Inaugural 2025 IP-CCSE post-event communiqué

Following the 2025 Indo-Pacific Climate Change Summit & Expo (IP-CCSE) consultation process, we are pleased to deliver the following communiqué:
Preamble
Climate change is a phenomenon observable by all and a global issue that is progressively affecting every human and every endeavor on the planet. The current public discourse around climate change is often uninformed, manipulated, and acrimonious. This dynamic only delays the much-needed agreements, actionable steps, and coordination necessary to mitigate the globally disruptive and hazardous effects of climate change.
Beyond the contentious debates fixated on the origin of Climate Change, resides this conclusion: If it’s human-made, we’d better act fast and equitably to address it. If it’s not, we’d better act even faster and more globally.
The IP-CCSE has formalized a participatory process to facilitate collaboration amongst climate stakeholders, creating pathways to the development of long-term, equitable solutions.
Process
The 2025 inaugural event evolved into a multimodal forum that enabled representatives to engage in freer, more creative, and in-depth consultations.
The consultation process comprised a series of conversations with high-level actors in the global climate change landscape, including industry associations, environmental protection agencies, economic development agencies, global finance, scientific research institutions, academia, indigenous and First Nations organizations, think tanks, political organizations, elected officials, conservationists, environmentalists, and the media.
IP-CCSE’s objective is to continue engaging stakeholders to draft a collective framework—reflecting each organization’s expertise, purpose, and aspirations—that outlines a broad approach to sustainable economic development and includes regenerative guidelines.
This consultative and collaborative process supports the drafting of frameworks that comprise negotiated environmental policy, economic development incentives, and public-private partnerships in the vast Indo-Pacific Region.
Stakeholders’ contextual background
• Governments have a mandate to ensure public health at the lowest cost. Prevention is the safest, most constructive, and most cost-effective approach.
• Environmental Protection Agencies are created to identify pollution factors and origins, issue adequate regulations, and enforce them.
• Indigenous and First Nations organizations have accumulated millennia of ecosystem knowledge. Our ancestors have survived by being stewards of Nature.
• Science is a perpetual process of expanding understanding and knowledge.
• Corporations are organizations created to produce and deliver goods and services. Their legal structures include fiduciary responsibilities to their investors to generate maximum profitability and financial returns.
• Industry associations’ objective is long-term protection of their members. They are freer to consider existential issues and advise on adaptation strategies.
Remarks of note from the participants:
• Technological and manufacturing innovations that began in the late 1700s have produced goods and services that have brought immense progress, comfort, and safety to the human species.
• This progress’s most significant consequence is non-biodegradable waste, discharged into the air and water, and mixing with fresh resources.
• CO2’s warming effects on the atmosphere were first observed in the mid-1800s.
• Over the last two centuries, the sheer increase in waste of all kinds has overwhelmed Earth’s natural recycling and regenerative ecosystems.
• Air and water are humanity’s commons, circulating around the globe. Pollution anywhere is pollution everywhere.
• In consequence, over 95 percent of the world’s population lives in areas with dangerous levels of air pollution. Polluted air has been linked to dementia, heart disease, stroke, cancer, respiratory illnesses, and millions of premature deaths each year.
• Pollution-related health issues impose a significant financial burden on people, their families, their nations, and their governments.
• A recent Oxfam report found that the wealthiest 0.1 percent of the world’s population produced more carbon pollution in a day than the poorest 50 percent emitted all year. Adaptable tax schemes that impact carbon emissions need to be formalized, and revenues directed to green finance, mitigation, and adaptation.
• Requiring purification systems at manufacturing and energy plants, and fuel-powered vehicles, adds significant costs. These added costs lead to higher prices for consumers, reducing competitive advantage in global markets.
• In response, industries have traditionally chosen to fight pollution-reducing laws and regulations to remain competitive. Labor organizations support this approach to maintain active plants and achieve full employment.
• Intense competition in global markets, short-term political gains, and media dramatization-driven profitability have created a toxic status quo and made it nearly impossible to provide the public with adequate environmental laws and regulations.
• The solutions must be pragmatic, equitable, shared-benefit, innovative, free-choice, opportunity-driven, and community-based. While reducing pollution, solutions must spur new models, new industries, new markets, and be profitable.
Framework drivers: Responsibility, Collaboration, Innovation, Progress.
• Industries’ economic and environmental sustainability: while engaging industries to internalize their negative externalities, new policies must provide long-term certainty and predictability for these industries to plan and evolve towards Net-Zero and circular models.
• Government national responsibilities: nations must provide for their citizens’ need for safety and protection from harmful externalities.
• Governments must also participate in the Society of Nations, in broad collaboration with it, to regenerate a healthier environment and stabilize the climate.
• In the Indo-Pacific Region, the National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) must formalize an all-encompassing process with specific modalities due to the fast-rising ocean levels. The NAPs are to include security, relocations, education, cultural preservation, and economic development.
• Environmental protection agencies’ responsibilities to public health must include collaboration with other agencies for comprehensive results that include a healthy economy and innovative developments. Environmental policy must embrace long-term economic incentives for industries to internalize their negative externalities and remain globally competitive.
• Science must adhere to the strictest, most independent ethical methods and peer-reviewed processes. The science that delivers formidable innovations that benefit humanity must also include the solutions to those innovations’ negative externalities.
• Academia has responsibilities to incite creative data collection and analysis, teach methods to expand knowledge, develop critical thinking, and lead to innovative solutions. Resolving climate change mitigation and improving lives requires global collaboration and multi-generational efforts. These efforts began decades ago, generating solutions that should be urgently implemented while evolving over time.
• Global finance self-protection supports evolving environmental regulatory sets. The rapidly evolving insurance industry is a harbinger of caution against climate change’s predictable upheavals to the world’s economy.
• Independent media has the responsibility to conduct thorough investigative journalism, report the truth, and deliver sound analysis. Media integrity can become a new business model, as the majority of the public prefers reliable information over agitated commentary.
• Global public support is needed for new infrastructure and evolving environmental regulations. Frenetic consumption of cheap products should mature into enjoying fewer but better goods, delivering a more sustainable and satisfying lifestyle.
• Humanity can ease the transition to sustainable economic development on a healthier, more stable planet.