Tuvalu: first casualty of climate change
We must ensure that Tuvalu is our only casualty. To that end, the global response to the displacement of peoples must not be ad hoc. Climate change and sea-level rise should force all of us to face up to our complicity in destroying cultures and the need to accept responsibility for ensuring the safekeeping of a people. We should set up funds for those who are losing their homes. This could be handled by the U.N. High Commissioner on Refugees. Given the enormous contributions by industrialized nations to climate change, institutions like the Group of Eight could set up a fund for environmental refugees. Additionally, there will have to be programs to support the settlement and cultural adaptation of the refugees.
For the Pacific Islanders, fairness is irrelevant. Climate change is not a future concern; it is an immediate national security threat. A diaspora of a people is being created. It is difficult to understand what this means.
The Tuvalu islands are only the first casualties of climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, predicts a 50-cm to 1-meter rise in sea levels over the next century. A rise of 1 meter would place 17.5 percent of Bangladesh, 6 percent of the Netherlands, and 80 percent of Atoll Majuro of the Marshall Islands under water, according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCC. Low-lying coastal zones of developed countries and small islands could also be seriously effected. While some holdouts challenge the IPCC, it represents a comprehensive and authoritative group of more than 1,000 experts and the overwhelming majority opinion.
The disappearance of Tuvalu introduces a host of other questions that need to be dealt with and fast. What will become of the Tuvalu people's territorial waters? What happens when more of these island nations disappear, potentially displacing 7 million people? What are the economic and security implications of disappearing exclusive economic zones? Can there be compensation for the loss of a country, its history, its culture, its way of life? How do we put a price on that? Who will pay it?
It's too late for Tuvalu, a small island nation in the Pacific. Ten thousand people, Tuvalu's entire population, are packing their bags as their homes among nine low-level atolls are being swallowed by the rising sea. These are the facts of life: The Earth is warming, sea levels are rising, and Tuvalu is quietly being erased from the surface of the Earth.
Leo Falcam, president of the Federated States of Micronesia, made an impassioned plea to senior policy leaders in Hawaii last week to create policies that will curb global warming. He cautioned that the Pacific Islanders' "early experience with real consequences of global warming has been considered analogous to the canary in the coal mine -- providing an early warning to the global community of its own impending doom."
The Tuvaluan people need to build new lives in a new land. Australia and New Zealand have begun to take in environmental refugees, but they will have to adjust to the cultures that will surround them. After having lived in relative isolation, difficulties are inevitable. Tuvalu is a small, largely homogeneous nation. Its population is 96 percent Polynesian, of whom 97 percent belong to the Church of Tuvalu. There are no mobile phones, one radio station, and one Internet service provider. Most remarkably, there are no regular military forces for the island nation. This country is so secure and so small that it did not anticipate a need to defend its territory.
The problems are acute. On one hand, Tuvaluan people have to think about their future. They will enter into a world that is not their own. The burden of maintaining their culture and religion without a geographic center will be set upon them.
While developed nations quibble over the details of the Kyoto Protocol, Tuvalu islanders are literally losing their homeland. To the United State and other developed nations, it is a question of fairness. They are focused on how to apportion the burden of responding to the threat. Developed nations argue that developing nations like India and China will be the leading creators of greenhouse gases in a decade or two. For U.S. negotiators, any framework that doesn't take this development into account is unfair.
On the other hand, the Tuvaluans will need to preserve their past. The collective memory of a small society will be cleaved as its people are forced to take refuge in separate lands. And memory is all that the Tuvaluans will have left of their homeland. Their burial grounds, their schools, their homes, their churches will be enveloped by the ocean. The Tuvaluans can never go home again.
Amid the clamoring for international consensus on protocols and pacts, we must heed Falcam's statement that "climate change . . . is nothing less than a form of slow death."
Rising sea levels are only part of the problems that are caused by climate change. The 1.4- to 5.8-degree (centigrade) rise over the next century will also increase flooding, the intensity of storms, and droughts in Asia and Africa. It will also change the distribution of rainfall. This is only the tip of the rapidly melting iceberg.
Eun Jung Cahill Che