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Approximately eight million native inhabitants of the Pacific islands will probably lose their homeland by 2050 if the climate change continues its present course. The Society for Threatened Peoples (GfbV) warned on Tuesday at the beginning of a three-day conference of the Pacific states in Cairns (Australia), at which the consequences of the climate change will be discussed in the light of a hitherto unknown exodus in many small Pacific states.
„For the native inhabitants in the Pacific the climate change is not just theory, but already noticeable in daily life”, reported the GfbV Asia consultant, Ulrich Delius. About 2,500 inhabitants of the Carteret Islands, a small group of islands in Papua New Guinea were already moved in the spring of 2009 to the island of Bougainville 120 km away, since their homeland is threatened with flooding. „It is above all on the many atolls lying not more than three metres above sea-level that fear is spreading.” States like Kiribati and Vanuatu, to which many of the low-lying atolls belong, are threatened with complete submersion. About half of the inhabitants of all Pacific island states live no more than 1.5 km from the coast. „So the rapidly rising sea-level is something affecting all islanders.”
Many inhabitants of the islands have already been looking for possibilities of moving to Australia or New Zealand. The governments of the island states have been desperately looking for perspectives for the survival of their states. Indonesia has recently offered the small Pacific states long-term leases of higher-lying islands.
The slow sinking of the islands into the sea is just one of the many alarming signs of the climate change in the region. The rising temperature of the sea is also causing an increasing number of devastating hurricanes on the islands. Pukapuka and Nassau, which belong to the Cook Islands, suffered in the year 2005 five hurricanes in as many weeks. Only ten percent of the houses survived this natural disaster without damage.
As a result of the rise in the temperature of the ocean the tuna swarms have been moving away from the islands into the largely uninhabited far south and north of the Pacific and so cannot be reached by the islanders, who traditionally live from fishery. The fishermen have therefore to concentrate more on the coral reefs, which are already over-fished. 25 percent of all coral reefs in the world are in the Pacific.
„Long before the islands are flooded life there will no longer be possible because the rising sea-level will attack the reserves of fresh water”, said Delius. The cultivation of crops will on many islands become increasingly difficult on account of the rising salt-water.
The GfbV Asia consultant, Ulrich Delius, can also be reached at u.delius@gfbv.de
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