Meet the President Trying to Save His Island Nation From Climate Change

For millennia, the people of Kiribati have lived off the land, dwelling on their small islands located in the central Pacific Ocean.

President Anote Tong

But over the last several decades, rising sea levels due largely to climate change have slowly eaten away at the country’s 313 square miles. Without action, the country of 102,000 people may disappear altogether over the next few decades.

Kiribati President Anote Tong has been advocating for bold action to address climate change for years, making his pleas around the world. Now, Tong says his country’s citizens won’t be able to remain on the physical islands of Kiribati much longer without drastic change on global warming. Whatever happens, his country won’t look the same in 50 years.

“We have constantly been calling the international community to do something about reducing emissions, but the reality for us is that it really does not matter,” Tong told TIME in a recent interview. “The gas is already in the atmosphere… either we leave or we spend a lot of resources to build up the islands.”

Around the world, sea levels have risen nearly 3 inches since the early 1990s due to ice melt caused by global warming. Even if countries are able to reduce emissions as much as policymakers have promised, global sea levels will still rise by one to two feet by 2100. Without carbon cuts, that rise could top three feet. In Kiribati, where land is rarely more than few feet above sea level, even a moderate rise could be catastrophic. And the island nation is also at risk from an expected increase in the number of extreme weather events, such as storms and typhoons.

Tong’s plan for dealing with this is two-fold. First, he wants to fortify at least one island in the Kiribati chain so the country’s physical presence doesn’t disappear in its entirety. The president is light on details on how exactly he plans to save an island, but he says the technology exists (he has reportedly considered employing a Japanese company that has proposed engineer islands floating). The exact shape of the plans may depend on the support offered by other countries, Tong said. He’s met with representatives of the Netherlands and other flood-prone regions about how to best protect the islands.

But even if some of the country can be saved from the rising seas, Tong doesn’t expect to be able to accommodate all of the country’s residents. For those forced to leave, Tong says there must be “migration with dignity.” Last year, Kiribati purchased 5,000 acres of land in nearby Fiji as insurance policy and world leaders have indicated that they would be willing to support Kiribati refugees if it becomes necessary.

Catastrophic one-off events like hurricanes and tsunamis tend to prompt international sympathy. (Think of the $14 billion donated to relief efforts following the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami.) Kiribati has benefited from some of that support, primarily from other Pacific island countries and development groups. But development commitments have measured in the millions, far from the hundreds of millions, if not billions Tong says his country needs to fully adapt to climate change.

Other countries have been less eager to offer support. In a moment that startled many Pacific Islanders, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott was captured on tape last month laughing at a joke about how Kiribati would soon have “water lapping at [its] doors.” Australian Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, who made the off-color remark, apologized but not before Tong had earned the world’s sympathy condemning the joke as “morally irresponsible.”

Despite the attention his country’s plight has received, Tong doesn’t like to linger on the topic. Instead he emphasizes the damage caused by the policies of Australia and other developed countries that have emitted the carbon that is endangering the very existence of Kirbati, where the average resident emits less than 1 ton of carbon dioxide each year or 7% of the global average. “Climate change is not an issue that really respects any sovereignty,” he said. “If it’s a national issue, keep your emissions within your borders, which you cannot do.”

In December, negotiators from around the world will gather in Paris at a United Nations conference aimed at creating a binding agreement for countries of the world to decrease their greenhouse gas emissions. Asked about his hopes for the conference, Tong said his goal was simple: “Give us a proposition that will guarantee that our people will remain above the water.” More

 

 

©

Kiribati president says Australia's loyalty to coalmines 'selfish and unjust'

The president of Kiribati has criticised Australia’s commitment to new coalmines on economic grounds as a “very selfish perspective” that illustrates the “fundamentally unjust” dynamics of climate change.

Anote Tong, whose small Pacific island nation is threatened by rising sea levels, has written to other national leaders calling for a worldwide moratorium on new mines ahead of UN climate talks in Paris in December.

