The Attacking Ocean (29 page)

Figure 12.3
The Pacific Islands.

The Tuvalu government is profoundly concerned about global warming and rising sea levels, which threaten to submerge the entire country. Even without sea level rises, the islands are extremely vulnerable to destructive wave action. For instance, the construction of a World War II airfield on the Islands of Funafuti involved the building of piers, infilling beach areas, and excavating deepwater access channels. These humanly made alterations in the 1940s changed local wave patterns, so much so that much less sand now accumulates to form and replenish beaches. Hungry waves now devour and erode the shore even faster than before.

Apart from rising sea levels, there are also concerns about so-called king tide events, exceptionally high tides that occur at the end of the southern summer and raise sea levels above normal high tide limits. Even without factoring in rising sea levels, such tides already flood low-lying areas, including the airport. A belt of narrow storm dunes lies on the ocean side of the islands, the highest ground on Tuvalu. But occasional
cyclones topple these formations, again increasing the islanders’ vulnerability to rising seas—and more frequent severe weather events are forecast for the future. High tides and cyclones cause enough disruption before one factors in an estimated sea level rise of twenty to forty centimeters over the next century, which could render Tuvalu uninhabitable.

With the population having more than doubled since 1980 and a history of poor coastal management, Tuvalu’s future as a self-sustaining country is, at best, uncertain. Small islands like Tuvalu have few options. There is nowhere to retreat to, nor is it even marginally economical to build seawalls or to reclaim land in the face of the encroaching ocean. There remains relocation, perhaps moving to another island or to Australia, New Zealand, or elsewhere where there is space to absorb thousands of islanders. Just as in other places, there are deep ancestral ties to the islands, which means that at present very few Tuvalans leave their homeland permanently, perhaps no more than seven people out of every thousand. Seasonal employment in agriculture in New Zealand is accessible to up to five thousand workers from Tuvalu and other Pacific islands, with talk of expanding the scheme to Australia, but this does not offer a permanent solution for a vanishing archipelago.

Some commentators have called for the relocation of the entire population to Australia, New Zealand, or to Kioa Island near Vanua Levu, a major island in the Fijian archipelago. Kioa has been a freehold for settlers from Tuvalu since 1947. However, a mass migration to the island bristles with economic and political difficulties, and is not on the immediate horizon. Former Tuvalu prime minister Maatia Toafa has pointed out that the government does not consider the threat sufficient to evacuate everybody. Of more immediate concern is a serious shortfall in freshwater supplies, especially during droughts caused by La Niña. A long dry spell in 2011 led to water rationing, households on the capital atoll of Funafuti being limited to two buckets a day. Desalinization plants are likely to be the dominant water source in future centuries—if the islands are still inhabited. Fortunately, unlike some other Pacific islands, Tuvalu has a guarantee from New Zealand that land and space
will be found for everyone on the islands if such a dire situation as permanent abandonment arises.

THIRTY-TWO ATOLLS AND a single raised coral island comprise the tiny nation of Kiribati in the central Pacific, none of them more than two to three meters above sea level.
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Nearly 113,000 people live on twenty-one of these islands, scattered over three and a half million square kilometers, most of them on the principal island, Tarawa, where there is severe overcrowding. One of the poorest nations on earth, Kiribati is on the front-lines of global climate change, for sea level rise may submerge the islands within a few generations. Here, the coast
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Kiribati. In an era of more frequent storms and sea surges, also higher waves, the islands are under constant attack. Official tidal records chronicle a sea level rise of about three millimeters a year since 1992, but such readings can be problematic as periodic El Niño events raise sea levels, while La Niñas bring smaller rises or even slight falls.

Rising seas are but part of the problem. The extreme weather events that accompany them are far more damaging, if a projected fifty-centimeter rise—perhaps a conservative estimate—transpires. Coastal erosion is already pervasive. High waves, some 3.5 meters high, sweep over seawalls, topple coconut and papaya trees, and flood houses and gardens. A World Bank report projects that between a quarter and a half of the southern portions of Tarawa, where over half the population lives, will be inundated by 2050. As much as 80 percent of the northern areas could vanish under rising sea levels and storm surges in the same time frame. The measured statistics provide sobering data, but they also mask a much more volatile situation. Events such as exceptionally high king tides are sweeping farmland out to sea and devastating villages, as well as contaminating freshwater wells. People who have lost their houses to the ocean are moving to slightly higher ground, but all too often there is nowhere to go. Saltwater intrusion is already affecting taro crops, which are sensitive to changes in groundwater, as are coconut trees, which provide copra, dried coconut meat, a major component in Kiribati’s economy. As the land area diminishes in the face of the Pacific and seawater
contaminates wells, the islanders face serious water shortages, even after building a network of boreholes that are fast drawing down an underground freshwater lense under Tarawa, formed by percolating rainwater.

Kiribatans have a profound attachment to the land of their ancestors, but they face a future of limited options like their distant neighbors on Tuvalu. The islanders have adapted about as far as they can, given a population density on Tarawa of about three times that of Tokyo, around fifteen thousand people per square kilometer. There are some seawalls, but to construct the kinds of massive defenses that would be needed to curb storm surges is unaffordable. There is but one long-term solution: out-migration, organized not haphazardly, but in a controlled manner. Talk of constructing artificial islands like oil rigs at an estimated cost of about two billion dollars each went nowhere. The government is now talking of purchasing about 2,400 hectares of land on the island of Vitu Levu in Fiji to relocate environmental refugees.

