Sinking Pacific Island Kiribati Considers Moving to a Man-Made Alternative

By Kathy Marks, Asia-Pacific Correspondent from Independent.co.uk

Posted on Thursday, 8 September 2011

The future for Kiribati, one of the low-lying Pacific nations threatened by rising seas, is so dire that the government is contemplating relocating the entire population to man-made islands resembling giant oil rigs.

"We're considering everything... because we are running out of options," the President of Kiribati, Anote Tong, said yesterday in Auckland, where he is attending the Pacific Islands Forum. He said that his small, impoverished country – where the highest land is no more than two metres above sea level – urgently needed the world to take action on climate change.

Vulnerable Pacific nations have acquired a powerful new ally, the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, who visited Kiribati on his way to the Auckland conference. In a speech on Tuesday, Mr Ban warned: "For those who believe climate change is about some distant future, I invite them to Kiribati. Climate change is not about tomorrow. It is lapping at our feet – quite literally in Kiribati and elsewhere." Beachside villages in Kiribati – which consists of 33 coral atolls sprinkled across two million square miles of ocean – have already had to move to escape the encroaching waves. Water supplies have been contaminated by salt water, and crops destroyed. Erosion, caused partly by storms and flooding, is increasingly serious.

Mr Tong said he had seen models of a man-made floating island, similar to an offshore oil platform and costing US$2bn (£1.25bn). While it sounded "like something from science fiction", he said radical ideas had to be considered. "If you're faced with the option of being submerged with your family, what would you do?" he asked. "Would you jump on the rig... on a floating island or not? I think the answer is yes."

Other ideas included building a series of sea walls, at a cost of nearly $1bn. But Mr Tong said it would be up to the international community to fund such projects, and he complained that Kiribati had received little financial aid despite pledges from wealthier nations.

A former British colony called the Gilbert Islands, Kiribati is home to 103,000 people, most of them crammed into the main atoll, Tarawa, a horseshoe-shaped chain of islets surrounding a central lagoon. Like other pancake-flat Pacific nations such as Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, and Indian Ocean nations such as the Maldives, it faces oblivion as a result of global warming-induced rising sea levels.

Mr Tong said that for i-Kiribati, as his countrymen are known, it was no longer a case of adapting to a changing environment, but of survival. He said Kiribati desperately needed the world to act to reduce carbon emissions.

Mr Ban said his visit to Kiribati had strengthened his view that "something is seriously wrong with our current model of economic development". He said: "We will not succeed in reducing emissions without sustainable energy solutions."

Ethnic Californians -- The State’s ‘Environmental Vote’

New America Media, Text By Ngoc Nguyen, Posted: Aug 05, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO -- A majority of Californians want to move forward with environmental regulation, despite a tough economy, with the strongest support coming from those with the highest joblessness rates, according to a new survey by the Public Policy Institute of California.

A poll released last week found that two-thirds of Californians approve of AB 32 - a state law that calls for reductions in global-warming pollution, and nearly 60 percent favor taking action right away, rather than waiting for the state economy or job situation to improve. The survey of 2,504 adults was conducted July 5-19 in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese.

“In the face of serious economic downturn, and that continues with high unemployment, residents in California remain steadfast in their support for environmental regulations that call for clean air and reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and that is very important finding,” said Mark Baldassare, PPIC’s president and CEO.

California has the second highest unemployment rate in the nation, with 11.8 percent of Californians out of jobs compared to the national rate of 9.2 percent.

Support for the state’s landmark climate change law was highest among ethnic Californians: nearly three-fourths of Asians, blacks and Latinos support AB 32, compared to 61 percent for whites. Sixty-nine percent of blacks and Latinos and 53 percent of Asians want the state to act now to reduce greenhouse gases that cause global warming, compared to 51 percent of whites.

“People of color are the strongest environmentalists in California,” said Roger Kim, executive director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN). “Air pollution, climate change, clean energy - [our communities have] the highest level of concern and favor more action from government at all levels,” he said during a briefing on the poll for ethnic media on Wednesday.

Support for environmental policies was strongest among African Americans and Latinos, who also have the highest unemployment levels in the state - 19.5 percent and 14.7 percent, respectively, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Most Californians believe climate change policy will lead to more jobs and address environmental problems and air pollution they are concerned about,” Baldassare said.

