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Disappearing islands

By Mark Hayes - posted Friday, 16 February 2007


In the tsunami of Australian coverage following the release of the latest scientific report on global warming, the Pacific has all but completely been overlooked.

The scientifically dense Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (PDF 2.2MB) - actually a summary of the best available science on global warming for policy makers - is the first of a series of three reports due for release during 2007. 

The next IPCC Report, due for release in early April, 2007, will focus on regional impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, and it's here that more attention will be paid to the Pacific.

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But it's in the Pacific that many of the effects of global warming have been experienced for many years. Sea level rise threatens the very existence of countries like Kiribati and Tuvalu.

"We should have acted a long time ago, and I think that any action that takes place now is dealing with the damage, not stopping the disaster," Kiribati President, Anote Tong, said in Tokyo just before the IPCC Report was released.

"It's just like any disaster, like a tsunami in Aceh, but it takes longer to happen. And because it takes longer, it doesn't seem to attract the same degree of attention."

Pacific Islanders are gravely worried for their and their children's futures, and for the future of their homes. They already experience, and endure, the effects of global warming daily.

Successive Tuvaluan governments, since at least 1997, have warned about the effects of global warming on their low lying, remote, and scattered island country, and successive Tuvaluan prime ministers have described global warming as “creeping terrorism” being done to them by the polluting, developed world.

For Pacific atoll countries, like Kiribati, and Tuvalu to the south, the major looming effect of global warming is sea level rise. But this isn't the only effect of global warming.

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On the boomerang shaped 12km-long capital atoll of the nine-atoll country of Tuvalu, Funafuti, the highest point of land is about 3.7m above mean high tide. My Tuvaluan friends laughed loudly when, as I stood on the nondescript surveyor's concrete circle tucked away on a side road near the hospital on central Funafuti, I declared, "I've climbed Mt Funafuti!"

Late on Tuesday afternoon, February 28, 2006, Funafuti recorded its highest ever high tide, at just over 3.48m. As the tide peaked, I was wading, knee deep, along a flooded road just south of Funafuti Airport, to talk to worried locals who'd never seen extreme high tide seepage at that part of the atoll. Only luck, and benign weather during the February, 2006, extreme high tide week, prevented their houses from being flooded.

The difference between the top of “Mt Funafuti” and 3.48 metres is less than the distance between my knees and the soles of my sandals.

At the time, the best available data, from an Australian tidal monitoring system with instruments strategically placed around the Pacific, including on Funafuti, showed the sea around the atoll had risen about 7cm over the past 13 years. While seas in the Pacific don't rise like water in a bath, so that Arctic and Antarctic ice melts don't necessarily cause sea level rises around places like Tuvalu, other factors, such as rising surface temperatures, and longer and more persistent El Nino events, contribute to creeping sea level rise.

The extreme February high tides are nothing new. Last year's record occurred as a new moon was closest to the earth for 16 years, pushing tides hard against Tuvalu's nine inhabited atolls. But sea level rise caused by global warming amplifies the impacts of the annual extreme tides.

The eastern, barren, scoured Pacific Ocean side of Funafuti Atoll is really weird. Locals don't go out there much, and neither do I when I'm “on island”. There's this deeply spooky feeling that the roiling ocean's out to get the atoll, battering it, nibbling at it, seeping underneath and then up through it, and when there's a storm surge or a tsunami from a cyclone or deep sea tremor far away, smashing into and over it, deeply frightening the 4,500 or so Tuvaluans crammed on the three square kilometre land area of the atoll.

The traditional staple food crop in Tuvalu, their version of potatoes, is a large swamp taro called Pulaka, which is grown in deep mulched pits dug into the atolls. Pulaka growing secrets are passed from father to son. Each year, they have Pulaka growing competitions, which are reported on Radio Tuvalu like fearsome sporting competitions.

The size of the winning Pulaka is extraordinary, as long as a metre or more and tens of kilos in weight.

But on Funafuti Atoll, thanks to sea water seepage underneath the atoll through cracks caused by World War II excavations and the building of the first air strip, the Pulaka is dying, and with it are important Tuvaluan traditions.

It's deeply saddening to stand with worried Elders looking at the Pulaka's elephantine green leaves tinged with yellow, a sure sign the Pulaka beneath the flooded pits is sick and even dying. Global warming hasn't caused this tragedy, but it certainly amplifies the sea water seepage which is poisoning the atolls from beneath.

Sitting with Elders in a Tuvaluan Fale (open sided, thatch roofed hut) is another way to learn about the effects of global warming there.

They tell how fish migrations have changed, and how the changes disrupt island traditions for catching and sharing different species from the catches. Coconut, pandanus, and breadfruit harvests aren't as bountiful. The winds, sea currents, and bird migrations seem wrong, not what they were in their ancestor's time.

The rains aren't coming like they used to, the Elders say. But when it does rain, the storms, walls of black cloud rising from the horizon, with bone and building rattling thunder and lightening cracks, often literally pour thick rain on to the atoll, also to cause widespread flooding because, with a saturated water table, the lens shaped reservoir beneath the atoll, there's nowhere for the fresh water to go but outwards. As it later seeps into the atoll, it turns into poison, mixing with contaminated brackish water also polluted from islander's septic tanks, useless, even dangerous, to use on local's gardens.

In between the storms, they get fresh water from tanks everywhere on the atoll, but when these run dry in an El Nino amplified drought, a hideously expensive desalination plant produces fresh water which is trucked around the 12km-long atoll so householders don't suffer thirst, at least children can be bathed, and toilets occasionally used.