Tong, who called for a pact to end new coal projects “simply to find some very concrete action on climate change”, told Guardian Australia he knew it would “touch on sensitivities”.

“I know the closure of coal-fired power plants will not happen,” he said.

“But at least the moratorium on coalmines, it gives people that sense that something can be done … and it allows those involved in the industry time to adapt. I thought it would be more achievable.

“In climate negotiations to date we keep talking around the numbers, two degrees or more than two degrees celsius. [But] it’s about what we do. And coal is certainly something very concrete, very significant in terms of what it does.”

In recent weeks the Australian government and the mining lobby have portrayed environmental groups as saboteurs of valuable coal projects, using legal challenges to put jobs and economic growth at risk.

Tong, who said he was yet to receive a reply from the Australian government, wrote in his letter that “science, as confirmed by the [intergovernmental panel on climate change], dictates that for the world to avoid catastrophic climate change, we must leave the vast bulk of carbon reserves in the ground”.

Asked about the economic arguments raised in defence of the continued advance of Australia’s coal industry – including its self-proclaimed role in helping alleviate world poverty– Tong said: “My response is very simple: it’s a very selfish perspective.

“I understand and I’ve always said that for Australia, climate change is not the top of the agenda because they’ve got high ground,” he said. “We don’t.”

Other countries had refused to acknowledge the “fundamentally unjust” situation that climate change is “not contained within the countries that create it”.

“The question is: do we have the moral obligation to worry and care about those for whom this is a serious issue?” Tong said.

“My answer is yes. You have every responsibility and obligation to do something about it. If it was happening inside Australia, there is no doubt at all in my mind that it would be on top of what everyone was doing.”

Amid fears about Kiribati’s survival, the government has been forced to consider radical engineering schemes to mitigate a shrinking land mass, while buying farmland in Fiji as a “food security” measure.

Climate change had dominated his 12-year term as president (which will end next year), but recent unprecedented tidal flooding and cyclones represented a “new and frightening” development.

“It puts some panic in people,” Tong said. “It’s not something we’re talking about happening into the future – we can see the problem. What do we do when the next tide comes? And we have a spring tide coming at the end of this month.

“There are really no sceptics [in Kiribati] at the present moment in time.

“I must be honest to say that I’ve never really gone out of my way to publicise to our own people what is happening because I didn’t see the sense in making them fear what they really cannot do anything about.

“So my focus has been trying as much as possible to alert the international community to the fact planet Earth has a problem, and so do we.”

Tong said the ideal outcome of Paris would include “realistic solutions” to the impacts that Kiribati and others face. He is among those lobbying for an international aid package for Kiribati and other vulnerable nations to meet the costs of climate change.

“For us, zero emissions is not even good enough. The reality is what’s already in the atmosphere will … continue to raise the sea to levels that would ensure that we go down,” he said.

“The future is guaranteed to be very terrible in a very short space of time. We need a package.”

Suggestions that vulnerable countries be given loans instead of grants were not politically acceptable.

“People will not go for it. It is the responsibility of the international community to come up with a package,” he said.

He hoped that “what happens in terms of delivery, what happens in terms of the targets, will happen very soon – sooner rather than later”.

“It is a moral issue and it’s absolutely unjust for those to go ahead and do what they’re doing without regard for those whose survival will be in question,” he said. More

 

©

Climate change threatens human rights, Kiribati president tells UN

Pacific leaders tell Human Rights Council they fear for the future of their civilisations as climate impacts intensify

Just three weeks after the conclusion of the most recent climate negotiations, Geneva has once again offered a space for governments to consider how to address the human rights implications of climate change.

As the issue recently emerged as one of the elements that many countries wish to see integrated to the Paris climate agreement, these discussions provided insights on opportunities for states and UN bodies to better address this issue in the coming months.

Last Friday, the Human Rights Council hosted two high-level panels dedicated to the issue of human rights and climate change, with specific focus on the importance of international cooperation and on the impacts of climate change on the exercise of the right to food.

