Sinking islands deride climate change inaction

Channel NewsAsia 5 Dec 07;

NUSA DUA, Indonesia - As the world tries to hammer out a future plan to tackle climate change, tiny islands say it is too late -- their homes and histories are disappearing under the rising sea.

Dressed in traditional grass and rattan skirts, the islanders used music, song and slide shows to tell their story to a tearful audience in a luxury hotel on the Indonesian island of Bali.

For nations and communities that sit only a few metres above sea level, even small ocean rises engulf their land and send destructive salty water into their food supply, leaving residents with little choice but to flee.

"Relocation for us is our only means of building our future. We will lose our identity, but we have no choice, the islands are shrinking," said Ursula Rakova, from the low-lying Carteret Islands in Papua New Guinea.

"Do we leave our children so they float in the sea, or do we help them now?"

Climate experts say that as global warming heats the Earth up, glaciers and polar ice caps will melt and sea waters will expand, sending oceans rising by at least 18 centimetres (7.2 inches) by 2100.

World sea levels rose 3.1 millimetres (0.12 inch) per year from 1993 to 2003, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said.

Representatives from the Carteret Islands, the Pacific nation of Kiribati, and islands in Australia's Torres Strait have brought their story to a UN climate conference being held here in Bali.

"For us as Kiribati people, the land is very important," said Tangaroa Arobati, a global warming activist from Kiribati, where about 92,500 people live on 33 coral atolls which sit about two or three metres above sea level.

"A very important thing is to have land and women. It gives us our future generation, and our land, this is our heritage."

As sea levels have crept higher, the coasts have eroded, corals have been bleached, and islanders' staple foods such as the giant Babai taro, coconut and banana are unable to grow in salty soil.

Drinking water is being contaminated with sea water, while extreme weather events beat coastlines, and fish are no longer abundant.

On the Carterets, where one island has been split in two by the encroaching sea, Rakova said hunger and desperation were sending the young men to mainland Papua New Guinea, or spiralling into depression.

"The young men of Carteret relieve their pain by getting drunk," she said.

Nearly 190 nations have gathered at the UN Bali meeting, which aims to see nations agree to negotiate a new regime to combat climate change when the current phase of Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012.

But activists say new targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would do little to held some Pacific islanders.

"They talk about climate change as if it is something that might happen in the distant future, something that might happen in 2020 or 2050 or even in 2100," said Tony Mohr, of the Australian Conservation Foundation.

"However vibrant cultures and communities of the Pacific are already experiencing climate change."

Islanders are urging the world to do all it can to reduce greenhouse gases and stop history repeating itself on other small islands.

They also want financial help from rich nations and practical assistance for the islanders, who will likely soon join a growing number of climate refugees.

"If this continues, maybe we will be left with three coconuts. We may be clinging to a very small piece of land. Where is our future?" said Kiribati's Arobati. - AFP/ir

Sinking Islanders Seek Help at Bali Climate Conference
Charles J. Hanley in Kilu, Papua New Guinea
Associated Press, National Geographic 5 Dec 07;

Squealing pigs tore inland, and Filomena Taroa herded the children to higher ground.

The sea was rolling in deeper than anyone had ever seen last week on Papua New Guinea's island of New Britain.

"I don't know [why it happened]," the sturdy, barefoot grandmother told a visitor. "I'd never experienced it before."

As scientists warn of rising seas due to global warming, more reports are coming in of flooding from record high tides in villages like Kilu.

It's happening not only to low-lying atolls but also to shorelines from Alaska to India.

This week by boat, bus, and jetliner a handful of villagers are converging on Bali, Indonesia, to seek help from representatives of the more than 180 countries gathered there for a United Nations climate conference.

"Climate Refugees"

The coastal dwellers' plight—once considered theoretical—appears all too real in 2007. The problem is spreading to new coasts, and the waters are flowing further inland.

Scientists project that seas expanding from warmth and from the runoff of melting glaciers may displace millions of coastal inhabitants worldwide in this century if heat-trapping industrial emissions are not sharply curtailed.

A Europe-based research group, the Global Governance Project, will propose at the two-week Bali meeting that an international fund be established to resettle "climate refugees."

(Read "Climate Change Creating Millions of 'Eco Refugees,' UN Warns" [November 18, 2005].)

Ursula Rakova is a resident of the Carteret Atoll northeast of the nearby island of Bougainville.

"We don't have vehicles, an airport," she said, summing up the islanders' plight. "We're merely victims of what is happening with the industrialized nations emitting greenhouse gases."

The sands of the atoll have been giving way to the sea for the past 20 years. The salt water has ruined their taro gardens, a food staple, and has contaminated their wells and flooded homesteads. The remote islands now suffer from chronic hunger.

The national government has appropriated $800,000 (U.S.) to resettle a few Carteret families on Bougainville out of 3,000 islanders.

"That's not enough," Rakova told the Associated Press in Papua New Guinea's capital, Port Moresby. "The islands are getting smaller. Basically, everybody will have to leave."

"Sloshing" Ocean Rising

In a landmark series of reports released this year, the UN climate-science network reported that seas rose by a global average of about 0.12 inch (0.3 centimeter) annually from 1993 to 2003, compared to an average of about 0.08 inch (0.2 centimeter) annually between 1961 and 2003.

A 2006 study by Australian oceanographers found the rise was much higher—almost an inch (2.5 centimeters) every year—in parts of the western Pacific and Indian oceans.

"It turns out the ocean sloshes around," said the University of Tasmania's Nathaniel Bindoff, a lead author on oceans in the UN reports. "It's moving, and so on a regional basis the ocean's movement is causing sea-level variations—ups and downs."

Regional temperatures, atmospheric conditions, currents, and undersea and shoreline topography are all factors contributing to sea levels.

On some atolls, which are the above-water remnants of ancient volcanoes, the coral underpinnings are subsiding and adding to the sinking effect.

(Related photos: "Quake Lifts Island Ten Feet Out of Ocean" [April 10, 2007].)

The oceanic sloshing is steadily taking land from such western Pacific island countries as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands.

In Papua New Guinea, reports have trickled in this year of fast-encroaching tides on shorelines of the northern island province of Manus, the mainland peninsular village of Malasiga and the Duke of York Islands off New Britain.

International media attention paid to the Carteret Islands, the best-known case, seems to have drawn out others, said Papua New Guinea's senior climatologist, Kasis Inape.

"Most of the low-lying islands and atolls are in the same situation," Inape said.

No Escape

The village of Kilu sits on a brilliantly blue Bismarck Sea bay ringed by smoldering volcanoes, swaying coconut palms, and thin-walled homes on stilts.

Invading waves last year forced some villagers to move their houses inland 20 or more yards (18 or more meters)—taking along their pigs, chickens, and fears of worse to come.

Worse did come on November 25, when the highest waters yet sent people scurrying further inland.

"We think the sea is rising," said 20-year-old villager Joe Balele. "We don't know why."

The scene is repeated on shores across the Pacific, most tragically on tiny island territories with little inland to escape to.

Preparing to head to Bali to present her people's case Tuesday at the UN climate conference, Rakova searched for words to explain what was happening back home.

"Our people have been there 300 or 400 years," she said. "We'll be moving away from the islands we were born in and grew up in. We'll have to give up our identity."