Tuvaluans are a devoutly Christian people, and quite a few Elders believe God's promise in Genesis 9 to never again flood the Earth. Following an afternoon storm, a glorious rainbow can arc across the sky to the west, bracketing the Motu (islets) on the far western edge of Te Namo (the lagoon) some 18km away, reaffirming, at least for the more devout, that God's promise is still strong. All this talk about global warming and sea level rise threatening Tuvalu's very existence is just Palagi (white person, outsider) stuff.

The Faifeau (pastors), and most of their flock, also know that while God's promise remains strong, it's human wickedness, our sin, that's wrecking Tuvalu's environment. They teach that humanity has failed in our stewardship of God's good environment, placed in our care by Te Atua (the Almighty).

Out on the western edge of Te Namo, at Tepuka motu, standing on the remaining thick, pinky-white, coral sands, my friend Semese Alefaio, a conservation worker charged with the care of the motu, and I look at the heartbreaking sight of large coconut and pandanus palms fallen into the lagoon, as the motu's steadily eroded.

Not far away is a portent of the future, a brown, sea scoured, rock called Tepuka sa Vili Vili, once capped with thick tropical atoll forest like Tepuka and girded with dazzling coral sand beaches. Ten years ago, Tuvalu was brushed by a cyclone which seriously eroded the protective beach and damaged Tepuka sa Vili Vili's thick tropical atoll forest cap. The relentless, indefatigable Pacific Ocean battering the remains finished the job. Tuvaluans from Funafuti, who used to use these motu for picnics and ceremonies, talk about how their childhood playgrounds are slowly and steadily disappearing.

Sam's shown me coral bleaching where protective reefs are crumbling: the steady beach erosion around Funafuti and the outer motu is obvious as he steers the boat around Te Namo. Some of the erosion was caused during wartime but more recently port and coastal building has interrupted local sand replenishing currents. Some of it, he says, in his quiet Tuvaluan way, is caused and made worse by global warming's effects.

The situation isn't helped either by sensationalist, ignorant Palagi reporting, portraying Tuvaluans as passive victims of global warming. While the tides last year were extreme, record breaking, Tuvalu - a nine atoll country - and Funafuti Atoll itself, were not completely flooded by sea flowing in from the western Te Namo or the eastern Pacific. I use bad reporting about Tuvalu as examples of “how not to do it” in my journalism classes. Tuvaluan's are anything but passive victims and they're working hard to deal with the escalating problems they face.

NGOs like WWF Pacific, scientific bodies like the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission (SOPAC), and the Pacific Regional Environment Program (SPREP), and even a European Union-funded NGO, Alofa Tuvalu, are among the bodies working closely with Tuvaluans to help them better understand and respond to the many challenges they face.

A Japanese environment NGO pays for Radio Tuvalu to put its news on line in English and Tuvaluan.

Global warming just makes the effects of modernity, and the news about them, all much worse.

To respond to global warming's assaults, and to the environmental effects of development caused by severe population pressure and the accompanying solid waste problems, Tuvalu is implementing a National Adaptation Plan of Action (NAPA) which is slowly adjusting Tuvaluan lifestyles to the more threatening environment that surrounds them.

Septic tanks are being replaced by composting toilets; water security is improving; most houses now have gardens supplying vegetables to improve local diets; solar power is being trialed to reduce the cost of diesel generated electricity; and Tuvalu invests an enormous proportion of its tiny, $AU23 million, budget in education so more of its people have employable skills when they emigrate, some doing so as environmental refugees.

Some scientific, policy, and popular writing on global warming warns about probable environmental refugees seeking succour from sea level rise inundating their coastal or island homes. While New Zealand has a special category allowing 75 Tuvaluans a year to immigrate on environmental grounds, though they don't advertise this as the primary reason, Australia refuses to acknowledge or allow environmental refugees from the Pacific.

But they're already here, and some of the migrated Tuvaluans are friends of mine.

But none really wanted to leave their beloved home islands. They keep their traditions and language alive in Australia and beyond with local church services and community meetings. Their celebrations of Tuvalu Independence Day, October 1, are always lively affairs, with feasting and a Fatele - a Tuvaluan singing and dancing performance which can last for hours is wonderful to witness.

My Tuvaluan friends have a saying, “Tatou ne Tuvalu Katoa” (We are all Tuvaluans). Used locally, it's a call for Tuvaluans to work together for the betterment of their tiny, vulnerable country. The IPCC report reinforces that all of us are, in an important sense, Tuvaluans, beset by the same global warming threats with which they live every day.

The IPCC Report, and subsequent hard scientific studies of global warming's effects due for release during 2007, bring no real surprises to Pacific Islanders like my Tuvaluan friends. They're coping each day with global warming's effects, and their beloved homes may ultimately be doomed.

More information about Tuvalu is on Tuvaluislands.com. Two recent documentaries on Tuvalu put a human face on the effects of global warming in the Pacific. The Disappearing of Tuvalu: Trouble in Paradise, by Christopher Horner and Gilliane Le Gallic, was made in 2004. (and is viewable on Google Video. And Atlantis Approaching by American film maker, Elizabeth Pollock of Blue Marble Productions. An earlier version of this 2005 documentary was shown on a US PBS World Roughcut show in 2006, and that shorter version is on line.

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This is a longer version of an article originally published in New Matilda on February 7, 2007.
 
Dr Mark Hayes has travelled to Tuvalu and Funafuti Atoll three times, to work with Radio Tuvalu's journalists and report on the effects of global warming. He remains in close contact with his many Tuvaluan friends, and is researching the doing of journalism in and on the country.  



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About the Author

Dr Mark Hayes is a lecturer in the journalism program at the University of Queensland where he specialises in Pacific media and journalism contexts and practices. He still wishes he was back in Suva teaching journalism at the University of the South Pacific.

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