Pablo Garza, associate director for external affairs and state policy with the Nature Conservancy, said Californians’ strong support for environmental regulation during the economic downturn contrasts the “negative mood” of the nation and Washington, where federal legislation to tackle climate change has gone nowhere.

“California leads the nation on environmental policy and attitudes, and Latino, African-American and Asian communities are the environmental vote in the state,” said Garza, citing the defeat last November of Proposition 23, which called for the indefinite suspension of the state’s climate change law AB 32.

This year’s poll findings track with numbers from 2010, which showed that African Americans, Asian Americans and Latinos were at the forefront of support for the state’s climate change law.

The state’s ethnic communities were more likely to perceive climate change as a threat to health than their white counterparts, the poll found. Seventy-two percent of African Americans, 61 percent of Latinos and 52 percent of Asians said they were “very concerned” global warming would increase air pollution, compared to 36 percent of whites. They were also more likely than whites to believe that policies to reduce global warming would create jobs.

Jakada Imani, executive director of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, said outreach to ethnic communities about the environment needs to focus on issues relevant to their lives, such as air pollution.

“We don’t talk about polar bears,” he said.

“The environment is very personal and impacts us everyday…it’s very much connected to issues of health, economics and politics,” said Kim.

Californians rank air pollution as the most important environmental issue. A majority (53 percent) of Californians said they consider the health risks from air pollution as very or somewhat serious. Seventy-seven percent of blacks and 67 percent of Latinos felt that way, compared to 44 percent of whites and 43 percent for Asians.

APEN’s Kim said that Asian immigrants in the United States come from Asian cities where air pollution is much worse, so “in comparison, the air here seems better.” He said the poll also shows varying socioeconomic status in the community, adding that perceptions of health risks from air pollution in low-income regions are in line with their black and Latino counterparts.

Yet despite the strong levels of support by ethnic Californians for environmental action and policies, activists say their voices are still not being heard.

“We’re not a part of the debate happening at all government levels,” said Kim.

He pointed to recent legislation signed by Gov. Jerry Brown that requires the state to get one-third of its electricity from renewable sources such as the sun and wind by 2020. This legislation will spur opportunities, Kim said, and ethnic Californians need to be at the table to ensure the implementation plan benefits the communities most in need.

Rising Seas, Rising Awareness

Published on Thursday, October 22, 2009 by The Baltimore Sun
Rising Seas, Rising Awareness
Climate change threatens to drown Maryland's coasts and islands, but it's not too late to act
by Mike Tidwell

Here's an idea: Why don't the residents of Smith Island - at the fragile center of the Chesapeake Bay - rent a few scuba-diving suits and hold a town hall meeting under water?

Scientists say a huge part of the Chesapeake region could be below water in a few decades due to rapid global warming. So why not practice up? Just grab a few wetsuits and goggles and rehearse for the aquatic life to come.

A similar rehearsal took place last week in another island area: the archipelago nation of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean. Sitting at underwater tables, atop underwater chairs with fish darting about, the country's president and Cabinet ministers held a "global warming summit" to ask the world to stop the rising seas that could eventually submerge their entire country.

But as TV networks broadcast this bizarre meeting back to the U.S., you could almost hear the "tsk, tsk." We comfortable Americans tend to view really big catastrophes - things like famines and tsunamis - as far-away matters involving people usually too poor or under-educated to plan better.

This mindset helped blind us to the pre-Hurricane Katrina dangers of New Orleans. And it's blinding us today to the shared threat of climate change in places like Smith Island, not to mention Manhattan Island and most of south Florida.

Smith Island - just 80 miles east of the White House in the main stem of the Chesapeake - is home to 300 fishermen, artists, boat-builders, shopkeepers and retirees. The island covers four square miles and is, on average, less than 2 feet above sea level.

If, thanks to global warming pollution, the Greenland ice sheet continues its satellite-verified meltdown, then Smith Island will almost certainly disappear even faster than the Maldives and faster than several much-publicized South Pacific island nations. The whole eastern third of Maryland, in fact, is in big trouble, from Ocean City to Solomons Island to Annapolis. James Hansen, the top climate scientist at NASA, says we'll be measuring sea-level rise in meters by 2100 if current trends continue.

