While world leaders from wealthy countries acknowledge the “existential threat” of climate change, Tuvaluan Prime Minister Kausea Natano is racing to save his tiny island nation from drowning by raising it 4m to 5m above sea level through land reclamation.
While experts issue warnings about the eventual uninhabitability of the Marshall Islands, President David Kabua must reconcile the inequity of a seawall built to protect one house that is now flooding another one next door.
That is the reality of climate change: Some people get to talk about it from afar, while others must live it every day.
Photo: AFP
Natano and Kabua tried to show that reality on Wednesday on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly. Together, they launched the Rising Nations Initiative, a global partnership aimed to preserve the sovereignty, heritage and rights of Pacific atoll island nations whose very existence have been threatened by climate change.
Natano described how rising sea levels have affected everything from the soil that his people rely on to plant crops, to the homes, roads and power lines that get washed away.
DISAPPEARING NATIONS
The cost of eking out a living eventually becomes too much to bear, causing families to leave and the nation itself to disappear, he said.
“This is how a Pacific atoll dies,” Natano said. “This is how our islands will cease to exist.”
The Rising Nations Initiative seeks a political declaration by the international community to preserve the sovereignty and rights of Pacific atoll island countries; the creation of a comprehensive program to build and finance adaptation and resilience projects to help local communities sustain livelihoods; a living repository of the culture and unique heritage of each Pacific atoll island country; and support to acquire UNESCO World Heritage designation.
The initiative has already gained the support of countries like the US, Germany, South Korea and Canada, all of which have acknowledged the unique burden that island nations like Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands must shoulder.
A UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released in February spelled out the vulnerability of small island developing states and other global hotspots like Africa and South Asia, whose populations are 15 times more likely to die from extreme weather compared with less vulnerable parts of the world.
If warming exceeds a few more 10ths of a degree Celsius, it could lead to some areas — including some small islands — becoming uninhabitable, said report coauthor Adelle Thomas of Climate Analytics and the University of the Bahamas.
NOT AT FAULT
On Wednesday, Natano said that Tuvalu and its Pacific neighbors “have done nothing to cause climate change,” with their carbon emission contribution amounting to less than 0.03 percent of the world’s total.
“This is the first time in history that the collective action of many nations will have made several sovereign countries uninhabitable,” he said.
Representatives from other nations who attended Wednesday’s event did not deflect responsibility.
However, whether they will do enough to turn things around remains to be seen.
Several have pledged money to help island nations pay for early warning systems, and bring their buildings up to code to better protect them from hurricanes and other weather events.
However, there was less talk of mitigating the problem of climate change and more about how to adapt to the devastation it has already wrought.
“We see this train coming, and it’s coming down the track, and we need to get out of the way,” International Organization for Migration deputy director-general Amy Pope said.
German State Secretary and Special Envoy for International Climate Action Jennifer Morgan, who also attended Wednesday’s event, spoke of her country’s target to reach carbon neutrality by 2045.
However, while Germany remains committed to phasing out coal as a power source by 2030, it has had to reactivate coal-fired power plants to get through the coming winter amid energy shortages as a result of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
GREATER EFFORT
For the president of the Marshall Islands, wealthy nations could be doing much more.
During his speech at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, Kabua urged world leaders to take on sectors that rely on fossil fuels, including aviation and shipping.
He pointed to the Marshall Islands’ carbon levy proposal for international shipping that he says “will drive the transition to zero-emission shipping, channeling resources from polluters to the most vulnerable.”
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