Representatives from small islands states called for urgent action to mitigate climate change, pointing at the fact that climate change threatens the progress made with the promotion of human rights.

The prime minister of Tuvalu Enele Sopoaga warned that climate change will worsen existing inequities in world already riven with inequality, poverty and conflict. Tuvalu, the prime minister warned, has neither the resources nor the capacity to cope with these impacts.

Kiribati’s President Anote Tong reminded the Human Rights Council that, despite all the efforts by his government, climate change remains an existential threat to his people.

“Who do we appeal and turn to for our people’s right to survive?” president Tong asked the Council. “If there is a major challenge on human rights that deserves global commitment, leadership and collaboration, this is the one: the moral responsibility to act now against climate change.”

Both Sopoaga and Tong challenged the Council to consider how the international community should respond to the climate crisis and to urge more strongly for climate action in order to protect the rights of the most vulnerable people.

Other speakers discussed in their interventions the benefits of integrating human rights into climate policies. UN Special Envoy on Climate Change (and former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights) Mary Robinson emphasized that a “human rights framing to our development and climate responses can maximize the potential for inclusion, participation and equality”.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, insisted more specifically on the importance to respect the rights of indigenous peoples, in particular land rights and participatory rights, when designing climate policies.

Quoting the fifth assessment report from the UN’s IPCC climate science panel, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz also highlighted that “indigenous, local, and traditional knowledge systems and practices, including indigenous peoples’ holistic view of community and environment, are a major resource for adapting to climate change, but these have not been used consistently in existing adaptation efforts”.

The panels were followed by an interactive dialogue with representatives from governments and civil society.

Several common threads emerged from this discussion, including the importance to fully implement the right of the public to take part in decision-making related to climate change, the recognition of the impacts of climate change on economic and social rights, and the importance to consider the linkages between the need to address climate change while protecting the right to development.

Several speakers also spoke in favor of two specific proposals for UN institutions: the importance to include strong references to human rights in the Paris 2015 climate agreement and the opportunity for the Human Rights Council to nominate a UN special rapporteur on human rights and climate change.

Germany also announced during the panels that the country would join the “Geneva Pledge on Human Rights and Climate Action” signed by 18 countries during the most recent round of climate negotiations.

However, the impact of the high political stakes related to the preparation of the Paris Climate Agreement could also be felt throughout the panels.

The interventions by most countries reflected mainly well-entrenched positions in the Council and at the climate negotiations.

The United States in particular suggested that attempts to push for the inclusion in the climate negotiations of references to the work of the Human Rights Council could lead to the “sabotage of the 2015 climate agreement”, a statement that many participants to the session considered out of tone with the discussions.

The panels were followed by the presentation, on Monday, of the report of the UN Independent Expert on Human Rights and the Environment John Knox.

In his presentation, Prof. Knox emphasized that climate change is likely the most serious threat to the enjoyment of human rights.

Referring to the Geneva Pledge as an example of a good practice to better integrate human rights and climate policies, he challenged relevant UN bodies, such as the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNEP and UNDP, to establish focal points for human rights and climate change.

The ongoing discussions in Geneva this week are not expected to lead to immediate concrete results. These exchanges could nevertheless provide additional momentum when related sessions will resume in June, both in Geneva and in Bonn.

For the first half of the month, UN climate negotiations will continue to advance work towards the Paris climate agreement.

Momentum

Several governments having insisted last month on the need to insert human rights language in the negotiating text, the June meeting of the climate talks will be crucial to determine whether this proposals are retained in the draft agreement.

Upon the closing of the climate negotiations in Bonn, the Human Rights Council will gather once again in Geneva to consider, among other matters, the adoption of a new resolution on human rights and climate change.

Over the past two months, Geneva offered two opportunities for governments to deepen their understanding of the interplay between human rights and climate action.

The coming months will now be critical to determine whether, through the UN climate body and the Human Rights Council, states are willing to commit to take steps towards ensuring that climate policies address climate change in a way that promotes human rights at the same time. More

 

©

Commentary: Christopher Jorebon Loeak - President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands

 

This is the transcript of a video "address to the world" released by President Loeak on 18 September 2014 ahead of the UN Secretary-General's Climate Summit. The full video can be viewed here.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8t7ElMPS_8

Out here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, climate change has arrived.

