MINIMUM CONTRIBUTION, MAXIMUM EXPOSURE

They contributed almost nothing to climate change, but they are living its consequences anyway.

Climate change is a global crisis that hits everyone, but not equally. Some places have contributed almost nothing to it and are still facing some of its worst consequences. This project follows six Pacific islands in this context: how little they have contributed, how greatly they have been affected, and what measures they are taking in response.

Barely any emissions

In the last 20 years, while global greenhouse gas emissions have constantly risen, most Pacific islands have remained below the world average.

Figure 1: Average greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) in the last 20 years in tons of GHG per capita. DATA: Greenhouse gas emissions per capita. Additional data on the world average for the last 20 years come from Our World In Data.

This project focuses on the six with the lowest emissions: Tuvalu, American Samoa, Northern Mariana Islands, Nauru, Marshall Islands, and Guam. These islands emit at least 92.3% less than the world average, and four of them (Guam, Marshall Islands, Nauru, and Northern Mariana Islands) go even further, at 97.9% lower. Their contribution to the problem is close to zero, however, their exposure to its consequences is not.

Sea levels keep rising

Sea level rise is one of the clearest dangers facing these islands, directly threatening the land they live on. In recent years, sea level increases have become more frequent across the region.

In the last four years with registered data, all six islands have reported only positive anomalies, meaning that the sea kept getting higher year after year. The last sea level decrease was recorded back in 2015, and in 2021, Guam experienced an anomaly of +20 cm.

Figure 2: Sea level anomalies in cm across the years in the selected Pacific island. DATA: Sea level anomalies.

Higher seas mean drinking water getting contaminated and coastlines slowly disappearing. This is only one part of the risk these islands are facing.

Disasters hit harder and more often

Over the last 10 years, most of these islands have experienced a steady rise in the frequency and severity of climate-related disasters, affecting the lives of thousands of people.

Figure 3: Number of directly affected persons attributed to disasters across the years. DATA: Number of directly affected persons attributed to disasters.

The Marshall Islands show this clearly, with more than 175,000 people being reported as affected by disasters since 2016. That is not a number that can be ignored.

What they are doing about it

Renewable energy is an example of the islands taking action. Since 2014, most of these islands have consistently increased their share of renewable energy in total consumption.

Figure 4: Change in renewable energy share relative to 2014, measured in percentage points (pp). DATA: Renewable energy share in the total final energy consumption.

Tuvalu and Guam lead the way, with renewable energy share increases of up to 6.62 and 5.85 percentage points, respectively, since 2014.

Conclusion

The pattern is clear. These Pacific islands emit a fraction of what the rest of the world does (some of them over 97% less) yet they are the ones dealing with rising seas and harder disasters, with hundreds of thousands of lives already affected. And they are investing in renewable energy year after year to contribute to the solution. They did the least to cause this, but they are paying the most for it.

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This project was specifically created for the Pacific Dataviz Challenge 2026.

This project is built with Quarto, Python, and Plotly. The source code is available on GitHub.

The data sources for each visualization can be found in their respective captions, with all the datasets being completely open.