The central banks of seven Pacific island nations have signed a roadmap that commits them to working together to boost inclusive green finance (IGF) in a region highly vulnerable to climate change.

The Natadola roadmap, named after the beach resort where it was signed, was agreed by the central banks of hosts Fiji as well as Papua New Guinea, Samoa, the Seychelles, the Solomon Islands, Tonga and Vanuatu.

The document identifies regional capacity building in green finance as a priority and encourages the pooling of funding and technical expertise between countries, as well as the leveraging of technological solutions by the financial sector.

It also emphasises the need for a just transition to net zero that recognises different states’ capacity to implement policy solutions, as well as the existence of diverse needs within populations and between countries.

“These Pacific Island nations are leading the way in implementing groundbreaking IGF policies. Countries such as Fiji and Vanuatu have included disaster resilience into their regulatory frameworks,” the roadmap says.

“The Reserve Bank of Fiji has made significant strides by including green elements into surveys that assess the demand for financial services. This enabled them to comprehend the susceptibility of households and their strategies for dealing with natural catastrophes.”

The roadmap further highlights the Central Bank of Papua New Guinea’s “groundbreaking Inclusive Green Finance Policy, the first in the region, [which] includes a green taxonomy that resonates an inclusive approach to green financing wherein micro, small, and medium enterprises… are considered”.

The roadmap was signed under the auspices of the Pacific Islands Regional Initiative (PIRI) Plus, which is part of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI), at the end of a four-day conference in Natadola that also included representatives of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the central banks of the Maldives and Bahamas.

The document is intended as an attempt to build on the 2017 Sharm El Sheikh Accord on green finance, which promotes a financially inclusive response to climate change in developing countries.

PIRI chair Ariff Ali, the governor of the Reserve Bank of Fiji, “emphasised that central banks play a critical role in addressing climate risk challenges, an issue acknowledged as one of the most pressing at our Pacific doorstep”, according to a statement released by the central bank.

“He underscored that central banks’ traditional mandates of price stability and financial stability are intrinsically tied to the health of our planet and that by integrating environmental considerations into macroeconomic frameworks, central banks can incentivise investments in renewable energy, sustainable infrastructure, and climate-resilient technologies.”

The AFI’s policy programmes director Eliki Boletawa meanwhile pointed to the devastating recent landslide in Papua New Guinea, which the prime minister has linked to changing weather patterns, as a sign of the urgency with which the region needs to “enhance our resilience against environmental shocks and emergencies”.

Low-lying Pacific island countries are considered extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels, with most of their populations living close to the shore.

The islands contribute less than 0.02% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but with cyclones and other extreme weather events rising in frequency and intensity, the cost of such disasters and local climate adaptation efforts has ballooned.

The Agence Française de Développement aid agency estimates that the annual cost of climate damage in the Pacific island nations stands at around 10% of their GDP, or US$1bn per year.

Finding the finance needed to stave off the worst impacts of the climate crisis will be “a very steep mountain to climb”, the UN has conceded, as two vital international conferences failed to produce the progress needed to generate funds for poor countries.

With less than five months to go before the Cop29 UN climate summit in Azerbaijan in November, there is still no agreement on how to bridge the near-trillion dollar gap between what developing countries say is needed and the roughly $100bn a year of climate finance that flows today from public sources in the rich world to stricken developing nations.

Rich countries have so far given little indication that they are rising to the challenge. The G7 summit of heads of state of the world’s richest countries, in Italy last weekend, skirted the topic of climate finance with warm words on the “importance of fiscal space and mobilising resources from all sources for increased climate and development action, particularly for low-income and vulnerable countries”.

Campaigners said the group’s promises to “work on a coordinated approach” were too vague and had little substance. Harjeet Singh, the global engagement director for the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, said: “The G7 nations have once again failed to fulfil their obligations in responding to the climate crisis. Wealthy countries bear significant responsibility to developing countries for the harm they’ve inflicted through years of extractive exploitation of resources and the consequent impacts caused by climate change. They owe trillions of dollars annually to hundreds of millions of people suffering and dying from climate impacts.”

Sima Kammourieh, the programme lead at the thinktank E3G, said: “The G7 leaders failed to present the full-fledged, structured and specific economic and financial action plan that is needed for global climate safety. At this juncture, more is needed than menus of options or high-level frameworks.”

Last Thursday, an exhausting fortnight-long meeting of ministers and officials in Bonn, the UN’s climate headquarters, ended with similarly scant concrete result. Mohamed Adow, the director of the Power Shift Africa thinktank, warned that without finance, developing countries could not hope to reduce their emissions and cope with the impacts of the climate crisis. He said: “Developing countries are expected to slay the climate dragon with invisible swords, having got zero assurances on the long term finance they need.”

Simon Stiell, the UN’s climate chief, warned: “We can’t keep pushing this year’s issues off into the next year. The costs of the climate crisis – for every nation’s people and economy – are only getting worse.”

The failures have bruised already fragile hopes of reaching a global settlement that would provide the funds needed for poor countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions and cope with the impacts of worsening extreme weather.

At Azerbaijan this November, at this year’s conference of the parties (Cop) summit under the UN framework convention on climate change, governments are supposed to agree a new framework for climate finance and a “new collective quantified goal” that would set out how much rich countries should provide to the poorest, and how the money should be collected and spent.

Research by economists Nicholas Stern and Vera Songwe in 2022 suggested about $2.4tn would be needed annually to tackle the climate crisis by developing countries excluding China. Of that sum, about $1.4tn could come from countries’ domestic budgets, leaving about $1tn to come from climate finance sources, such as the World Bank and other development banks.

Developed countries largely agree that such sums are needed, but they are resistant to the suggestion from some developing countries that it should all come from their taxpayers. Instead, they would like to see some come from the private sector, and some from other sources, such as the carbon markets, or “innovative” measures such as levies on fossil fuels, on frequent fliers or on international shipping.

They also point to the fact that rich petrostates such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates have no obligation to contribute to climate finance, nor do countries with burgeoning economies that are still classed as developing, including China, South Korea and Singapore.

But there is no clarity over how any new forms of finance could be brought to bear. At the Bonn conference, the prospect of some form of levy on fossil fuels was floated but Saudi, UAE and some others were resistant to the idea even being discussed.

While Bonn provided a little clarity on some technical issues, there was little political common ground. In Stiell’s words: “We have left ourselves with a vast amount to do between now and the end of the Cop.”

A car owned by the Finance Ministry fatally hit a pedestrian on a road near the Diet building in Tokyo on Thursday before overturning while driving away from the site, police said.

The police arrested Nobuhide Nohata, 55, who drove the car, at the site, also near the prime minister’s office. He works for a company commissioned by the ministry, according to the police.

The 67-year-old pedestrian was confirmed dead after being taken to a hospital, said the police. He was struck by the car at around 5:40 p.m. while walking on a pedestrian crossing.

The vehicle continued to drive for several hundred meters before colliding with a car waiting at an intersection, they said. It then made a right turn and overturned, with part of its body resting on a sidewalk.

“When I tried to turn right at the intersection, I was rear-ended,” a man who was driving the car that was hit said. “When I got out, I saw the vehicle overturned. I was left upset by what happened in a split second.”