In the last year alone, my country has suffered through unprecedented droughts in the north, and the biggest ever king tides in the south; and we have watched the most devastating typhoons in history leave a trail of death and destruction across the region.

Lying just two meters above sea level, my atoll nation stands at the frontline in the battle against climate change. The beaches of Buoj where I use to fish as a boy are already under water, and the fresh water we need to grow our food gets saltier every day. As scientists had predicted, some of our islands have already completely disappeared, gone forever under the ever-rising waves. For the Marshall Islands and our friends in the Pacific, this is already a full-blown climate emergency.

Some tell us that we should begin planning to leave. But how can we? And why should we? These islands are our home. They hold our history, our heritage and our hopes for the future. Are the world's polluters asking us to give up our language, our culture, and our national identity? We are not prepared to do that - we will stay and fight. If the water comes, it comes.

Brick by brick, I built the seawall behind me with my own hands. But even this is barely enough to protect my family from the encroaching waves. Last year, after returning from a visit to the United Nations in New York, I was so shocked by the damage from the rising tides that I added another foot of bricks to the wall.

In the Marshall Islands we have a saying - "Wa kuk wa jimer". It means that we are all in the same boat together. What is happening here is a mere preview of the havoc that awaits if we continue with our polluting ways. If my country goes, others will surely follow. We are the canary in the coalmine.

The climate crisis is forcing us to take matters into our own hands, both at home and on the international stage. Last year the Marshall Islands hosted the largest-ever Pacific Islands Forum Leaders' meeting in Majuro and it remains one of the proudest moments of my Presidency.

The big outcome was the Majuro Declaration for Climate Leadership, a powerful message from the world's most vulnerable countries to the big emitters that surround us that the time for talk is over, and the time for action is now. Our efforts had an impact with the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Japan all committing to be climate leaders, and to do more to tackle climate change. At this time last year, I presented the Declaration to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and promised to bring the spirit of Majuro to his Climate Change Leaders' Summit in New York, which is now less than a week away.

The Summit comes not a moment too soon. It is the first gathering of world leaders on climate change in nearly five years, and just over a year before our deadline to sign a new global treaty on climate change in Paris at the end of 2015.

Paris cannot be another Copenhagen. The world has changed too much. The science is more alarming, the impacts more severe, the economics more compelling, and the politics more potent. Even the world's two biggest polluters - China and the United States - are working together to find a pathway to a new global agreement.

But there are still some that seek to slow us down.

To my fellow world leaders I say "next week's Summit is a chance for all of us to be the leaders we were elected to be". We must send a strong and united message to the world - and to the people that we represent - that we are ready to do a deal next year. And to avoid the worst impacts of a warmer world, this new deal must capture a vision for a carbon-free world by the middle of the century. Without it, no seawall will be high enough to save my country. Together, we must find the courage to rise to this challenge. It is time to build the greatest climate change alliance the world has ever seen.

My people are counting on it, as is all of humanity.

Christopher J. Loeak is the President of the Republic of the Marshall Islands

 

© 2014

Besieged by the rising tides of climate change, Kiribati buys land in Fiji

The people of Kiribati, a group of islands in the Pacific ocean particularly exposed to climate change, now own a possible refuge elsewhere. President Anote Tong has recently finalised the purchase of 20 sq km on Vanua Levu, one of the Fijiislands, about 2,000km away.

Abandoned house affected by sea water

The Church of England has sold a stretch of land mainly covered by dense forest for $8.77m. "We would hope not to put everyone on [this] one piece of land, but if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it," Tong told the Associated Press. Kiribati has a population of about 110,000 scattered over 33 small, low-lying islands extending over a total area of 3.5m sq km.

In 2009 the Maldives were the first to raise the possibility of purchasing land in another country in anticipation of being gradually submerged. At the time the government looked at options in India and Sri Lanka.

