Travellers with Pacific island trips booked for the coming months should keep a closer eye on the forecast than usual. The Southwest Pacific could see seven to 11 named tropical cyclones this season, with at least four reaching Category 3 or stronger, according to an outlook coordinated by Earth Sciences New Zealand. Worse for holiday planners, the season — which normally runs from November to April — may kick off early this year, thanks to a strong El Niño developing. Activity is expected to be elevated near and east of the International Date Line, an area that is usually quiet, as well as across the northern and central Pacific. New Zealand faces normal risk, with February and March typically the most active months for decaying storms hitting its northern and western coasts.
The outlook landed in the same week as a burst of climate diplomacy from the region. Tuvalu, the low-lying nation of roughly 10,000 people, hosted a Pre-COP leaders' gathering shared with Fiji — part of Australia's compromise arrangement with Türkiye over COP31 hosting rights. The event drew only two leaders from outside the Pacific (Timor-Leste and Mauritius), and copped criticism from Australian opposition figures, but Tuvalu's Climate Minister Maina Vakafua Talia defended it as an emotional, ground-level encounter with a nation literally at sea level, producing the Taku Pakasoa Declaration urging action to keep the 1.5-degree target alive.
Talia also welcomed an Australian High Court ruling that planning authorities must weigh the full carbon footprint of the Mount Pleasant coal mine in New South Wales, including emissions from burning its coal overseas — a decision that builds on the 2025 International Court of Justice opinion championed by Vanuatu. Meanwhile, Tuvalu's Prime Minister Feleti Teo opened the Pacific Islands Law Officers' Network meeting in Funafuti, pressing regional legal chiefs to lock in protections for statehood, sovereignty and maritime boundaries as seas rise. The Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union treaty, signed in 2024, already offers a climate mobility pathway that attracted applications from more than half of Tuvalu's population.
Why should a traveller care? Because the Pacific's climate story is also its travel story. An early, busier cyclone season means anyone heading to Fiji, Vanuatu, Samoa, Tuvalu or even northern New Zealand between November and April should build flexibility into bookings, buy decent travel insurance and take local weather warnings seriously. And for those curious about the region's frontline climate reality, Tuvalu itself — small, remote and profoundly welcoming — remains one of the most moving places you can visit, even as its government works out how to keep a nation above water on paper as well as in fact.
Elsewhere in the regional bulletin: Palau's president flagged a crystal meth influx linked to Chinese traffickers that has its only prison at nearly double capacity, and disaster damage to housing is now costing the world an estimated $228 billion a year. Neither derails travel to the region, but both underline how much pressure these small island states are juggling alongside their tourism economies.
