Kiribaiti doesn’t have the luxury of climate change denial, and they are sending the rest of the world a wake-up call.
The president of Kiribati, Anote Tong, announced that century old villages had to be relocated, “Where they have been living over the past few decades is no longer there, it is being eroded.” Every other week the high tide bring more erosion to this beautiful Pacific island nation, made of 33 coral atolls and home to some 100,000 people. The islands here have not got much room for erosion and sea level rise though, when the highest point in the island nation is 2m, even a 2 cm rise is very significant, by 2100 the IPCC (AR4) sea level rise models predict a minimum of a 20cm rise. In the worst case IPCC sea level rise scenarios, Kiribati will be uninhabitable for humans by 2050.
Erosion isn’t the only problem, fresh water sources are very limited on coral atolls and many of Kiribati’s aquifers are already beginning to suffer from salt water intrusion as the sea water rises.While in Wellington for a U.N. sponsored World Environment Day summit, President Tong began seeking New Zealand and Australia’s help with future environmental refugees from Kiribati.
“We may already be at the point of no return, where the emissions in the atmosphere will carry on contributing to climate change, so in time our small low-lying islands will be submerged,”
[Climate change] “is not an issue of economic development, it’s an issue of human survival”.
“We want to deny it, we don’t want to believe this, and our people don’t want to believe this. This is the option that we are suggesting, in the belief that if it is going to happen we will have at least addressed part of the problem and it won’t be such a severe one to address when the time finally comes.”
On the issue of preparing his people to be relocated President Tong said:
I think from our own perspective … it is important that if our people were to relocate, they should do so as trained, skilled people rather than people coming here and adding to the problems, their own problems and to the national problems”
How painful it must be for a leader to have to plan the inevitable, and looming, end to his nation, one with a history streching back thousands of years.
How very sobering to watch it.
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