Now Kiribati has taken action. "Kiribati is just the first on a list which could get longer as time passes," says Ronald Jumeau, Seychelles ambassador at the United Nations, who took part in the international negotiations on climate change in Bonn last month.

In March the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published the volume on adaptation of its fifth assessment report, confirming in starker terms forecasts first outlined by scientists in 1990. Within a few decades, small islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans risk being extensively or even completely submerged. In places the sea level is rising by 1.2cm a year, four times faster than the global average.

The cost of protecting these places against rising sea levels, compared with national income, is among the highest in the world. Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Maldives are among the 10 countries where the financial impact of climate change is the most severe.

For many of these countries, which are represented by the Alliance of Small Island States, the impacts of climate change are "irreparable", as Tong has often stressed. "Whatever is agreed within the United States today, with China [the two largest sources of CO2 emissions], it will not have a bearing on our future, because already, it's too late for us ... And so we are the canary. But hopefully, that experience will send a very strong message that we might be on the frontline today, but others will be on the frontline next," he said in an interview on CNN last month. This explains why small island states think it is so important to set up an international mechanism for loss and damage, to compensate for the irremediable consequences of global warming.

The international community approved the principle of such a mechanism in November 2013. "When a population is forced to leave its country, it is no longer a matter of adaptation," Jumeau claims. "Where will these countries find funds? It is up to the industrialised countries, which caused global warming, to shoulder their responsibilities." He wants to make the loss and damage mechanism a priority for the global deal on climate change slated to be signed in Paris in December 2015.

In the immediate future, the land purchased by Kiribati will above all be used to for agricultural and fish-farming projects to guarantee the nation's food security. With sea water increasingly contaminating the atolls' groundwater and catastrophic coral bleaching – total in some cases such as Phoenix atoll – there are growing food shortages. "Among the small islands, Kiribati is the country that has done most to anticipate its population's future needs," says François Gemenne, a specialist on migrations at Versailles-Saint Quentin University, France. "The government has launched the 'migration with dignity' policy to allow people to apply for jobs on offer in neighbouring countries such as New Zealand. The aim is to avoid one day having to cope with a humanitarian evacuation."

Kiribati has long-standing relations with Fiji. In the 1950s families from Banaba island, who had been displaced to make room for a phosphate mine, took refuge there, Gemenne recalls. More

 

© 2014

The Nations Guaranteed to Be Swallowed by the Sea

Imagine the street you live on is knee-deep in floodwater, and it’s ruining everything in sight, including your home. Now imagine that those awful floodwaters never, ever recede. Instead, the water just keeps rising and rising until your entire country drowns.

For a number of island nations, that's ultimately the significance of the recent reports about the unstoppable melt of the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, along with hundreds of glaciers.

Tony de Brum (left) at UN climate
COP 19 in Warsaw with US chief
negotiator Todd Stern. Image: US
State Dept

“We’ve already lost some island atolls. On others the rising sea is destroying homes, washing away coffins and skeletons from graves,” Tony de Brum, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, told me. “Now with every full moon the high tides brings salt water into our streets. We’re moving further inland but can’t move much further."

The Marshall Islands are located in the northern Pacific Ocean, and are home to some 70,000 people spread out over 24 low-lying coral atolls. Low-lying, as in six feet above sea level on average. Not only do rising seas flood and erode shorelines, they also make groundwater too salty too drink and “poison” the land with salt so crops and even coconuts trees can’t grow.

Earlier this month Motherboard reported that the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet was underway, guaranteeing a minimum of three metres (10 feet) of sea level rise. Another study said the melting ice is 31 per cent faster now than between 2005 and 2011. Way up in Greenland, the same thing is happening, according to anew study in the journal Nature Geoscience. And then there was the recent US National Climate Assessment that found Alaska’s and Canada’s glaciers are pumping huge volumes of water into the ocean.

