FORMER Pacific Islands Forum Secretary General Dame Meg Taylor has used a World Ocean Day address to call for Pacific unity.
She warned that rising geopolitical pressure, militarisation and reliance on outside funding could weaken the region’s control over its ocean future.
Speaking as a guest at a World Ocean Day gathering, Taylor said the ocean sits at the heart of Pacific identity, history and survival.
Recalling her childhood in Papua New Guinea’s highlands, she said she was “a daughter of the mountains” but had long understood the ocean’s place in Pacific life.
“We are gathering as people of the Pacific and as a people of the ocean,” she said.
Taylor traced that story from the achievements of Pacific navigators and customary ocean governance systems to the colonial period.
She said colonial rule reshaped the region and created many of the divisions still visible today. But Pacific peoples were never passive. They reclaimed institutions, asserted their agency and built a regional architecture that increasingly reflected Pacific priorities.
At the centre of her remarks was the Pacific’s role in shaping modern ocean governance.
Taylor highlighted the region’s influence in United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea negotiations, especially the push for 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zones.
For Pacific states, she said, this was not just a legal detail. It was a clear claim to ocean space, resources and rights under international law.
She also pointed to major Pacific-led initiatives that followed. These included the Treaty of Rarotonga, the campaign against driftnet fishing, regional fisheries institutions and the success of the Parties to the Nauru Agreement in reshaping tuna management.
Taylor said these achievements show what Pacific-owned institutions can do when backed by political trust and collective discipline.
But the address was also a warning.
Taylor said the region faces real tensions. These include difficulty holding common positions on climate change, rising competition between major powers and the growing militarisation of the Pacific.
She said Pacific leaders and civil society must keep asking whose priorities are shaping the agenda.
Taylor also highlighted more recent Pacific diplomacy.
She pointed to the Blue Pacific Continent narrative, the 2050 Strategy, the push for the 1.5-degree target in the Paris Agreement and Vanuatu’s legal campaign on climate obligations.
She noted that a United Nations General Assembly resolution urging countries to act on those obligations passed this week with 144 votes.
For her, it was further proof that Pacific states can reshape international law when they act together.
Taylor urged Pacific civil society to keep holding governments and institutions to account and to defend Pacific-led governance amid mounting external pressure.
“The ocean has always been our highway, our home, our identity,” she said. “Let us govern it as ours.”
