Letter from Majuro
Crying Wolf
The Pacific neds to be fighting the right climate change battles.
There is an oddly uniformed tenor to the complaint of some small islands about the impact of ocean level rise. At a Pacific leaders meeting in Hawaii in March, the prime minister of Tuvalu made an impassioned statement about how Tuvalu’s islands were fast disappearing under the rising tides brought about by climate change.
This grabbed headlines worldwide. But a follow-up story from the French news agency AFP contrasted the Tuvalu PM’s comments with the scientific data obtained by Australian researchers from a tidal gauge that was placed in Tuvalu 10 years ago. According to 10 years of daily data, there has been no sea level rise in Tuvalu.
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But for the Pacific, this is the wrong battle to be fighting. Given the long-term nature of the impact of climate change, we’d be surprised if there was significant ocean level rise at the present time. Secondly, to contend that all or even most atoll erosion is related to climate change seriously undermines the case that small islands are attempting to make at the international level. Why?
It’s like crying wolf. If Pacific officials continue to claim the current erosion problems are caused by global warming when they’re not, people will stop paying attention to the bigger picture question: if actions aren’t taken now to reduce the output of pollution globally, in the next 30 years or so, a difficult-to-reverse cycle of global climate changes will result in disaster for low-lying islands and coastal areas.
In every major urban center in small islands, from Majuro (Marshall Islands) to Tarawa (Kiribati) to Funafuti (Tuvalu), there is big environmental change, primarily from causeways that were built to link islands together, covering over natural ocean-to-lagoon water channels. Add to that a significant amount of dredging and seawall construction and the result is that the natural topography of these fragile atolls has been changed beyond recognition.
Along with the current man-made imprint on atoll environments, the early stages of climate change are evident. The record of the past few years demonstrates that global climate change is fostering more severe, and possibly more frequent, climate variations and storms. Severe El Niños and more powerful storms result. Stronger and more frequent weather events take their toll on small islands that often have few resources and marginal lands.
The Pacific area in general, and small islands in particular, are gaining wider international attention for a variety of unique needs. That interest shouldn’t be undermined with uninformed statements blaming all current atoll environmental problems on climate change.
—Contact Giff Johnson at: pacmag@ntamar.com
