Climate Change: Watery apocalypse awaits Pacific islands

Anthony Paul, Straits Times 26 Aug 09;

AS A teenager in the Carteret Islands, a south-west Pacific atoll in the eastern Papua New Guinea (PNG) archipelago, Ms Ursula Rakova walked to her school and church along a road on Han Island, the centre of a thriving community that produced taro, the islanders' staple food.

These days, the taro plantations are gone, swamped by rising seas. The road, too, is underwater. 'Where we once walked,' she told The Straits Times, 'we now have to paddle a canoe.'

Tuvalu, a tiny south-west Pacific nation (population: 12,000) about 3,200km east of the Carterets, is often billed as the likely first community to be devoured by the surrounding ocean. Its situation is indeed dire: Seawater and the saltwater table threaten coconut and taro farming.

According to latest studies of the region's changing conditions, however, Tuvalu won't actually disappear for another 1,000 years, though it will become uninhabitable long before then.

Carteret islanders are already dealing with a watery apocalypse.

The islands form a horseshoe-shaped atoll (population: 3,300) with a total area of 0.6 sq km (the size of about 83 soccer fields) and a maximum height of 1.2m above sea level. Much of the land the community lives on is already awash. Islanders deal with a higher incidence of malaria as the atoll's volcanic foundations slowly collapse, and trees and taro, coconut and banana crops surrender to ever more violent storms.

When their plight began to become more desperate some 20 years ago, islanders built sea walls and planted mangroves to break the waves' advance. 'But recently,' says Ms Rakova, 'it has become evident that these measures aren't going to work in the long run.'

Over the past six months, about 800 islanders have either fled or are currently planning their families' escape to drier land at Tinputz, on Bougainville, PNG's largest nearby island. 'By 2015,' says Ms Rakova, 'we'll have to move the rest.'

The Carterets, populated about 200 years ago by settlers from Bougainville, have a largely matriarchal society: Women inherit much of the land. Ms Rakova, 43, a soft-spoken but clearly strong-willed graduate of PNG University in Port Moresby, heads Tulele Peisa, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) leading the evacuation. The NGO's name means 'riding the waves' in the local language.

Ms Rakova gave up her job with Oxfam three years ago to set up Tulele Peisa. 'Our whole culture is at stake,' she says. 'Our people, especially the older ones, don't want to move, but there is really no alternative.'

The islanders, she says, blame people in industrialised countries for what is happening. 'We don't fully understand the science,' she admits, 'but we're angry about reports that carbon dioxide emissions may be causing climate change.'

If the wider world is indeed causing problems for the Carterets, it won't be the first time. During the Pacific War (1941-45), fighting between Allied forces and the Japanese invaders caused much devastation. The islanders ruefully recall how the Carterets were once seven islands, but bombing obliterated one island, turning them into a six-island atoll. Some outside the islands are sceptical of this story, claiming that over the years, islanders have reduced their available land by using explosives to carve out new fishing areas.

Whatever the truth, latest scientific studies by institutes in Australia don't encourage islanders who may want to stay and continue fighting the ocean's surge.

Australia's National Tidal Centre's measurements show that western Pacific areas nearer the equator, like the Carterets, appear to be experiencing sea-level rises of about 5mm a year, compared with an average global rise of about 3mm.

Meantime, satellite altimeter readings, says the tidal centre, show evidence over the past decade of a kind of grand pan-Pacific 'slosh': Sea levels 'have risen in the south-west Pacific and fallen in the north-west Pacific since 1992'.

In a recent report, Oxfam warns that by 2050, 150 million people may be displaced globally because of climate change, half of them in the Asia-Pacific region.

'The potential for climate displacement is especially a concern for low-lying atoll nations in Polynesia and Micronesia,' the report says. 'With land areas just metres above sea level and narrow strips of land just 50m to 100m wide in some atolls, there is no retreat to higher ground from the ravages on the coast.'

Certainly, the Carterets' islanders are worried. Says Ms Rakova: 'The PNG government allocated 2 million kina (S$1.1 million) to pay for more land in Bougainville (for the resettlers), but we have not seen one cent of this so far.

