The Copenhagen Climate Conference was significant for all, but none as much as the Pacific Islands, whose people will lose their homes, culture and livelihoods in the near future. May Slater reports.

Locals campaign against climate change. Picture: 350.org.

Akka Rimon greets her Sydney audience with a traditional I-Kiribati blessing “Te Mauri, Te Raoiao Te Tabomoa”. It means health, peace and prosperity for all. “This is something that we believe strongly in, something we believe everyone is entitled to,” she says.

Akka is here to tell the story of her changing island home, Kiribati, a string of 33 coral atolls and coconut palms straddling 4000km of the equator. It’s a fitting tale for a forum called ‘The Human Face of Climate Change’, but it’s a story she finds difficult to tell.

“When I was asked to speak here I wasn’t really sure whether I should be excited or sad because these issues are so close to my heart.” Her story, she says, “is about the waves, climbing over the walls, climbing over my island one day.”

In Kiribati, a nation of 110,000 people, ideals of collective health, peace and prosperity are being washed out with the King tides. “We are tiny” Rimon says, “but we’re at the forefront of climate change.”

Rising sea levels, a warmer, more acidic ocean and extreme weather events are making life on the islands untenable. And in response, her people are preparing to leave.

“Maybe we will still be there when our grandchildren grow up but I don’t know what will happen to us after this,” she said.

Scientists estimate they have fifty years before the atolls will properly drown. Akka thinks it’s more like thirty.

But the Islanders are already living out the flooded sci-fi future of Waterworld – just not in the Hollywood spotlights. On Kiribati, climate change is felt acutely, and every day. Water and food – basic to survival – have been affected most severely. As the sea pushes deeper into natural waterways, it is contaminating freshwater supplies and salt-soaking already arid soils.

“Our children collect water every day,” says Rimon. “In their quest, they now have to carry their buckets right into the middle of the island.”

They are also suffering new health problems from exposure to water borne diseases that hitch a ride on warmer currents and fester in stagnant inland pools.

Not much grows here; land is an already limited resource and more fragile plant life cowers in the face of greedy and temperamental tides. Locals depend on imported foods like rice, flour and sugar.

“We have coconuts and bwabwai (taro), what we call papaya, pandanus and breadfruit as our major substitutes,” says Rimon, “but when there’s a delay in a cargo ship arriving, then we’re in trouble.”

But perhaps the most obvious proof of Kiribati’s close fought battle with climate change are the deep scars of coastal erosion.

“Everywhere, you can see damage to the infrastructure, damage to the roads – the rate of our erosion is frightening because it’s faster than our capacity to repair the damage, to re-build homes and sea walls” says Rimon. “It’s amazing how nature is fighting back.”

The damage and the uncertainty are not unique to Kiribati. Dr Sarah Park, from the CSIRO Climate Change Adaptation program says “all countries in the Asia Pacific Region are vulnerable”. And that includes The Torres Straight Islands. Last year, Dr Park met with Pacific representatives in Fiji as part of an AusAid funded project to assess the impacts of climate change.

“Extreme events like the tsunamis we saw in Samoa will be more frequent and more severe,” she says. “Warmer water temperatures will increase the likelihood of cyclones and storms, which will especially affect the low-lying islands like Kiribati and Tuvalu.”

Park’s research aims to inform future adaptation strategies; improving food security, water management and access to health and education. She says migration, as a way of coping, is an extreme last resort. But the prospect is fast becoming a reality for many.

Cam Walker, National Climate Change Officer at non-profit organisation Friends of the Earth, says climate displacement in the Pacific region is happening, and the numbers of people fleeing their homelands will continue to grow.

“Compared to the rest of the world, numerically, it is not as big an issue as it’s going to be for other regions, particularly Africa and mainland Asia, but it’s going to be significant.”

Unfortunately, these real life refugees from the rising seas will not have a Kevin Costner raft to help them sail off in search of Dryland.

In April this year, The Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea became the first people in the world to officially relocate for environmental reasons. When whole communities began the move to mainland Bougainville, experts and activists dubbed them the world’s first ‘Climate Change Refugees’.

“In the Carterets” says Walker, “global warming has actually led to the collapse of the local food security. Rising sea levels matched with storm surges are impacting their food growing areas, their gardens – which means they’re dropping into malnutrition.” There was no alternative but to leave.

Other vulnerable Asian and Pacific nations are bracing themselves in similar ways against the creeping tides, unprecedented droughts and increasingly severe weather events. Like Papua New Guinea, the governments of Kiribati, Tuvalu and The Maldives are supporting their people to relocate.

Rimon says Kiribati’s long-term strategy is to upskill its people; putting training programs in place so that when the time comes to jump ship, they’ll be ready and able to swim with the best in the global economy.

“The government is trying to empower people to believe they can make a good life of themselves, wherever they are in the world,” she says.

Kiribati has already set up a number of skill building partnerships and labour mobility schemes with Australia and New Zealand. In one such program, about sixty young people are traveling each year to Australia to train under the Kiribati Australia Nursing Initiative. Another, The Pacific Access Scheme, allows Islanders to work in New Zealand for an extended temporary period. Rimon herself, who works in the Kiribati public service, is at Sydney University this year on an AusAid Leadership Award Scholarship, completing a Master of Public Administration.

“We want to migrate, not as second class citizens, but as skillful people, as worthwhile citizens,” she says. “We don’t want to be refugees of our own country and we don’t want to be a burden on other countries.”

