World’s first climate change victims call for help
The U.N’s Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) has reported that inhabitants of the low-lying Carteret Islands, off the coast of New Guinea, have called for urgent assistance to help them combat the effects of climate change.
Seas levels have risen by an estimated 10cm in the past twenty years, and the rising waters have wrecked agriculture on the atoll by poisoning the soil and splitting islands in two. Inhabitants say they are fast running out of food including the staple of their diet, coconuts.
“Food gardens and coconut groves have been destroyed and children are going to school hungry,” Ursula Rakova, chief executive officer of Tulele Peisa, a local NGO advocating for the rights of islanders, told IRIN.
“It is extremely difficult now for food crops to grow on the atolls. Salt water seeps through the land making it impossible for food to grow,” Rakova said. “Breadfruit is seasonal and not as plentiful as it was 30 years ago and fruits are getting smaller in size … bananas struggle to grow in the salt-inundated land.”
Academics and climate researchers have long warned of the effect rising sea levels, linked to global warming, are having on low-lying islands such as the Carteret Atoll with reports appearing in the New Guinea newspapers The National and the Post-Courier in 2005.
The atoll’s 1,500 inhabitants are fast seeing their home disappear and have asked the world community to come to their aid. IRIN reports the islanders now fear a large tidal wave will completely inundate them, wiping them from their homeland forever.
“Carteret islanders are victims of climate change and rising sea levels,” Rakova said, “and industrialised nations have to support my people in their transition from the atolls to mainland Bougainville.”
“[We] need financial support and Tulele Peisa needs K800,000 [$280,000] to build 10 family homes on the land donated by the Catholic Church of Bougainville.”
The Papua New Guinea government responded to the islanders’ plight by allocating US$700,000 to assist in relocation programs in 2007 however this was “not enough to cater for all the atolls,” said Rakova.
The Carteret Islands are Papua New Guinea islands located 86 km (53 mi) north-east of Bougainville in the South Pacific. The atoll is a scattering of low lying islands in a horseshoe shape stretching 30 km (19 mi) in north-south direction, with a total land area of 0.6 square kilometers and a maximum elevation of 1.5 m (5 ft) above sea level.
The group is made up of islands called Han, Jangain, Yesila, Yolasa and Piul, and were collectively named after the British navigator Philip Carteret who discovered them in the sloop Swallow in 1767. As of 2005 about one thousand people live on the islands. Han is the most significant island with the others being small islets in the lagoon. The island is near the edge of the large geologic formation called the Ontong Java Plateau [source].
For further information see: Global warming effects on Carteret Islands Part 1
Global warming effects on Carteret Islands Part 2
Rich Bowden writes for The Hatchet’s Worldview blog.
Image: Carteret atoll as seen from the air. Credit: NASA