Rising sea level puts island nations like Nauru at risk
December 5, 2012 -- Updated 0205 GMT (1005 HKT)
(File photo) The island is 21 square kilometers and has a population of 10,000, almost all of whom live on the coast.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Lands in the Alliance of Small Island States are disappearing amid rising sea levels
- The Alliance is pressing for action at the current Climate Change conference
- The warming climate also produces more extreme storms and affects fishing
- Alliance members do not sound optimistic about the conference
"The weather patterns
were predictable," he says. "There was a wet season and a dry season, an
annual cycle. When there was drought, it was limited."
"Now it's different," he
tells CNN. "There's no predictability -- periods of drought can last
seven or eight years, and when we get storms they are more intense. The
coastline is being eroded. Now the sea is right up to people's
doorsteps."
Keke is now foreign
minister of Nauru, and leads the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS)
at the current U.N. Climate Change conference in Doha, Qatar. The
Alliance is fighting a David-and-Goliath battle with the world's biggest
polluters -- trying to shame them into tougher action to limit
emissions and curb the warming of the planet.
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The 43 members of the
Alliance include countries that are literally disappearing amid rising
sea levels. And they accuse the likes of India, China and the United
States of not addressing climate change with enough urgency.
The Inter-Governmental
Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 that sea levels would rise between
seven and 23 inches (18 and 59 centimeters) this
century, but a rate of ice-melt in the Arctic that is much faster than
anticipated has prompted many scientists to raise the projection to
about one meter, more than three feet.
Among those most
threatened are the Marshall Islands, halfway between Hawaii and Papua
New Guinea. The highest point on the 29 atolls and five islands is 33
feet (10 meters) above sea level. The capital, Majuro, is just three
feet above sea level and was inundated by high tides four years ago.
"Low-lying atolls across the Pacific are slowly vanishing," Keke says.
In Nauru, too, people
don't have many places to go. The island -- which on satellite imagery
looks like a white pebble in the deep blue expanse of the Pacific -- is
eight square miles (21 square kilometers) and has a population of some
10,000, almost all of whom live on the coastline. The highest point is
200 feet above sea level, but much of the interior has been ravaged by
the effects of phosphate mining. And the nearest neighbors are some 180
miles (almost 300 kilometers) away.
Keke says the Alliance
wants the 190-odd delegations in Doha to "ramp up their ambitions"
because current scientific projections about the warming planet will
otherwise wipe out a number of low-lying states. But time is pressing.
The Kyoto Protocol, the only binding international agreement on
emissions, expires in less than four weeks. And the Doha conference is
due to end later this week.
"Some countries are
ready to sign up for a second commitment period to Kyoto," which would
last from 2013 to 2020, Keke says. Among them the European Union and
Australia. But Canada, Russia and Japan are among governments that have
already said they won't sign onto an extension of Kyoto, a stance that
Keke says is "very disappointing."
They are demanding that
countries like China and India -- now the first and third emitters of
greenhouse gases -- to be bound by new targets, along with the
industrialized world.
China and India, as
developing nations, were excused from the commitment adopted at Kyoto by
some 40 developed nations to cut their carbon emissions by 5% by this
year, compared with the level in 1990.
Measuring sea levels
among the Pacific islands -- and trying to establish trends -- is
complicated by the effects of the weather systems known as El Nino and
La Nina, according to climatologists. But beyond the threat of higher
sea levels, the warming climate produces more extreme storms, and more
acidic water bleaches coral reefs.
Then there are the fish.
Many of these island states rely on fishing to survive and as a source
of revenue, but as ocean temperatures warm, fish move. Tuna don't like
it hot and swim toward cooler, nutrient-rich waters. A paper prepared
this year by the Secretariat of the Pacific Community forecasts that
currents and changes in water temperature will mean that "tuna are
likely to move progressively toward the east" -- away from the islands
of Oceania.
"Traditional food sources and ways of living will be at risk," Keke says.
AOSIS is asking U.N.
officials at Doha not to allow this conference -- the 17th since the
Kyoto Protocol was adopted in 1997 -- to degenerate into a last-minute
take-it-or-leave-it declaration, as have previous sessions of the U.N.
Framework on Climate Change. But these conferences have a habit of
coming to life only when the main players turn up in the final days, and
past meetings have led to shallow agreements that revised the process
of negotiation rather than established real commitments.
Whether Doha will be
much different, and whether Keke and his colleagues from the Alliance of
Small Island States will see a glimpse of hope on the horizon, may
become clearer by the end of this week.
At present they don't
sound very optimistic, releasing a statement Monday that reads: "We
begin the final week of negotiations in Doha with the sober recognition
that time is running out to prevent the loss of entire nations and other
calamities in our membership and around the world."
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