Add it all up and this means many small island nations like the Marshalls—along with countries like the Maldives, Tuvalu, Micronesia, Kiribati, Palau and others—will be swallowed by the sea. “Where are we to go? How are we to survive? What happens to our culture? Will we become wards of another state?” asked de Brum.

“The news from Antarctica should be sobering to anyone from a coastal region around the world,” said Ambassador Marlene Moses of the Republic of Nauru, a small island in the South Pacific home to fewer than 10,000 people.

Moses is also chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), a coalition of 43 low-lying island and coastal nations who are fighting hard to get countries like the US, Canada, China, Japan, and Australia to slash their CO2 emissions and keep future global warming below 1.5 C˚. Anything higher, they believe, and most of these nations will drown.

“I can tell you personally it has been very upsetting to witness what seems like an indifference to the plight of small islands,” Moses said.

When told of the recent science out of Antarctica and Greenland, Claire Anterea, a community worker from the central Pacific island nation of Kiribati responded in despair, “My gosh this is not fair! If the world can’t stop the glacier collapse who will save my people and my country?”

“We have a beautiful life here,” she said, “a simple and subsistence way of living. It is unexplainable to know that our beloved home will disappear.” Kiribati consists of 30-odd pancake flat coral atolls straddling the equator.

The government of Kiribati is hoping to buy thousands of acres on one of Fiji’s islands to relocate its 115,000 residents. While relocation may mean survival, the literal disappearance of their islands risks the overwhelming loss of their culture and identity. When you live on tiny islands in the middle of the enormous Pacific Ocean, land has a very special meaning.

“Without our land how can I explain to my children their roots? Where they come from in the first place?” she said. More

 

© 2014

A Man Leaves His Island

Recently a news story about a man seeking asylum in New Zealand as a climate change refugee made headlines all over the world.

His original appeal to the Immigration and Protection Tribunal of New Zealand was dismissed in June 2013 because, according to the tribunal, he is not a considered a refugee under the terms laid out in the international Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. He is now asking the New Zealand High Court to let him appeal this case.

Mangroves planted on Kiribati to prevent erosion.

“There’s no future for us when we go back to Kiribati,” Ioane Teitiota told the appeal tribunal, adding that a return to his tiny Pacific atoll would pose a risk to his children’s health, according to Reuters.

The relationship between climate change and migration is complicated. And pointing to climate change as the main factor affecting the living conditions on small island states is difficult.

People such as inhabitants on small island states, in many cases find themselves caught between wrongs of the past and the future consequences of these wrongs, explains Ilan Kelman, Reader in Risk, Resilience and Global Health at University College London.

Kelman points out that many island states are still struggling with the effects of colonialism, post-colonialism, modernism, forced relocation efforts and misguided aid, as well as the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from the rich countries of the world.

His story

No matter how the New Zealand High Court concludes on Mr. Teitiotas’ appeal, his story is also a story about the nation of Kiribati, as an icon for other islands regarding the challenges they face concerning overpopulation, resource management, poverty, sea level rise and climate change.

The following text is adapted from the official decision from the Immigration and Protection Tribunal of New Zealand.

Ioane Teitiota was born in the 1970s on an islet situated three days journey by boat, or two hours by plane, north of Tarawa, the main island and capital of Kiribati.

As is common in the Kiribati island group, his home island is a low-lying atoll with houses built on coral debris which has accreted over time. When in his early teens, he was sent to school on a nearby island.

Republic of Kiribati

In 2002, Teitiota married his wife and moved in with her family in another village situated on Tarawa. He lived there with his wife’s family in a traditionally constructed dwelling which had been built on coral, which had accreted on a sea wall built some years previously. The dwelling was situated on ground level and had electricity. Water was obtained from a well and from supplies provided by the Government. There were no sewerage facilities.

Over time, the villages on Tarawa in which Teitiota resided became overcrowded. People travelled to Tarawa from outlying islands because this was where most government services such as the main hospital were located. Land was purchased from existing landholders or acquired through kinship ties to Tarawa.

