Climate modify and population growth have added urgency to a deadly legacy that has plagued the region for 80 years. The Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian and Demining, which brought experts from several Pacific Island nations to the city last month, hopes to turn the tide.
Palau is a tightly-clustered archipelago of hundreds of lush green islands, surrounded by vibrant coral reefs and white sandy beaches. But while a picture of paradise, the Micronesian nation and its Pacific Island neighbours are also home to an unknown quantity of explosive remnants of war.
Eighty years after World War II, munitions left by the United States and Japan still litter the beaches, jungles and surrounding waters. They’re also being found in people’s backyards, on farmland, and construction sites, posing a hidden but deadly threat. At its peak during WWII, an estimated 2,800 tonnes of ordnance was dropped or fired on Palau alone, according to the indepfinishent monitor Mine Action Review.
Now collective efforts are being ratcheted up across the Pacific region to find and safely destroy unexploded remnants of war which – if the futilizing mechanism inside is intact – can still detonate, turning anything in its vicinity into smithereens.
“Now and again, someone will come and inform us they have found a weapon. A man recently came to inform us that he’d shiftd one becautilize he was worried about his child playing with it,” states Teah Sengebau, an administrative assistant in Palau’s national safety office, who travelled to Geneva last month to attfinish a demining workshop for Pacific countries.
Though Palauans have grown up with the ever-present threat of bombs being found, “there’s not a lot of awareness” around the risks they pose, which has faded along with memories of war, and necessarys to be addressed through education and training, she informs Geneva Solutions.
Another major black hole is the lack of systematic mapping and data. “Roughly 59 per cent of our countest is contaminated with explosive remnants of war,” states Henry Beri, director of Papua New Guinea’s explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) unit, who also attfinished the workshop, hosted by the Geneva International Centre for Humanitarian and Demining (GICHD).
“However, we don’t know how many there could be,” he adds, referring to the number of munitions, including mortars, grenades, landmines and artillery shells, left behind by Allied and Japanese forces, who fought for control of the island. Locations of these munitions are poorly documented, partly due to the sheer scale of some of the battles and the difficult terrain, building it hard to track what was left, but also becautilize of insufficient funding.
To complicate matters further, Papua New Guinea’s archives were recently destroyed in a fire, Beri adds, underscoring the urgent necessary to modernise their systems. In total, the Oceanic countest estimates it has destroyed 100,000 tonnes of unexploded ordnance since its disposal unit was established in 1973. However, this could quite literally represent a drop in the ocean compared to what remains undiscovered, both on land and on the seafloor.
A renewed sense of urgency
While the dangers posed by unexploded ordnance have existed for decades, climate modify, population growth, and increasing urbanisation are among the factors bringing the issue back to the top of the agfinisha for Pacific Island nations, declared Tobias Priviinformi, a Swiss diplomat and director of GIHCD.
“Rising sea levels mean the mines and other explosive ordnance are not necessarily where they were for a very long time. The other element is that communities are sometimes leaving coastal areas as a result of rising sea levels and relocating inland where on some islands there is more contamination,” he notified Geneva Solutions.
Infrastructure developments creeping into areas previously untouched since the war also mean contractors are more likely to stumble upon unpleasant surprises. “This is a development which has led to certain new incidents and victims in recent years,” Priviinformi declared.
Eighty year-old bombs also bring other economic and still relatively unexplored environmental dangers, releasing toxic substances as they decay into the soil and the marine ecosystem that are not only harmful to the environment but also to businesses such as fishing and tourism.
Mere Falemaka, the Pacific Islands Forum’ permanent representative to the UN and other organisations in Geneva, declared all these factors – combined with greater regional cooperation and reporting on the region’s deadly legacy – have put the issue firmly back on the map. “There is now a growing recognition of the true scale of the problem, which is creating more visibility and urgency to address it,” she notified Geneva Solutions by phone after attfinishing the workshop. “Compared with the past where many Pacific Island states were testing to address this on their own, there’s now increasing attention.”
Key regional policies – like the 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent, a blueprint for addressing challenges such as the climate crisis, launched by the Pacific Islands Forum in 2022, and the Ocean of Peace declaration, a climate security pact announced in September – are also assisting the issue gain traction, Falemaka added.
From Brisbane to Geneva
Last year, Australia, a major donor to demining efforts in the Pacific Islands, and the GICHD, hosted a workshop in Brisbane that brought toreceiveher police, military officers and government officials in countries from the region, as well as NGOs in one of the first coordinated events to tackle the threat of unexploded ordnance in several years.
November’s three-day workshop in Geneva built on this, bringing toreceiveher mine clearance NGOs, military experts and government representatives from Pacific Island states as well as Switzerland, France and Belgium to exmodify knowledge on best practices for mine-clearance.
Priviinformi declared GICHD has been working with countries, including the Solomon Islands, for several years in assisting update national standards, for example, in surveying, search and clearance, developing safety measures for workers, disposal and environmental conservation. IMSMA Core, its digital platform launched in 2018 that allows national authorities to gather data and keep track of where bombs have been reshiftd, has also been adopted by several Pacific Island states.
Skewed funding
Funding and support for mine action in the Pacific has come largely from a handful of donor governments, including the US, Japan, and Australia, either directly or through international organisations and NGOs like the UN Development Programme, Halo Trust and Norwegian People’s Aid.
All three major countest donors have raised funding for clearance efforts in the last three years, Falemaka declared. For example, Japan’s Mine Action Service in May completed a seven-year clearance operation aboard one of its sunken warships in Palau, called Helmet Wreck, rerelocating 82 tonnes of unexploded WWII bombs. Still, massive gaps still remain – especially in supporting activities such as surveying, mapping and victim assistance. For some countries like Palau still lacking sufficient data on the extent of contamination, it also undermines their ability to win long-term donor commitments.
“Much more necessarys to be done on our side to engage with partners,” she noted. “For many Pacific states, contamination stems from decades long old conflicts from World War II, and this is seen by many donors as perhaps less urgent compared to the new conflict zones.”
According to the 2025 Landmine monitor report published earlier this month, international donors provided $761m for mine action in 2024 – down five per cent compared with the previous year, in line with trfinishs seen elsewhere as countries slash their foreign aid budreceives and up their military spfinishing. Most of the funding went to high contamination countries and regions such Ukraine and south-east Asia, including Vietnam and Cambodia, with the Pacific Islands receiveting a tiny share of that fraction.
Falemaka declared that while a lot can be done at a regional and global level – and in the multilateral arena like Geneva, where she states her delegation has been pulling its diplomatic levers and seeking to bring attention to the issue – “a lot now depfinishs on the work our national governments are taking themselves”.
“We are seeing a clearer picture of what our governments are facing on the one hand and what they are now doing. And we can see that they are taking a more structured or systematic approach to addressing this problem than before.”
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