That's a lot to take in, for sure, and skepticism might be the natural response to such climate predictions. So don't take it from Greenpeace or Al Gore or even James Hansen. Listen instead to Allstate Insurance Co.

In 2006, Allstate announced it was no longer issuing new homeowners' policies in states up and down the East Coast. In Maryland, the company shut its doors to new customers across 11 eastern counties, including parts of Anne Arundel and Prince George's counties. Why? First, the company said, sea levels are definitely rising worldwide based on irrefutable science. Second, Atlantic hurricanes are getting bigger and more intense as the planet warms. Hence, Smith Island and much of the rest of eastern Maryland just aren't good insurance risks anymore, Allstate acknowledged. The potential for catastrophe is too great.

Allstate is not a Republican corporation. It's not a Democratic corporation. This is rational private capital talking. The idea of an underwater town hall meeting near Smith Island seems less alarmist when a major insurance company is abandoning customers just a stone's throw from our nation's capital.

Thankfully, the Maryland General Assembly has done its part on global warming. It passed a statute last spring mandating a 25 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions statewide by 2020. But like the tiny nation of the Maldives, Maryland can't solve global warming by itself. The U.S. Senate must pass an even stronger federal carbon cap by mid-December, ahead of international climate talks in Copenhagen, Denmark. With a congressional bill in hand, President Barack Obama must then go to Copenhagen and push China and the rest of the world for a strong global treaty to replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol.

The good news is that this Saturday, for the first time ever, activists from Maryland and the Maldives - as well as Greenland, Australia and myriad places in between - will be speaking with one voice on global warming. The much-heralded "International Day of Climate Action" involves more than 4,000 events in more than 170 countries, including a "human circle of hope" outside the White House. (Learn more at www.350.org/dc).

And while there's no word yet about an aquatic town hall meeting at Smith Island, there are rumors of wetsuits and goggles available for loan from the president of the Maldives. It's time to follow in his wake.

Copyright © 2009, The Baltimore Sun
Mike Tidwell is executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network based in Takoma Park. His e-mail is mtidwell@chesapeakeclimate.org.

Japan Seeks Cooperation from Micronesia on Global Warming

Fukuda seeks cooperation from Micronesia in tackling global warming
Nov 30 08:19 AM US/Eastern

TOKYO, Nov. 30 (AP) - (Kyodo) — Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda on Friday sought the cooperation of visiting Micronesian President Emanuel Mori in promoting Japan's proposal to launch a post-Kyoto Protocol framework for negotiations to tackle global warming in which all major greenhouse gas emitters will take part.

In their 20-minute meeting at the prime minister's office, Mori thanked Japan for its leadership on the climate change issue and expressed hope that it will take the initiative as a country that shares the same Pacific climate as island nations that are easily affected by weather conditions, Japanese officials said.

Fukuda told Mori he is fully aware that global warming is a "serious issue" for island nations such as the Federated States of Micronesia and said that Japan is proposing the negotiating framework while taking the situation of island states into account, the officials said.

Japan is proposing a forum in which all major emitters will take part in negotiations with a view to building an effective future framework for addressing climate change after the expiration in 2012 of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

The move is part of the international community's efforts to build a new regime to fight global warming. Japan earlier announced an initiative to halve greenhouse gas emissions from current levels by 2050.

At a press opportunity at the outset of their meeting, the prime minister said Japan has decided to post a full-time ambassador to Micronesia as part of efforts to further strengthen the relationship between the two countries.

"Japan and Micronesia have a historically long relationship and there are many people in your country who are of Japanese ancestry, including yourself, Mr. President," Fukuda said. "We have a particular affinity and affection for your country."

Fukuda said Japan is planning to decide shortly on the provision of grant aid to Micronesia for improvements to Pohnpei international airport and will also consider further assistance measures for the country, the officials said.

Mori expressed hope that the upgrading of Japan's diplomatic mission in Micronesia to an embassy will help to enhance bilateral ties and thanked Japan for its continued economic cooperation, they said.