The young Kiwis heading to the world's biggest climate change gathering

Pacific communities must be at the forefront of global climate change action, three young Kiwi activists heading to the world's annual climate summit say.

Ataria MacDonald, Aigagalefili Fepulea'i-Tapua'i and Aditi Tiwari - all in their twenties - are among an estimated 80,000 people heading to COP31, which kicked off in Antalya, Türkiye overnight.

This year's conference is taking place against a backdrop of global political upheaval, including ongoing disruption to fossil fuel supply chains.

That has sharpened many countries' focus on electrifying their economies, and the transition to clean energy is a priority on this year's 'action agenda' - the practical discussions that sit alongside the formal negotiations.

New Zealand's delegation is heading over at an unusual moment, with a caretaker government in place following Saturday's inconclusive election.

Caretaker climate minister Simon Watts will attend from 15 to 18 November, and RNZ understands that Labour's Deborah Russell and the Green's Francisco Hernandez will also go.

MacDonald, Fepulea'i-Tapua'i and Tiwari are not part of New Zealand's official delegation, but will attend as 'civil society' delegates, who represent communities, NGOs and other organisations all pushing for climate action.

MacDonald (Ngāti Manuhiri), 26, the aquaculture project manager for her iwi, is one of three iwi rangatahi attending the conference alongside chief executive Nicola Rata-MacDonald.

Ngāti Manuhiri's rohe reaches from Takapuna to Mangawhai, and includes the islands of the Hauraki Gulf (Tīkapa Moana).

"One of the biggest issues I think we're facing across Tāmaki and Hauraki Gulf is the sedimentation that's happening," she said.

Ataria MacDonald, the aquaculture project manager for Ngāti Manuhiri, will head to COP31 with two other rangatahi from her iwi as well as its cjief executive.

While sedimentation itself is not directly caused by climate change, it is made worse by increasing storms and extreme rainfall events, which increase bank and coastal erosion.

Mahurangi Harbour, in particular, has been badly affected by sediment run-off.

That had not only affected the iwi's cultural practices, but hurt the wider community, MacDonald said.

"We have oyster farmers in that area that are no longer able to rely on that as their livelihoods and create a living from there."

The invasive Caulerpa seaweed posed another existential threat to the health of the Gulf, and the risk of further pest species arriving was rising as New Zealand's ocean waters warm.

"There are a lot of issues that are happening in our climate that aren't actually caused by ourselves as a [Pacific] region, but we're left dealing with the consequences."

With tens of thousands of people going to COP, and hundreds of different events, MacDonald said she would be "trying to find something micro in such a macro conference".

"What we have established is an indigenous network online with groups, mobs from Australia, the Pacific region, and we are all collectively attending COP31 to connect as indigenous people," she said.

"It's almost using a global context to actually connect at a regional level."

The Pacific was originally set to play a significant role in this year's COP, with Australia bidding to host the conference in partnership with island states.

However, a late bid from Türkiye resulted in this year's unusual co-hosting arrangement and a shift from Adelaide to Antalya.

Australia has still pledged to represent the interests of the Pacific, but MacDonald said there would have been a much stronger attendance from Pacific island states if the conference was in Adelaide.

"We all were really banking on the idea that it would be closer to home."

A pre-conference event was held in Fiji and Tuvalu in October, but many countries opted to skip it.

New Zealand was among the 50-odd nations that did attend, and Simon Watts signed the country up to the event's concluding Taku Palasoa declaration.

Aigagalefili Fepulea'i-Tapua'i, 23, will head to Türkiye firmly grounded in the Pacific.

She set up youth climate group 4 Tha Kulture while she was still in high school at Aorere College in Māngere, and is currently executive director of the Aotearoa Climate Action Network.

"The Pacific is not just a nice to have," she said.

"We are there to represent people who are living through the everyday impacts [of climate change]. And it's very easy for that to get lost when people are going through the motions of COP."

It was also easy for New Zealand to forget its place in the Pacific.

"We have this idea that we are part of the Anglosphere, where actually, when it comes to the climate context … what happens in the Pacific happens to us too, eventually," Fepulea'i-Tapua'i said.

"So it's really important that we support and stand in solidarity with the Pacific."

Fepulea'i-Tapua'i said Watts "spoke very ambitiously" about keeping the 1.5°C Paris Agreement target within sight while he was in the islands.

"I would love to see the New Zealand government carry that through to COP31. It needs to be more than words."

She and other advocates from the Pacific would push hard for stable, meaningful climate finance, she said.

"We are there to represent those who are unjustly living through the worst impacts of climate change."

Aigagalefili Fepulea'i-Tapua'i sets a rat trap as part of her work with the South Auckland-based Beautification Trust.

Currently, climate financing was typically treated as a form of charity or aid - which did not recognise either the dignity of Pacific peoples or match the scale of the challenge they faced.

"We're not victims - we are resilient people."

The challenge was to support that "without it becoming an expectation that resilience is an endless resource", Fepulea'i-Tapua'i said.

"Families can't afford to constantly have to recover - whether that's flooding or other natural disasters that come in future."

Like Ataria MacDonald, she was expecting the conference to be "quite chaotic".

"Things develop so fast that you have to be really, really responsive. But I think that it's exciting. I think that any opportunity we have to speak truth to the experiences of the people that we represent is exciting."

For Porirua climate advocate Aditi Tiwari, 26, that experience is so close to home it's almost lapping at the door.

"Just a kilometre away from my house is the Pāuatahanui Inlet.

"We see how the community suffers from every single flood or every single season of rising sea levels," she said.

"How are we going to combat that?"

Already this year, she has been part of a community effort to plant 10,000 natives along the inlet to help reduce shoreline erosion.

It's that grassroots voice that Tiwari hopes to take to COP31 as a delegate for the Global Shapers Community, a network set up by the World Economic Forum.

However, she's travelling there solo, paying her way to Türkiye through crowdfunding, community raffles and support from friends and whānau in Porirua.

One of her grounding experiences as a teenager arriving in New Zealand in 2014 was learning about the concept of mana whenua and connecting that back to similar ideas in India, where she was born.

"It goes beyond beach cleanups or tree planting - it's the feeling and the sense of belonging that you belong to the land," she said.

"And what does that mean? What is your shared responsibility as someone who lives and breathes here? So I think that was my first connection to climate."

One of her jobs while she is in Antalya is to deliver the joint statement from rangatahi who went to Aotearoa's Youth COP, held in Auckland in September.

"I consider myself very privileged to be able to go," she said.

Young people had "incredible ideas" to contribute but often did not get a seat at the table.

"I've been told time and time again in the last two months that, at least we have you, who is going to represent us and take all our cool whakaro and all our knowledge, not just to the international stage, but also bring that back home and be able to share that."

COP31 will run until 20 November, with a 'cover decision' - a high-level political statement agreed on by all members - expected in the final days.

This year's cover decision could include official acknowledgement that the world will exceed the 1.5°C target and will need to pursue an 'overshoot' scenario, where both the temperature peak and the length of time the world spends above 1.5°C are limited as much as possible.

A UN report published in September said that would require deep cuts to emissions, as well as removing carbon already in the atmosphere.

A path away from fossil fuels will also form part of this year's discussions, after last year's host, Brazil, put together a draft voluntary 'road map'.

Last year, New Zealand opted not to join a push from about 80 countries to include developing such a 'road map' on the formal agenda.

The New Zealand delegation did consider signing a separate Belém Declaration on the Transition away from Fossil Fuels but ultimately did not, after officials in New Zealand advised that Resources Minister Shane Jones did not want them to.