New climate centre director’s blueprint to help Pacific SMEs prosper
November 6 2023
Inaugural PACT research centre director Prof Paul Dargusch.
When it comes to global action on climate change and transitioning to the new carbon economy, policymaking and debate often takes place from the top down, rather than from the ground up.
The UN’s annual COP conferences, national climate policy, and global carbon offset markets are typical examples.
But Professor Paul Dargusch, the newly-appointed inaugural director of the Pacific Action for Climate Transitions (PACT) research centre, believes that to achieve true and lasting climate action, empowerment should originate and flow in both directions.
“Small-scale operations are still the less empowered partners in the whole global response to climate change. They need to be empowered,” Prof Dargusch said.
The world-first PACT climate change research centre, a collaboration between Monash University and Fiji National University (FNU), was launched in Fiji in March by Fijian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Professor Biman Prasad.
“I’d love to see PACT (enable) businesses in the Pacific...to embrace new commercial opportunities in the emerging carbon economy”
The centre, which aims to improve economic resilience and community wellbeing in response to climate change in the South Pacific, received $AU1.6 million in initial funding from the Fiji Government in July.
After Prof Dargusch commences in his role on 1 December, his first priority will be consultation and engagement with the Pacific Islands small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) community - the engine room of the region’s economy.
“For PACT to succeed it must meaningfully and usefully engage with businesses in the Pacific,” Prof Dargusch said.
“If I look at how the international community has supported Pacific Island nations so far, it’s usually through NGOs (non-government organisations) providing community-based aid and running projects. But there has been very little engagement with the business community.”
Small-scale operators who operate within lean margins and are often time-poor face “systematic economic constraints” when it comes to investing in the new carbon economy, he said.
“But we have a decent understanding of those constraints and ways to address them.”
"I’d love to see PACT not only help businesses in the Pacific respond to the challenges of climate change but also enable them to embrace new commercial opportunities in the emerging carbon economy, such as building new business ventures around supply chains for nature-based infrastructure projects", he said.
“PACT’s role is to help small businesses in the Pacific become stronger and more prosperous. That way they are more resilient to shocks and better able to cope with whatever climate change brings.”
PACT research projects already underway are exploring:
- How extreme weather events disrupt industry, agriculture and migration within Fijian communities;
- Sustainable land management practices that can help save Fiji’s forests;
- Ways in which communities can prioritise the trade-offs they are asked to make;
- How Fiji’s new Climate Change Act works in practice.
Prof Dargusch started his career as a forester in Tasmania. He then worked in commodities trading and natural resource management, completing his PhD part-time with The University of Queensland’s Business School.
His research in the years to follow focused on carbon dynamics in the forests of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea and more broadly, studies of how to develop more cost-effective climate change mitigation actions that provide greater benefits to people and nature. He first visited the islands of Milne Bay in Papua New Guinea when he was 14 and has cherished opportunities to visit the region since. “I think that’s where my love of the Pacific started,” Prof Dargusch said.
Prof Dargusch also developed an emissions trading simulation game called the Carbon Game/Carbon Sim, and a Massive Open Online Course with EdX, which combined have been used by more than 25,000 people globally.