When Penninah Woyengu in Madang, Papua New Guinea, thinks about her own story within the wider mat of the Shifting the Power Coalition, she sees herself as one thread among many – carrying the voices, struggles, and strength of young women in her community into a regional movement.
Her work with Hauskuk Initiative is not just about climate indicators, warning messages, or hazard maps. It is about real lives.
It is about the young girl who walks long distances because nearby water sources have dried up, and every extra hour on the road is an hour taken from school, rest, or joy.
It is about the mother who lies awake at night when the rain is heavy, worrying not only about the floodwaters, but also about what happens to women and girls when homes are crowded, infrastructure breaks down, and tensions rise.
It is about the young woman who has ideas about how to make her community safer—who understands where the water flows, who notices which houses flood first, who knows which families are most at risk—but who has never been asked to speak in a planning meeting.
Across our islands, women are already governing climate security: warning their communities, coordinating evacuations, challenging exclusion, navigating climate finance, and standing in global spaces to defend the science of 1.5°C.
The Shifting the Power Coalition (StPC) was born from a simple observation: Pacific women are already first responders in every crisis, but too often remain invisible in decision-making spaces. Since 2016, this regional alliance has worked to shift power, resources, and recognition from international actors towards women-led and disability-led organisations rooted in Pacific communities.
The Coalition shows that when women-led movements are resourced, they don’t just “participate” in systems – they transform them. The invitation before Pacific Leaders is clear: move this leadership from the margins of acknowledgements to the centre of mandates. Treat women-led coalitions as the climate and disaster infrastructure our region already relies on. And then fund them like our lives depend on it – because they do.
But what exactly does it mean to treat women-led work as climate and disaster infrastructure rather than “projects”? The answer lies in how these networks function from village to regional level.
In Tonga, Bougainville, Madang Province (PNG), and Vanuatu, women’s organisations have built multi-hazard early warning systems that connect national meteorological and disaster management agencies with households through women’s grassroots networks. Early warning messages are translated, simplified, and disseminated via trusted relationships – including through weaving groups, church women’s groups, youth collectives, and disability organisations.
These systems don’t exist in a vacuum. National policies in Vanuatu, Tonga, and Bougainville already include gender-responsive and inclusive disaster risk management and multi-hazard early warning systems (MHEWS) commitments, while telecom partnerships—such as those with Digicel—give women’s organisations tools to move messages at scale.
At the same time, regional gender and humanitarian networks are developing checklists and tools to help governments and NGOs conduct gender and social analysis across the disaster cycle – from risk assessment and anticipatory action to recovery and livelihoods. The aim is simple: ensure that no one is left behind, and that policies respond to real lives rather than assumptions.
“When we design for those most at risk, we end up protecting everyone because these issues we are not only facing within the Pacific; it’s a global one as well. I know across the continents young women with disabilities are facing the same exclusion,” says Ulamila Biudole of the Fiji Disabled Peoples Federation.
“At the heart of the disability inclusive disaster risk reduction is this one principle; nothing about us without us. This is not a slogan – it’s a survival strategy and when young women with disabilities lead, our systems become sharper, safer, and more humane.”
Defending 1.5°C – and Civic Space
In Kiribati, the ocean is not a metaphor. It is at the doorstep, in the food gardens, in the drinking water.
For Tabouea Naare, a young woman leader with Nei Mom Uprising, climate change is “not abstract – it is saltwater in our crops, it is our water being inundated, and it is the question of whether our children will have land to stand on.” Her response, she says, “cannot be abstract either – it must be rooted in who we are.”
While women’s networks are busy preparing their families and communities, another battle is unfolding in conference halls. During the recent UN climate negotiations in Bonn (SB64), Pacific advocates described a “quiet” conference overshadowed by global crises—war, energy shocks, skyrocketing defence and AI spending—even as climate impacts worsened. In the rooms where science was being discussed, large emitters pushed back on basic concepts like tipping points, overshoot, and even the 1.5°C survival threshold, weakening the foundations Pacific countries have fought so hard to secure.
Civil society and media space is shrinking. Fewer journalists are present, accreditation is harder, and opportunities for Pacific-led press conferences and actions are limited. Yet when Pacific advocates did gain a platform, they used it to defend science and shift the narrative back to the human realities of climate impacts in the islands.
StPC and its partners are preparing to engage at the Pacific Pre-COP and COP31, building a climate advocacy agenda that connects local realities—early warning, protection, displacement—to global negotiations. This is work that has been building from the foundations created by networks like the Pacific Feminists Defending the Living Planet, the Pacific Island Feminist Alliance for Climate Justice, and the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network. But our engagement in these multilateral spaces depends on funding, accreditation, security, and political will to keep civic space open.
Flexible funding models—such as those StPC has negotiated with some philanthropic partners, including contingency options for travel, care, and organisational strengthening—make it possible for women’s organisations to show up in these spaces and speak on their own terms.
Recognition to Resourcing
If Pacific leaders are serious about climate security, human security, and the Blue Pacific, then women-led and disability-led coalitions must move from the margins of communiqués to the centre of implementation. That means concrete decisions, not just warm words.
Finance must move directly into the hands of women-led and disability-led organisations. Governments and development partners can set clear targets: a defined percentage of all regional climate and disaster finance—including mechanisms influenced by PIF—should go directly to such organisations as flexible, multiyear funding.
Civil society’s experience with flexible grants and rollover options shows that when funding recognises the real costs of organising, care, cybersecurity, safeguarding, and leadership transitions, women’s organisations are better able to sustain their work and respond to fast-moving crises.
Like others across the wider Pacific social justice movement, the Shifting the Power Coalition is working to ensure that frontline experiences shape climate and humanitarian policies. Our collective agenda links women-led early warning systems, accessible ICTs, women-led disaster responses, and gender-transformative climate finance directly to the Paris Agreement – especially its Global Goal on Adaptation and evolving Loss and Damage arrangements.
Integrating women-led systems into national and regional adaptation and loss and damage strategies is not optional for the Pacific – it is already how resilience is being built on the ground.
Across the region, women-led early warning and multi-hazard information systems are getting alerts to the last mile, ensuring that people with disabilities, young women, and remote communities actually receive lifesaving information in time to act. These systems draw on indigenous knowledge, community organising, and care infrastructures that women have sustained for generations, and they are often the first line of response when cyclones, flooding, or slow-onset sea level rise translate into very real loss and damage for families and cultures.
Recognising and resourcing these women-led systems within formal adaptation plans and loss and damage frameworks is essential to making the Global Goal on Adaptation more than an abstract indicator. When Pacific feminist movements and women’s rights organisations shape climate finance, disaster governance, and early warning design, adaptation metrics begin to reflect questions communities actually ask: Who receives information? Who can evacuate safely? Who is compensated for what is lost? Grounding climate and humanitarian policies in these lived realities ensures it is measured not only in infrastructure or GDP, but in the safety, dignity, and decision-making power of Pacific peoples – especially women in all their diversities on the frontlines.
Jay Nasilasila from the Fiji Disabled Peoples Federation during StPCs Annual Partners Meeting in October 2025.
Three Pacific women leaders at a regional meeting on climate action and inclusion.
Shifting the Power Coalitions Young Womens Steering Committee Reps.
