Pre-COP meetings offer ministers and negotiators a smaller space ahead of the annual UN climate conference to test ideas, identify areas of disagreement, and build political momentum around issues that will ultimately be negotiated at COP. This year, where those conversations are happening matters.

For decades, Pacific countries and movements have pushed the international community to understand the climate crisis not as a distant or future threat, but as a present struggle over survival, sovereignty, land, oceans, livelihoods and justice. At Pacific Pre-COP31, global climate decision-makers are coming directly to a region on the frontlines of that crisis.

As WEDO and the Women and Gender Constituency (WGC) head to Fiji, here are five things we are watching.

1. Bringing Pre-COP to the Pacific matters

The Pacific has played an outsized role in shaping global climate ambition, from the fight to keep 1.5°C within reach to demands for action on loss and damage, climate finance and the protection of oceans.

Yet Pacific communities continue to experience some of the most severe consequences of a crisis to which they have contributed least. Sea-level rise, extreme weather, displacement, biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, and non-economic loss and damage are already reshaping communities across the region.

Holding Pre-COP in Fiji and Tuvalu brings ministers and global decision-makers closer to these realities. It also creates an opportunity to shift the frame: from seeing the Pacific primarily through vulnerability to recognizing Pacific leadership, knowledge, political demands and solutions.

The question is whether that proximity translates into political action.

2. Pacific feminists are bringing a clear agenda: Defend the Living Planet

Pacific feminists are not arriving at Pre-COP simply asking to be included in climate discussions. They have articulated a systemic agenda for climate justice.

The 17 Urgent Demands of Pacific Feminists Defending the Living Planet, led by Pacific feminist movements through DIVA for Equality and partners, connect climate change to ecological, economic, gender, and social justice.

The demands include urgent action to keep global temperature rise below 1.5°C; grants rather than loans for climate-vulnerable countries; accessible gender-responsive climate finance for feminist and grassroots organizations; meaningful action on adaptation and loss and damage; protection of oceans and water; recognition of Indigenous and traditional knowledge; food sovereignty; an end to fossil fuel dependency; and accountability for governments and corporations.

Together, they reject approaches that treat gender equality as an add-on to climate policy. Instead, they ask a much bigger question: what kind of economic, political, and ecological systems are necessary for people and the planet to survive and thrive?

3. The Pacific Pact on Gender and Climate Action offers a model for implementing the Belém GAP

A major development heading into Pre-COP is the adoption of the Pacific Pact on Gender and Climate Action by Pacific Islands Forum Leaders.

The Pact represents a regional political commitment to lead and accelerate implementation of the Belém Gender Action Plan, adopted at COP30 last year.

It focuses on three interconnected areas:

• advancing Pacific women’s leadership in climate decision-making;
• strengthening gender-responsive climate data and evidence; and
• advancing gender-responsive approaches to climate finance.

Importantly, the Pact moves beyond a general commitment to gender equality. It identifies concrete areas for action, including increasing women’s representation in national climate delegations and governance bodies, valuing women’s traditional and Indigenous knowledge, improving the evidence available on gender and climate impacts, and ensuring climate finance reaches women-led organizations and communities.

As countries now begin the work of implementing the Belém GAP, the Pacific Pact offers an important example of how a global framework can be translated into regional political commitment and, critically, national action.

4. Pacific feminist leadership is at the center of the Women and Gender Constituency delegation

The Women and Gender Constituency’s engagement at Pre-COP31 will center the voices, priorities and leadership of Pacific feminists.

The WGC delegation includes Noelene Nabulivou and Viva Tatawaqa of DIVA for Equality in Fiji, alongside WGC Facilitative Committee Members Mwanahamisi “Mishy” Singano, WEDO Director of Policy, and Babitha P.S., Founder of Menstruation Matters. 

Across official sessions, bilateral meetings, side events, and movement spaces, the delegation will advocate for Pacific feminist priorities to shape the road to COP31, including keeping 1.5°C within reach, advancing an ambitious and fit-for-purpose Just Transition Mechanism, securing adequate and accessible adaptation finance, and ensuring gender equality and feminist principles remain central to climate action.

The delegation will also help bring the Pacific Feminists Defending the Living Planet campaign directly into Pre-COP spaces.

Representation matters, but the goal goes further than having Pacific women in the room. Pacific feminist priorities must influence the decisions being made there.

5. The next challenge for the Belém GAP is national implementation

COP30 delivered an important outcome for gender and climate justice: the adoption of a new Belém Gender Action Plan for 2026–2034.

Now comes the harder question: how do global commitments become national policy, financing, and action?

At Pre-COP31, WEDO and the Women and Gender Constituency will join Pacific governments and partners for “Urgent Climate Action: Nationalising the Belém Gender Action Plan 2026–2034,” a dedicated discussion on moving the GAP from an international agreement into implementation.

This question will be central to WEDO’s work in the years ahead. National implementation must be connected to countries’ broader climate planning and budgeting, supported by adequate finance and informed by the expertise and lived realities of women, Indigenous Peoples and communities already leading climate action.

The Pacific Pact provides one regional model. The task now is to ensure that commitments result in measurable shifts in policy, resources, participation and power.

Looking beyond COP31: connecting climate justice and disaster risk reduction

WEDO will also use our time in the Pacific to meet with partners about what comes next beyond the UNFCCC.

Among those conversations will be planning toward the first Global Feminist Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Istanbul, Türkiye, bringing feminist movements and allies together to examine resilience, disaster risk, and collective survival through a justice lens.

The connections are increasingly impossible to separate. Climate impacts are escalating disaster risks. The people facing those risks are navigating unequal access to resources, infrastructure, decision-making, and recovery. And across both climate policy and disaster risk reduction, feminist movements are asking many of the same fundamental questions: Who carries risk? Who has the resources to respond? Whose knowledge shapes decisions? And what would it mean to build systems designed not simply to withstand crisis, but to advance justice?

Pacific Pre-COP31 offers an important space to carry those questions toward Antalya and beyond.