Suva: The renewed Pacific-European Marine Partnership, signed in late February with the Pacific Community, the Forum Fisheries Agency and the University of the South Pacific, has quietly become one of the load-bearing pieces of the European Union’s climate diplomacy ahead of COP31. The second phase carries a budget of twenty million euros, modest by the standards of bloc-level climate finance, but its design reflects a shift in how Brussels is positioning itself in a region where the strategic landscape has hardened over the past three years.
The instrument is not new. The first PEUMP cycle ran from 2018 and disbursed roughly forty-five million euros across fifteen Pacific states and Timor-Leste, focused on tuna stock science, coastal community livelihoods and the enforcement architecture that small island states need to police some of the largest exclusive economic zones in the world. What has changed in phase two is the explicit linkage between marine governance and the security consequences of climate change framed in the Boe Declaration, the regional doctrine adopted by Pacific Islands Forum leaders that defines climate impacts as the single largest threat to Pacific security.
That framing matters because COP31 is set to be hosted in the region, with Australia and the Pacific Islands Forum members co-presenting a bid that has the political backing of every Forum capital. If the conference proceeds in 2026 as currently planned, it will be the first time a climate Conference of the Parties is held with small island developing states as co-hosts and with their political priorities, particularly loss and damage finance and the phase-out trajectory of fossil fuels, anchored at the procedural centre. The EU’s bilateral and regional positioning ahead of that meeting is therefore not abstract. The Pacific protocol now under negotiation as part of the post-Cotonou architecture, combined with renewed ocean partnership instruments, gives Brussels a credible defence against the perennial Pacific critique that European climate ambition does not match European climate behaviour, especially on fossil-fuel subsidies and on adaptation finance.
There is also a Chinese subtext. Beijing’s security and economic outreach across the Pacific has intensified since the 2022 Solomon Islands security agreement and the more recent infrastructure programmes signed with Kiribati and Nauru. Pacific governments have largely refused the binary framing of strategic competition that Canberra and Washington sometimes prefer, but they have welcomed parallel partners. The EU has positioned itself as a third option that does not bring military basing requests, does not import political conditionality of the kind that Chinese partners increasingly attach to financing, and does come with regulatory weight on fisheries that small states cannot generate alone.
The fisheries enforcement work is where the renewed partnership has the clearest immediate payoff. Pacific tuna accounts for more than half of the global catch, and illegal, unreported and unregulated vessel activity, much of it traced to distant-water fleets, remains a structural drain on regional public revenues. Phase two of PEUMP routes funding to vessel monitoring, observer programmes and the legal capacity that prosecutions require, in coordination with the Forum Fisheries Agency’s regional surveillance centre.
What the partnership cannot do is substitute for the larger climate finance figures that Pacific governments have asked Europe to deliver. Twenty million euros is a marine instrument, not a green compact. The question Suva will press in the months before COP31 is whether the EU’s positioning on adaptation finance and on a clear fossil-fuel phase-out signal will match the diplomatic warmth its ocean instruments have generated. Without that alignment, the partnership risks being read in the region as a competent ocean programme attached to a climate posture that still falls short of the Pacific’s headline ask.