More immediately, she believes what’s needed is a better understanding of climate change; of the small things individuals can do to slow the impact and adapt to the changes happening around them. Rimon says that while most I-Kiribati now jump at any chance to get out, there are others who don’t believe global warming is actually happening.

“We are strong Christians, some people believe these changes are happening because we have sinned, it’s God’s will. But most I-Kiribati believe in God’s rainbow promise to Noah that there will never be another flood,” she says.

Her concern is that there will be a second flood, and when it strikes, people need to know what to do. “Maybe the government should at least give out lifejackets to every household,” she suggests grimly.

A 2001 World Disasters Report by The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies revealed that more people in the world are now forced to leave their homes because of environmental disasters than war. By 2050, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that there will be 150 million environmental refugees worldwide.

How will Australia respond to a humanitarian catastrophe of such scale on our doorstep? Bill Clinton raised the question during a visit to Australia in 2001. It was the time of the Tampa affair, when the Howard government refused a Norwegian freighter carrying 438 rescued asylum seekers from entering Australian waters.

“If you’re worried about 400 people” he told Australians at a charity dinner, “you just let the world keep warming up like this for the next fifty years and your grandchildren will be worried about 400,000 people.” The number of displaced from the island states alone, is predicted to be more like one million.

Australia is one of the driest places on earth, with gasping riverbeds, a bleaching barrier reef and crumbling coastlines of our own. We’re currently turning asylum seekers away by the boatload, literally. But as the world’s largest per-capita greenhouse polluter, there is the notion that we have a responsibility to support our Pacific mates bearing the brunt of the effects of global warming.

Margaret Duckett, CEO of the Australian Foundation for the Peoples of Asia and the Pacific, thinks we definitely do.

“The proportion of carbon emissions from those 8 million people that make up all Pacific Island countries is three quarters of one percent of global emissions” she says. “Their contribution is miniscule, but they’re the ones suffering the most.”

Cam Walker says the Australian Government recognises climate displacement is happening but is reluctant to act ‘prematurely’. They say they have to wait for Pacific Island nations to ask for help with relocation, and that at present, they are not doing so. “And we say, ‘Well that’s like saying you don’t call the ambulance until the truck hits the wall!”

Last week at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, Tuvalu, Kiribati and other members of the Alliance of Small Island States lobbied hard for deeper emissions cuts and a new treaty to cap global temperatures at 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, as opposed to the 2 degrees being pushed by the big polluters.

But the government of Tuvalu has also asked for more immediate assistance from its wealthier neighbours.

“A number of the Pacific Island countries want to be set up and accepted as autonomous states within Australia or New Zealand” says Duckett. “They also want it acknowledged that they will retain ownership of the sea waters around where their countries used to be so that they maintain an economic base. Otherwise they, and their cultures, will disappear.”

Duckett says previous appeals for Australia and New Zealand to take the people of Tuvalu in as a whole community have fallen on deaf ears.

Paul Power, CEO of the Australian Council for Refugees, says current refugee solutions are not appropriate, and in fact, The Refugee Convention is under more pressure than it can bear.

“We need to be prepared for significant climate displacement and we need to find new mechanisms to respond to displacement on a much larger scale,” he says. “Here we have the opportunity to plan long term – It would be a great shame if our collective thinking about movements of people in the future isn’t lifted above and beyond the current way of thinking and responding to crisis situations.”

In October, in an attempt to raise awareness of their country’s plight, leaders of The Maldives pulled on wetsuits and scuba tanks to hold an underwater global warming meeting. The flippers of President Mohamed Nasheed and his 13 cabinet members came to rest, 10 metres below the surface, under office desks on the sandy ocean floor. With hand signals and water-proof whiteboards, they drafted an appeal to all countries to dramatically cut their emissions before the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference. The Maldives are the lowest lying country in the world; 20 of its islands have been evacuated in the last 15 years because of rising seas and devastating tsunamis.

‘I don’t know what works’ says Margaret Duckett of the dramatic publicity stunt, ‘but it is important to try and get some understanding, to inspire action. Not enough people are really aware of what’s happening.’

Many, including Akka Rimon, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, delegates of this year’s Pacific Islands Forum in Cairns and members of the Alliance of Small Island States in Copenhagen agree; the only policy to minimize the pain of a climate displacement crisis is a sharp reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, globally.

“It’s hard to think we’ll be victims of what other people are doing,” says Rimon. “Now our work is to yell to the world, to our big brothers and sisters, that we don’t have any time left.”

Does she believe migration is inevitable for her people? Rimon laughs and launches into another personal story. “Let me tell you what happened when two earthquakes struck Vanuatu just a few weeks ago” she says. “It was so close to home. We had tremors and alerts, Government offices were closed. In the news we hear of people in Vanuatu running to the mountains, to the highlands. But we in Kiribati have no place to run…which is really not a joke at all!”

Rimon spoke to her brothers back home. “I asked them; ‘So what are you doing?’ And they’re like, ‘Well, the stadium is filling up with children’. This is what the panic was like; everyone trying to get their children up on the stadium, to higher ground. And I’m wondering; how helpless is this?”

What she does know is that her people want to remain in Kiribati for as long as they can. “We look forward to the outcome of Copenhagen to assure ourselves we still have hope,” she says. “But at the end of our story, our islands will be submerged one day.”

It’s a reality that lends a galvanizing perspective to the notion of a climate change debate.

“For us” says Rimon, “Climate change is an issue concerning our basic rights to a happy, healthy quality of life. It is a threat to our very existence.”

“Te Mauri, Te Raoiao Te Tabomoa.”

May Slater is a postgraduate Journalism student from The University of Technology, Sydney.

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