Pacific Environment works to stop climate change and ensure healthy ecosystems around the Pacific Rim for the benefit of people and our planet.
For more than thirty years, we have worked in alliance with locally-led initiatives and catalyzed game-changing policy wins for the region’s peoples, ecosystems and climate.
As home to many of the planet’s most biologically diverse and ecologically significant ecosystems, the Pacific Rim is a global priority for environmental action. We work to center local and environmental justice organizations to drive this urgent change.
Strategically, Pacific Environment advances an integrated approach, working from the local to global levels to tackle our region’s most pressing environmental problems and implement transformative solutions.
We campaign to stop climate change by working to fast-track key industries toward zero carbon emissions.
We focus on major global industries that have received less public attention but whose carbon emissions are significant and still growing: the maritime shipping and the petrochemical (plastics) industries. Both industries also cause large-scale damage to our region’s ecosystems and produce extensive pollution that harms people and all living things.
Through our initial years of work to stop the pollution and accelerated warming of the Arctic due to the direct impacts of the shipping industry (black carbon emissions from burning of heavy fuel oil, toxic wastewater dumping and underwater noise), we broadened our approach to catalyze decarbonization across the shipping sector. We engage multiple sectors including international policy makers, ports and portside communities, labor representatives, corporations and other stakeholders toward achieving a zero carbon shipping sector by 2040, with staff in the US, China, South Korea and Singapore.
We work to ensure healthy marine ecosystems.
Our local staff around the region focus on the Arctic and Southeast Asia to protect threatened coastal habitats, including coral reefs and mangroves—areas that have already experienced some of the most extreme impacts of climate change. These are areas of exceptional biological and cultural importance to our region as well as the planet’s health and stability.
In the Arctic, we advance marine habitat protection by working at the International Maritime Organization to clean up and regulate the shipping industry in Arctic waters, promoting a just and equitable clean energy transition in the Arctic, and advocating for the rights of Arctic Indigenous Peoples.
In other parts of the Pacific Rim, we work to establish and sustainably manage marine protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, two of the most effective tools at mitigating the effects of climate change on critical marine habitat, protecting wildlife and supporting coastal communities. We coordinate with local organizations in countries including Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia. This is part of our broader effort to accelerate implementation of the “30×30 Initiative,” a global goal to protect 30% of the planet’s lands and waters by 2030. These marine protection strategies are reinforced by our local plastic pollution reduction efforts in Vietnam and China to benefit marine areas and coastal and riverine communities.
