacific ‘hot spots’ for seabed mineral deposits. Unlike many other Pacific nations, Cook Islands has no prior history of terrestrial extraction. Seabed mineral exploration began in the Cook Islands’ Exclusive Economic Zone in the 1960s, and by the 1970s surveys revealed significant resources of polymetallic nodules.

This paper identifies and discusses the justice dimensions of exploring and exploring seabed minerals in the Cook Islands. That the seabed mineral exploration in Cook Islands has only just been approved, and that there are no examples within the Pacific (or elsewhere) of commercial scale seabed mining that can illustrate the full range of risks and impacts of this frontier industry, means that we are grappling with huge uncertainties. However, we can apply insights from other seabed exploration projects, just as we can apply some insights from terrestrial mining activities to consider the likely justice issues that will require attention as exploration activities get underway and identify potential pressure points and risks that may accompany commercial scale seabed mining activities if Cook Islands decides upon that pathway.