Rising sea levels are part of a much more complex problem, something so imperceptible that many Kiribatans do not consider it a threat. It is, after all, hard to believe that much of Kiribati, or Tuvalu for that matter, will be underwater within less than a century. Rapidly growing island populations, contaminated water supplies, and the loss of agricultural land to exceptionally high tides and sea surges are immediate concerns. So are flooded houses and villages, and receding coastlines. Food resources are under stress. A combination of all these factors limits the islanders’ options severely, to the point that in the final analysis possible solutions all revolve around out-migration, however unwilling Kiribatans are to face it. Where will refugees go? At this point, no one knows.

The Australian government is supporting the training of small numbers of young Kiribatan people in employable skills like nursing, on the assumption that they will remain in Australia instead of returning to their overpopulated, threatened homeland. The president of Kiribati supports this program, which he calls “migrating with dignity.” Such limited schemes provide economic incentives for people to move away gradually so they have time to adapt and build Kiribatan communities elsewhere. However, the migration issue is far larger than a few training
programs, and is compounded by the refusal of many islanders to believe that there is a sea level problem. Many of them, devout Christians, believe that God will raise the islands a little higher, then higher, so that they, and their descendants, will live in peace.

KIRIBATI AND TUVALU are but two of many Pacific islands that face uncertain futures in the face of the ocean. Such islands have formed an intergovernmental organization of low-lying coastal and small island nations, the Alliance of Small Island States.
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This active lobbying group argues that serious attention should be paid to mitigating the effects of greenhouse gas emissions and urges support for its members’ attempts to mitigate the effects of rising sea levels and other facets of global warming. Fourteen Pacific island states are members, as are the Comoros Islands, Mauritius, the Seychelles, and the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean.

The Maldives, a nation of about 1,190 islands covering an area of ninety thousand square kilometers, are a tourist paradise of dazzlingly clear turquoise waters, shimmering white beaches, and pristine coral reefs. The islands lie no more than 2.4 meters above sea level. Some are coral atolls, others islands covered with lush tropical vegetation and reef-ringed lagoons. Three hundred thousand people live here, on some of the lowest inhabited land on earth.

For many centuries, the Maldives were a crossroads astride ancient Indian Ocean trade routes that linked them with India and Sri Lanka. Maldive cowrie shells became a major form of barter currency throughout much of Asia and as far afield as the East African coast for many centuries.
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Little is known of the earliest inhabitants, who probably arrived from India or Sri Lanka and appear to have lived in transitory settlements. Buddhism spread to the Maldives during the third century B.C.E., probably during the reign of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka the Great, when the religion diffused far beyond the boundaries of his empire centered on the Ganges River. Fourteen centuries later, Buddhism gave way to Islam, which arrived from India’s Malabar Coast, a hub of the Indian Ocean trade. Islamic interest in the islands revolved around
the cowrie shell trade. Portuguese merchants established a small trading post supervised from Goa on the Indian mainland in 1558, but they were soon driven out. Both the Dutch, who had replaced the Portuguese as the dominant power on Sri Lanka, and the British, who expelled them in 1796, established hegemony over the Maldives, but did nothing to involve themselves in local affairs. Eventually the islands became a British Protectorate from 1887 until 1953, when the Maldives achieved independence and became a republic rather than a sultanate. Since then, the islands’ history has occasionally been turbulent, its economy boosted by a burgeoning tourist industry that capitalizes on the great natural beauty of the islands. But that beauty is under siege from climbing sea levels.

At the Kyoto climate change conference in 1997, former Maldives president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom said, “What you will do or not do here will greatly influence the fate of my people. It can also change the course of world history.”
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One cannot imagine the inundation of the Maldives Islands changing world history, but no one can deny that the nation’s 2.4-meter-high domains are extremely vulnerable, not only to rising sea levels, but also to exceptionally high tides.
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In 1987, such a tide flooded Malé, the capital. Nineteen years later, and at huge expense, then-president Gayoom increased the height of Hulhumalé Island as a place of refuge by using a giant dredge to suck up sand from the ocean floor into a shallow lagoon. He built a hospital, apartments, and government buildings. Several thousand people live there: Gayoom wanted fifty thousand to make it home. Rare events, like the great Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, also cause havoc on low-lying Maldivian atolls. Eighty-two people died and twelve thousand were displaced by the surging waves, which also did millions of dollars of damage to luxury resorts. In 2008, then-president Mohamed Nasheed announced a plan to purchase land in Sri Lanka or India to resettle the Maldive Islanders, but nothing has yet come of this idea.

No one knows what will happen when sea levels rise to the point when the Maldives lose significant land. The three hundred thousand people living on the islands—and the population is increasing—are already finding themselves competing for ever-shrinking space, while,
inevitably, the tourist economy will slowly implode in the face of the ocean.
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Maldivian fisheries, a staple of the economy and a primary food source for the islanders, are already in decline, thanks to pollution and coral destruction. The options for the future are at best limited, for expensive sea defenses or even floating islands are far beyond the resources of the government, even with substantial foreign assistance. Will there be violence in a country short of land where authoritarian rule has a long history, despite democratic experiments? Or will the entire population have to leave the sinking islands and settle elsewhere? There is even talk of the country suing the United States for not doing enough to combat global warming and rising sea levels. In the real world, however, the islanders will probably continue to occupy their homes until the bitter end, for to move away is always heart wrenching and to be avoided at all costs.