Climate Justice by Mary Robinson

Author:Mary Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Anote Tong returned to his Pacific island nation following the 2009 Copenhagen climate change conference to tell his people that Kiribati was in peril of being engulfed by the sea. (© Matthieu Rytz/anotesark.com)

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MIGRATING WITH DIGNITY

As president of Ireland, I had the privilege of meeting with hundreds of thousands of Irish at home and abroad, and visiting thousands of community groups and organisations across the country. But I never had to return home from an international conference and tell the people of Ireland that our land might soon become uninhabitable because of the onslaught of climate change.

That’s what happened to Anote Tong, former president of the Republic of Kiribati, when he returned to his Pacific island nation following the Copenhagen climate change conference in December 2009. He had to tell his people that Kiribati was in peril of being engulfed by the sea. Kiribati—pronounced keer-i-bas in the local language—is made up of thirty-three coral atolls and reef islands, located on the equator about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. Scattered across an ocean area the size of Alaska, Kiribati’s many islands, home to slightly more than one hundred thousand people, reach at most barely six and a half feet above sea level. The latest climate models predict that melting polar ice and thermal expansion of warming seawater may cause the world’s oceans to rise by two to four feet by 2100. Nearly twenty years ago, because of its position on the international date line, Kiribati was the first country in the world to welcome in the new millennium. Now, in a tragic twist of fate, it may become the first one lost to the effects of climate change before the dawn of the next century.

In response to this threat, in 2014, Tong purchased about six thousand acres of forested land on Fiji’s second-largest island, Vanua Levu, one thousand miles away. Five years earlier, the Pacific nation of the Maldives—also threatened by rising sea levels—became the first country to consider moving its sovereign state when the Maldives government looked to India and Sri Lanka for potential land. Tong’s decision to spend $8 million on the Fiji land came in the wake of the fifth assessment report of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which confirmed—in the starkest tones yet—that small islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans risked total annihilation. “Coastal systems and low-lying areas will increasingly experience adverse impacts such as submergence, coastal flooding, and coastal erosion due to relative sea level rise,” the report stated. On South Tarawa, Kiribati’s six-square-mile capital island, where approximately fifty thousand people live, the land is so narrow that it is possible to stand in the middle of the island and see ocean on one side, and the lagoon on the other. In the run-up to the report’s release in March 2014, Kiribati had been inundated by a series of extreme “king tides,” which sent polluted seawater crashing into people’s homes, breaking apart their flimsy dwellings, and sending residents fleeing to higher ground.

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