My Say
Big Waves Stir Up the Region
Recent earthquakes centred in northern Papua New Guinea stirred up waves that flooded parts of the Duke of York Islands and Raba
Recent earthquakes centred in northern Papua New Guinea stirred up waves that flooded parts of the Duke of York Islands and Rabaul. They warranted the issue of a tsunami warning for other countries, but fortunately none were affected.
As they embark on their voyage through the 21st century, the islands of Oceania will encounter a procession of other waves, some big tsunamis included. Some waves are potentially of a magnitude sufficient to founder countries not readied to ride them out.
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One is HIV-AIDS. This disease has reared up mightily in Papua Guinea and is more than a ripple in French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Fiji and in parts of Micronesia.
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At a political level and still even at the medical one, too many island governments remain oblivious to HIV-AIDS. How dismaying. It is a wave capable of shattering their societies.
The islands feel the waves of uneasiness caused by the climate change debate and whether the level of the ocean will rise at a rate sufficient to submerge big areas of low lying land, and even the entire atoll countries, in the not-so-distant future.
Last November’s Pacific Islands Forum meeting at Tarawa received a report from Australian scientists that 10 years of research by them—although at least another 10 and preferably 20 more years of data are needed—give no indication that Pacific sea levels are rising any faster (about seven millimetres a year) than they have done since the last Ice Age.
If that is so then such countries as Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands have rather more breathing space for preparing to cope with inundation than the 50 to 100 years that pessimistic forecasts suggested.
Although the South Pacific Islands receive only a million visitors a year, a total reached only two years ago, talk of whether they could be overwhelmed by a wave of tourism has been audible since the 1980s.
Rarotonga, now hosting just 60,000 visitors a year, may have reached that threshold. The sewage systems of “house full” hotels are packing up under the strain of boom time business. Some Rarotongans argue that further growth of tourism on the islands should be halted.
Large destinations like Fiji and French Polynesia are capable of absorbing many more tourists. But while all islands governments now treat tourism as an economic necessity, they wonder whether the global wave of tourism could swell to a height great enough to unbalance and overwhelm the cultures of their distinctive societies.
At their recent annual meeting, Pacific Islands police chiefs agreed that as a place of relative innocence compared with supposedly more sophisticated, but really meaning older, badder parts of world, their region is a target for a wave of electronic crime, money laundering anddrug and people smuggling.
“The impact of money laundering in the Pacific could potentially seriously affect islands nations in the future,” a statement from the meeting warned. Oceania is being rocked by waves of unrest from political difficulties in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Fiji. The region isn’t as calm as it was. Waves of social stress affect a lengthening list of Island societies in which joblessness, poverty and crime, are burgeoning as significant social indicators.
Since the mid-1990s, Pacific Islands governments individually and collectively, have embarked on a wave of essential, if difficult and painful, government and economic reforms. It is still too early to hope that all will be unqualified successes. But the fact that Pacific Islanders are riding into the 21st century on them is just cause for feeling a wave of optimism.