'We're losing our ancestral home, our culture, our identity, our whole life. We hope the world is listening.

'Climate change is not just about statistics, not just about science. Climate change is about human rights and the vulnerability of all people on small Pacific islands.'

Hardly an idyllic paradise
Bruce Gale, Straits Times 26 Aug 09;

ASIA'S economies may be about to lead the world out of recession, but not the South Pacific. Indeed, while the popular image of the South Pacific is of idyllic islands, the reality is very different.

A recent report submitted to the Australian Parliament concluded that Fiji's economy, the South Pacific's largest after New Zealand's, could contract by at least 5 per cent this year. And while Fiji's problems look particularly bad, they are really just an extreme example of the situation facing island nations across the region.

Most South Pacific nations are expected to register negative economic growth. Cash reserves, investment and trade are declining. The cost of imported goods is also rising as nations devalue their currencies in an attempt to stimulate exports.

The global economic slowdown is not the only reason for the gloom. The H1N1 influenza pandemic has taken its toll, and islanders report more frequent cyclones as well as rising waters - the result of global warming. Tonga's main island of Tongatapu, as well as Pukapuka in the Cook Islands, Kiribati and Tuvalu are particularly at risk.

But not all of the South Pacific's woes can be blamed on external influences. Long before the global financial crisis, many South Pacific economies had already deteriorated to the point where they were heavily dependent on international aid and foreign remittances from an estimated 150,000 Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian people living in Australia.

The Pacific island countries receive the highest amount of foreign aid in the developing world per capita. But despite this, few have shown much progress.

Nor is the aid well coordinated. Speaking at a summit of the Pacific Islands Forum in Cairns earlier this month, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd lamented the 'spaghetti bowl' of aid programmes - the 'dozens of competing and occasionally conflicting development assistance programmes'.

According to Dr Mahendra Reddy of the Fiji Institute of Technology, many of those who have prospered in Pacific island countries have acquired their wealth through government monopolies. As a result, vested interests provide strong opposition to market-opening measures.

Meanwhile, the deadening effect of the Melanesian system of traditional chiefs discourages dissent. Fiji is run by a military dictatorship. In Tonga, reformers are trying to replace an authoritarian monarchical system with something that more closely resembles a democratic polity. In other countries, central governments struggle to maintain control. The Solomon Islands is just emerging from a long period of near anarchy.

Other nations launch seemingly pointless reforms. Samoa, for example, is in the midst of a national debate about a multimillion-dollar plan to switch to left-side driving on Sept 7. Tiny Tokelau, on the other hand, seems more focused on critical problems. Its 1,500 residents worry about replacing an ageing vessel that is their only link to the outside world via a 30-hour trip to Samoa.

The eyes of most outside the region are focused on Fiji, an ethnically fractured island state with a population of about 950,000. Fiji's gross domestic product (GDP) grew 0.2 per cent last year after contracting 6.6 per cent in 2007 due to the impact of a coup. Its main industries include tourism, sugar, fisheries and garment manufacturing.

In a report on Fiji to the Australian Parliament on Aug 11, Ms Renuka Mahadevan, a senior academic at the University of Queensland's School of Economics, painted a picture of inappropriate economic policies, political uncertainty and slow progress on economic reform.

According to Ms Mahadevan, a devaluation in April designed to stimulate the export sector did little to help. Worse, she said, this approach to solving the nation's economic problems shifted the focus away from the pressing need for domestic economic reform. Financing the government deficit is also likely to be a growing problem. The ratio of external debt to GDP is low (7 per cent), but political problems have caused Fiji's credit rating to decline significantly in recent years.

Fiji has been under military rule since the country's armed forces chief Frank Bainimarama seized power in a 2006 coup. Fiji's subsequent refusal to bow to international demands for elections has left the country isolated. Suva has already been suspended by the Pacific Islands Forum, a regional bloc of 16 nations. Major trade partners, including the European Union, Australia and New Zealand, have also imposed sanctions. The Commonwealth has threatened Suva with suspension.

Whatever else one may say about it, the South Pacific is hardly an idyllic paradise.