Pacific Islands

During World War I (1914-1918) Japan gained control of Germany’s possessions in Micronesia, and after the war the League of Nations divided the former German possessions among Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. During World War II (1939-1945) Japan turned the Pacific Islands into a battleground as it sought to expand its empire. On December 7, 1941, Japan opened the Pacific phase of the war by bombing Pearl Harbor, a large U.S. naval base in Hawaii. With the navy of its largest Pacific rival in ruins, Japan swept across the Pacific in late 1941 and early 1942. By mid-1942, the peak of the Japanese advance, nearly all of the Pacific north of Australia and west of the international date line was under Japanese control. Allied forces fought bloody battles to regain the islands, including desperate struggles in the Battle of Iwo Jima, the Battle of Midway, and the Battle of Kokoda Trail.

After the war, several of the world’s nuclear powers, motivated by the perceived emptiness of the Pacific, saw Oceania as a place to test their newly developed bombs. Oceania’s first atomic bomb test took place in 1946 under U.S. direction on Micronesia’s Bikini Atoll. Eight years later the United States tested the first hydrogen bomb on the nearby Enewetak Atoll. The United States discontinued its testing at these sites by the late 1950s, but as recently as 1996 France used atolls in French Polynesia to test nuclear devices. Resettlement of Bikini and Enewetak atolls began in the 1970s. In an attempt to halt nuclear testing in 1985, most Pacific Island nations, including Australia and New Zealand, signed the South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone Treaty (SPNFZ). The SPNFZ imposed a ban on the testing, manufacture, storage, or dumping of nuclear materials in the region. Several Western powers, however, have used the islands in recent years to dump hazardous wastes, including chemical weapons.

In the 1990s environmental issues have been a major cause of concern for island inhabitants. These issues include global warming; loss of ocean resources such as fisheries and coral reefs; continuation of nuclear testing and its aftermath; loss of forest cover, mangroves, and other natural vegetation and fauna; and natural hazards, especially destructive tropical storms.

The predicted global warming caused by the abundance of greenhouse gases is a great concern for Oceania. If earth’s temperatures should rise even slightly, ice at high latitudes could melt and cause sea levels to rise around the world. If this happened, all islands would lose some measure of shoreline, and low islands, especially atolls, could disappear altogether. Several nations in the Pacific region have held international conferences to address the issue. Australia in particular has provided resources for monitoring and scientific study of regional climatic change and global warming.

A related environmental problem is the decreasing level of protective ozone in the earth’s atmosphere. The drop in ozone, believed to be associated with a “hole,” or thinning, in the ozone layer over Antarctica, means more of the sun’s harmful ultraviolet rays reach the earth’s surface. For the countries lying within the tropics and other parts of the globe, this is often a cause of great concern. The government of New Zealand, for example, issues frequent burn warnings, instructing its citizens that it is dangerous to remain in the sun for more than 15 minutes during the heat of summer. New Zealand has one of the highest rates of skin cancer in the world.

Fisheries throughout the Pacific have been depleted by many causes, the largest of which is overfishing by huge fishing fleets from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the United States. Such nations have often ignored maritime boundaries and taken ocean resources claimed by the small nations of Oceania. Many nations also use indiscriminate fishing tools that kill large numbers of other animals. Drift nets, for example, can measure several kilometers long, and catch not just tuna but marine mammals such as dolphins. The fragile coral reefs that abound in the South Pacific are another marine resource increasingly threatened: tourists and tour guides often approach the reefs too closely, and pollutants such as fertilizer chemicals create runoff that damages reefs.

In order to combat these and other concerns, the Pacific nations, sometimes with larger Pacific Rim nations like Australia and the United States, have formed a variety of regional organizations. The most important such organization is the South Pacific Forum, formed in 1971. Composed of all the independent and self-governing Pacific nations and Australia, the South Pacific Forum signed a treaty in 1986 with the United States regulating the fish catch of various countries.