Ever Get that Sinking Feeling?

For many island-dwellers in the South Pacific, clustered on tiny islands and narrow atolls, global warming is a catastrophe in the making… of titanic proportions. The uptick in nasty typhoons, also attributed to rising global temperatures, only accelerates the process. With melting glaciers and polar ice caps, the reality of rising oceans has a particularly harsh impact on these low-lying oceanic outposts where there is no higher ground to escape to. Off the Australian coast, for example, there are six little islands that have gone from bad to worse: “Part of Australia is being regularly inundated yet the people affected feel like they're being ignored... For nearly a decade communities in the Torres Strait have been asking the [Australian] Federal Government for funding to build seawalls... Climate projections suggest six low-lying islands will only get worse and the people fear that secret plans are being made to abandon the islands.” ABC.net.au (Australian Broadcasting), March 2^nd.

The Maldives gets slammed really hard when tsunamis roll across their archipelago, such as the disaster that struck in December of 2004: “[A]t least 82 people were killed and 26 unaccounted for from a population just over 270,000, according to the Maldives Disaster Management Center. Sixty-nine islands were completely flooded and a further 30 islands half flooded.” From a 2008 CNN report. According to that report, there is a “very likely possibility that the Maldives will sink under water if the current pace of climate change keeps raising sea levels... The Maldives is an archipelago of almost 1,200 coral islands located south-southwest of India. Most of the islands lie just 4.9 feet (1.5 meters) above sea level.”

As rising saltwater tides decimated the fertile land in Papua New Guinea’s Carteret Islands, thousands of locals were relocated to nearby Bougainville Island. A similar fate awaits islanders off the coast of New Zealand as well as the Solomon Islands. There are other ways that some islanders are preparing for what may be unavoidable. Take for example the leaders of the tiny Pacific island equatorial nation of Kiribati (near the International Date Line; noted in red on the map above), who are watching the seas rise and feeling the impact of increasingly ferocious storms with more than a little apprehension.

What’s their solution? “Kiribati President Anote Tong told The Associated Press on [March 9^th] that his Cabinet this week endorsed a plan to buy nearly 6,000 acres on Fiji's main island, Viti Levu. He said the fertile land, being sold by a church group for about $9.6 million, could be insurance for Kiribati’s entire population of 103,000, though he hopes it will never be necessary for everyone to leave.” Huffington Post, March 9^th. This option is definitely less expensive than building sea walls, but the pressure to move inland is nothing new to these islanders: “Tong said some villages have already moved and there have been increasing instances of sea water contaminating the island's underground fresh water, which remains vital for trees and crops ...

“Fiji, home to about 850,000 people, is about 1,400 miles south of Kiribati. But just what people there think about potentially providing a home for thousands of their neighbors remains unclear. Tong said he's awaiting full parliamentary approval for the land purchase, which he expects in April, before discussing the plan formally with Fijian officials.” Huffington Post. And we think we’ve got problems!

Oh, we do, actually. “[N]ew research [a study on sea level rise led by Dr. Strauss for the nonprofit organization Climate Central published on March 14^th by the journal Environmental Research Letters] calculates the size of the [U.S.] population living within one meter, or 3.3 feet, of the mean high tide level, as estimated in a new tidal data set from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the lower 48 states, that zone contains 3.7 million people today, the papers estimate, a figure exceeding 1 percent of the nation’s population… Under current coastal policies, the population and the value of property at risk in that zone are expected to continue rising… The land below the 3.3-foot line is expected to be permanently inundated someday, possibly as early as 2100, except in places where extensive fortifications are built to hold back the sea.” New York Times, March 14^th. It seems that the federal government is considering excluding such properties from coverage under available national flood insurance policies, so taxpayers don’t subsidize expensive coastal properties that the fed believe inevitably will be inundated.

I’m Peter Dekom, and it is probably too late to stop the damage from rising seas, but in a world where the industrialized nations made fortunes from fossil-fuel-driven economies, it is interesting as who is picking up the dollar tab for the damage.