As the villages became overcrowded, tensions were generated and there were often physical fights in which people were injured, and on occasion, killed. When this happened, the police intervened, taking the injured to the hospital and arresting those responsible.

Life generally became progressively more insecure on Tarawa as a result of sea level rise. From the late 1990s onwards, Tarawa suffered significant amounts of coastal erosion during high tides. Also the land surface was regularly flooded and land could be submerged up to knee-deep during king tides. Transportation was affected as the main causeway separating north and south Tarawa was often flooded.

This caused significant hardship for Teitiota, his wife and family as well as other inhabitants on Tarawa. The wells upon which they depended for water became salty. Salt water was deposited onto the ground destroying crops. Crops were difficult to grow and the land was stripped of vegetation in many places.

The Government’s supplies of water are coming under pressure through overpopulation and because people can increasingly no longer rely on well water for an alternative source. The sea wall in front of the Teitiota’s parents-in-law’s house was often damaged and required constant repair. The family existed largely by subsistence fishing and agriculture. One of the appellant’s brothers-in-law works at a local government port agency and provides cash income for the whole family as best as he is able. However, life is generally becoming more difficult. More

 

At UN debate, Kiribati’s President urges increased efforts to mitigate impact of rising seas

26 September 2012 – The President of Kiribati, a mainly low-lying Pacific archipelago that is one of the states most threatened by rising seas, today appealed to the United Nations to step up efforts to curb global greenhouse emissions and help in mitigation measures, including possible migration.

President Anote Tong

“We are grateful that the General Assembly agrees that climate change is a matter warranting the attention of the Security Council,” Kiribati’s President Anote Tong told the UN General Assembly on the second day of its annual General Debate, at UN Headquarters in New York.

“I applaud the commitment of our Secretary-General to this particular security threat, but he needs the support of all nations to take the necessary action to address it. We must step up our collective efforts to mitigate global greenhouse gas emissions,” he said.

The Kiribati leader called on development partners to provide resources and technology to enable his country to deal with the current impacts of climate change and prepare for an uncertain future.

“While we are taking adaptation measures to ensure that Kiribati remains habitable for as long as possible, we are also preparing for a future where our islands may no longer be able top sustain our population,” President Tong stated in his speech.

“We are looking to improve the skills of our people to a level where they are able to compete for jobs in the international labour market. We want our people to have the option to migrate with dignity should the time come that migration is unavoidable. And all the science is telling us that it is just a matter of time,” he said.

He added, “I frequently find myself watching my grandchildren and wondering what sort of a future we are leaving them.”

President Tong is one of scores of world leaders and other high-level officials presenting their views and comments on issues of individual national and international relevance at the Assembly’s General Debate, which ends on 1 October. More

Full text of President Anote Tong's UN address Click Here PDF

 

Entire nation of Kiribati to be relocated over rising sea level threat

The low-lying Pacific nation of Kiribati is negotiating to buy land in Fiji so it can relocate islanders under threat from rising sea levels.

In what could be the world's first climate-induced migration of modern times, Anote Tong, the Kiribati president, said he was in talks with Fiji's military government to buy up to 5,000 acres of freehold land on which his countrymen could be housed.

Some of Kiribati's 32 pancake-flat coral atolls, which straddle the equator over 1,350,000 square miles of ocean, are already disappearing beneath the waves.

Most of its 113,000 people are crammed on to Tarawa, the administrative centre, a chain of islets which curve in a horseshoe shape around a lagoon.

"This is the last resort, there's no way out of this one," Mr Tong said.

"Our people will have to move as the tides have reached our homes and villages."

Mr Tong said the plan would be to send a trickle of skilled workers first, so they could merge more easily with the Fijian population and make a positive contribution to that country's economy.

"We don't want 100,000 people from Kiribati coming to Fiji in one go," he told the state-run Fiji One television channel.

"They need to find employment, not as refugees but as immigrant people with skills to offer, people who have a place in the community, people who will not be seen as second-class citizens.

"What we need is the international community to come up with an urgent funding package to deal with that ambition, and the needs of countries like Kiribati." More