The stakes have never been higher — for people and our planet
Join our community of global activists
Pacific Environment works to stop climate change and ensure healthy ecosystems around the Pacific Rim for the benefit of people and our planet.
For more than thirty years — headquartered in downtown San Francisco — we have worked in alliance with locally-led initiatives and catalyzed game-changing policy wins for the region’s peoples, ecosystems and climate. But our success depends on generous support from local and international donors. Donate today!
Home to biologically diverse and ecologically and culturally significant ecosystems, we focus on the Pacific Rim as a global priority for environmental action. Our integrated approach to stopping climate change begins locally with staff in the United States which includes our international Arctic work, China, South Korea, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, Malaysia and Singapore, and rises to the highest levels of international government negotiations.
We campaign to stop climate change by working to fast-track key industries toward zero-carbon emissions.
We focus on major global industries with significant carbon emissions that have generally been ignored. like the maritime shipping and the petrochemical (plastics) industries. Maritime shipping accounts for 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions yet remains mostly unregulated. Single-use plastics are a lifeline for the oil and gas industry: production has grown over 22,000% in the last 70 years. Both industries cause large-scale climate damage and spew extensive pollution that harms people, our oceans and air and all living things.
Through our initial years of work to stop the pollution and accelerated warming of the Arctic due to the direct impacts of the shipping industry (black carbon emissions from burning of heavy fuel oil, toxic wastewater dumping and underwater noise), we broadened our approach to catalyze decarbonization across the shipping sector. Pacific Environment is a connector between international policymakers, ports and portside communities, labor representatives, big corporations and activists toward achieving a zero carbon shipping sector by 2040.
We work to ensure healthy marine ecosystems.
Our local staff around the region focus on the Arctic and Southeast Asia to protect threatened coastal habitats, including coral reefs and mangroves — areas that have already experienced some of the most extreme impacts of climate change. These are areas of exceptional biological and cultural importance to our region as well as the planet’s health and stability.
In the Arctic, we advance marine habitat protection by working at the International Maritime Organization to clean up and regulate the shipping industry in Arctic waters, promoting a just and equitable clean energy transition in the Arctic, and advocating for the rights of Arctic Indigenous Peoples.
In other parts of the Pacific Rim, we work to establish and sustainably manage marine protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, two of the most effective tools at mitigating the effects of climate change on critical marine habitat, protecting wildlife and supporting coastal communities. We coordinate with local organizations in countries including Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, and Malaysia. This is part of our broader effort to accelerate implementation of the “30×30 Initiative,” a global goal to protect 30% of the planet’s lands and waters by 2030. These marine protection strategies are reinforced by our local plastic pollution reduction efforts in Vietnam and China to benefit marine areas and coastal and riverine communities.
From grassroots to global, Pacific Environment partners with communities to build power for justice and systemic change. Join us in creating a flourishing and just future where our ecosystems and communities are healed, balanced and thriving.
