Kiribati Leader Cites Toll of Climate Change

For most Harvard students, dealing with climate change means changing desk lamps to energy-saving bulbs or recycling their class handouts. For the citizens of Kiribati, an island nation of 100,000 in the Pacific, it means a full-scale abandonment of the island and the eventual disintegration of their culture.

Kiribati’s president, Anote Tong, delivered a stirring plea to a packed audience at the Science Center yesterday in which he urged audience members to focus their attention on the already salient repercussions that rising sea levels have on inhabitants of island countries.

“In addition to focusing on the science and economics of the planet’s change, there is need for direct attention on the human dimension,” Tong said. “It poses the most fundamental moral challenge for humans in this century, for the future of real people will be on the line.”

Kiribati, which was once known as the Gilbert Islands, comprises 32 atolls—small coral islands—and one virtually unscalable rock island dispersed across 4,000 kilometers of the Pacific Ocean. Most of the land is situated at an elevation of less than two meters and is therefore particularly at risk from rises in sea-level caused by climate change.

“Any increase in sea level will have disastrous effects on our country,” Tong said, “well before the half-meter rise projected by scientists in the next 50 years.”

Over the last decade, rising sea levels have caused severe problems for Kiribati, including increasing high tides, harsher wave action, and coral breaching. Coupled with the scarce resources, a recent year-long drought, and exorbitant fuel and food prices that have crippled an already unstable economy, the newest crises promise to make the atolls uninhabitable in the near future.

“We put up sea walls as protection, but we do not have the resources,” Tong said. “We just tell people to move back [from the shore], but we cannot keep moving for we are in danger of falling off the other side.”

Tong, for whom this issue has been pressingly clear for over a decade, bemoaned the lack of interest and focus this problem has received on the international level.

“There has never been any discussion to date about what to do about the 100,000 people of Kiribati who will lose their country,” Tong said. “We made appeals in regional and international courts; I was reacting emotionally; I was shouting, and nobody was listening.”

Climate change has finally gained prominence on the international stage—the U.N. debate on climate begins this week—but Tong views this shift as too little, too late for island countries that will be affected regardless of “whatever we do.” As a result, he has begun the early stages of Kiribati’s coping strategy—an eventual full-scale evacuation of citizens to various recipient countries.

Kiribati, in coordination with New Zealand and Australia, has begun to train citizens in skilled labor to fill jobs gabs in other countries and make their migration more “digestible.”

The goal is to send abroad 1,000 skilled laborers every year for the next 20. These people will pave the way for the emigration of the remaining inhabitants who lack marketable skills.

Tong said he hopes to attract international attention to the impending onslaught of what he called “environmental refugees,” not only for the sake of his own people, but also because he views Kiribati’s situation as a precursor to the larger problems to come.

“While we of small low lying islands face the most disastrous consequences of climate change, no country, big or small, high or low lying, will be untouched,” Tong said. “Whatever we do now, countries like us will be affected. But it is important to do something for the survival of others who will be next.”

As Kirbati has become a victim of environmental degradation, though it emits little in terms of carbon dioxide, the country has taken strong measures to protect the environment in the face of a paucity of resources and money. This year, Tong’s administration created the world’s largest marine reserve—400,000 square miles in size—that oceanography professor James J. McCarthy, an expert on climate change, called a “remarkable gift to the world.”

“We did not close off 11 percent of our sea area because we knew we were going underwater,” Tong explained. “It was an opportunity to make that last stand. It was our contribution to humanity.”

—Staff writer Natasha S. Whitney can be reached at nwhitney@fas.harvard.edu.