What PIF is and how it works

A line that is not allowed to move

Maritime zones are measured from baselines drawn along a coast, and where the coast moves the zones move with it. On 6 August 2021 the Forum issued the Declaration on Preserving Maritime Zones in the Face of Climate Change-related Sea-Level Rise. It records an intention to maintain the zones already established without reduction, an intention not to review and update the baselines and outer limits as a consequence of climate change-related sea-level rise, and a position that those zones shall continue to apply notwithstanding any physical change connected to it.

The member records show the range the declaration has to cover. The highest ground in Tuvalu is Niulakita at 5 metres, and in the Marshall Islands it is on Likiep Atoll at 10 metres. Nauru rises to 70 metres at Command Ridge and Kiribati to 81 metres on Banaba. Papua New Guinea reaches 4,509 metres at Mount Wilhelm and New Zealand 3,724 metres at Aoraki / Mount Cook.

The Boe Declaration on Regional Security, adopted on 5 September 2018, had already reaffirmed that climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific. The 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent organises the Forum's work under seven thematic areas, from political leadership and regionalism to technology and connectivity, and describes the membership as custodian of nearly 20% of the earth's surface.

Wellington, 1971

The first meeting ran at Wellington from 5 to 7 August 1971 under the name South Pacific Forum, with seven participants: Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Nauru, Tonga, Western Samoa and the Cook Islands. The name Pacific Islands Forum dates from 1999. The secretariat works from Ratu Sukuna Road in Suva.

Much of the present membership could not have been in the room. The records date statehood for Papua New Guinea to 1975, for Solomon Islands and Tuvalu to 1978, for Kiribati to 1979, for Vanuatu to 1980, for the Marshall Islands and the Federated States of Micronesia to 1986, and for Palau to 1994. A body older than most of its members is unusual anywhere, and it is the reason the Forum's own instruments read as accession documents in reverse: the organisation was there first and the states arrived into it.

Where membership stops short of sovereignty

Four members are filed in this catalogue as dependencies. The Cook Islands and Niue are self-governing in free association with New Zealand and neither holds a UN seat; the records date the Cook Islands' present status to 4 August 1965 and Niue's to 1974. New Caledonia and French Polynesia are French, the first dated in its record from the annexation of 1853 and the second from the protectorate of 1842, and both were admitted to full membership in September 2016 after a decade as associates.

Beneath full membership sits a second tier. Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, Guam and American Samoa are associate members, which puts three more administering powers in the room by proxy: New Zealand, France and the United States.

Rarotonga, and the protocols

The South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty was opened for signature at Rarotonga in the Cook Islands on 6 August 1985 and entered into force on 11 December 1986. It bans the use, testing and possession of nuclear weapons inside the zone it draws, and it carries three protocols addressed to states outside the region: one covering territories they administer within the zone, one on the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons against parties, and one on testing.

France and the United Kingdom signed and ratified all three in 1996. The United States has signed them and has not ratified. China and Russia ratified the second and third, having no territory inside the zone for the first to apply to. The Marshall Islands signed the treaty itself on 3 March 2025 and ratification is outstanding.

Biketawa, and a suspended host

The Biketawa Declaration was adopted at Biketawa in Kiribati on 28 October 2000, and it is the instrument the Forum reaches for when a crisis arises in a member country. It sets out a sequence rather than a power: the Secretary General consults the Forum Chair, assesses the situation and seeks approval to go further, and the measures available run from a statement, through a ministerial action group, a fact-finding mission, an eminent persons group and third-party mediation, to a special meeting of leaders which may consider targeted measures. The declaration also fixes how any of that is to be done, including consultation with the authorities concerned, impartiality, and coordination with international partners.

Fiji was suspended from the Forum on 2 May 2009 and the suspension was lifted on 22 October 2014. The secretariat stayed where it was throughout, which is to say in the capital of the suspended member.

Three subregions, and a fourth on the records

In February 2021 five members gave notice of withdrawal over the appointment to the office of Secretary General: Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and Nauru. In June 2022 leaders agreed to rotate the post among the Micronesian, Melanesian and Polynesian subregions. Kiribati withdrew on 9 July 2022 and returned on 24 February 2023.

The subregion field on the member records does not divide into three. It files five members in Melanesia, five in Micronesia and six in Polynesia, and puts Australia and New Zealand in a fourth, Australasia, which the rotation does not name. The arrangement that settled the dispute is a division of the island membership, and the two members it leaves out are the two that were never going to hold the post.

What the Forum does not run

A trade agreement negotiated among Forum members covers ten of them. PACER Plus lists Australia, New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Kiribati, Niue, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu as parties, which leaves Fiji and Papua New Guinea outside it along with the four Micronesian states and the two French collectivities.

Fisheries are run by a separate body with a separate map. The Pacific Islands Forum Fisheries Agency was established on 9 August 1979 under the South Pacific Forum Fisheries Agency Convention and works from Honiara. Its seventeen members include Tokelau, which is only an associate of the Forum, and exclude New Caledonia and French Polynesia, which are full members of it. Neither list is an error. A grouping that admits territories alongside states will produce a different roster every time a different question is asked of it, and the Forum's own roster is the widest of them.