Global Warming Brings a Sinking Feeling in Tiny Tuvalu
Cox News Service
Sunday, October 28, 2007
VAIAKU, Tuvalu — The sea has been good to Evi Tauaa.
When he is hungry, he drags his nets though a turquoise lagoon so full of fish he can catch hundreds in an afternoon as the sound of laughing children filters through the South Pacific air.
 CRAIG SIMONS/Cox Newspapers Tuvaluan schoolboy Tuont holds a freshly caught fish in Vaiaku, Tuvalu's capital.  CRAIG SIMONS/Cox Newspapers Foreign dollars have spurred investment - including the Coconut Wireless Internet Cafe - in Vaiaku, Tuvalu's capital.  CRAIG SIMONS/Cox Newspapers Workers pass a narrow strip of land in Vaiaku, Tuvalu's capital. The widest point in Vaiaku is less than seven football fields across.  CRAIG SIMONS/Cox Newspapers A grave sits by the sea in Vaiaku, Tuvalu's capital. Tuvalu is arguably the world's nation most at risk to rising seas.  CRAIG SIMONS/Cox Newspapers A worker delivers fresh fish in Vaiaku, Tuvalu's capital as a local schoolboy hitches a ride.  CRAIG SIMONS/Cox Newspapers Evi Tauaa shows how sea water rose to his thigh when a wave washed across one of Tuvalu's atolls in May. Tauaa, 60, is considering leaving Tuvalu after a wave washed across the atoll where he lives.  CRAIG SIMONS/Cox Newspapers A scientist at Tuvalu's meteorological service holds a photograph of children playing in sea water that covered much of Vaiaku, Tuvalu's capital, during spring tides last year. A large part of Vaiaku has been flooded with sea water each year since 2000.  CRAIG SIMONS/Cox Newspapers Young Tuvaluan boy Alatinma plays in Vaiaku, the capital of Tuvalu. |
Vast open stretches of ocean have protected Tuvalu from the world's conflicts. The closest neighbor to its nine coral atolls is Fiji, 500 miles to the south.
"Life is easy here," Tauaa says, resting in front of his single-room house. "If I want a fish, I go and catch it. If I want a breadfruit or a coconut, I pick one."
But for Tuvalu's 9,000 citizens, descendants of Polynesians who arrived at the island chain 2,000 years ago, the sea has become hazardous. The ocean has steadily climbed Tuvalu's shores and now threatens to swallow the nation.
The rise is the result, experts say, of global warming — the slow heating of the planet due to greenhouse gas emissions.
Because Tuvalu's highest natural feature is 9 feet above sea level and the widest strip of land in Vaiaku, its capital, is less than seven football fields across, the island country is arguably the nation most at risk to the effects of global warming.
Already, the effects of rising seas are apparent. Each year since 2000, sea water has bubbled through the ground in downtown Vaiaku during the year's highest tides. The intruding water has flooded buildings and roads, and rogue waves have become an increasing threat.
"The United States and large nations have choices (as seas rise), but unfortunately, Tuvalu and other small island nations have no higher places to go," said Enele Sopoaga, Tuvalu's secretary for foreign affairs and labor. "If nothing is done, Tuvalu will be 80 percent gone in 30 to 50 years."
As fears about global warming grow, researchers have highlighted Tuvalu's plight and suggest it is a canary in the coalmine, signaling more trouble ahead. Tens of millions of people, they say, are likely to be displaced as the world heats, a shift that will lead to more illegal migration and social conflict.
Already, climate change has contributed to pressures that are pushing people off their land, scientists say. Warmer seas have led to more severe hurricanes while hotter temperatures have intensified droughts and flooding — changes clear in nations like Australia and India.
In coastal communities like Tuvalu, the impact of global warming has been more direct: The world's seas have risen about 8 inches over the last century and are expected to rise as much as 23 more inches by 2100, leading to erosion and the loss of cropland, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an effort coordinated by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization.
A U.N. estimate is 2002 said that about 24 million people worldwide were living as refugees or migrants because of degraded environments including floods and droughts — roughly twice the number of current refugees of war and political persecution.
"Very conservatively, the number of environmental refugees soon could be three or four times greater than the number of political refugees," said Janos Bogardi, director of the United Nations Institute for Environment and Human Security. "The point is that everyone should look into this because the mass movement of people is destabilizing everything."
A TROUBLED COUNTRY
A former British colony known as the Ellice Islands, Tuvalu gained independence in 1978. To the casual visitor, it does not feel like a threatened nation.
In Vaiaku, an atoll-sized investment boom is under way. Foreign currency is sent home by Tuvaluans working overseas and more than $30 million has been pumped into the economy by renting Tuvalu's national Internet address, .tv.
Locals have opened a handful of guest lodges, bars and restaurants and splurged on cars to drive along the 7-mile-long atoll. The island has its simpler charms, too: In the afternoon, children solicit handouts from fishermen and eat the fish raw at the ocean's edge, their shouts swallowed by the wide, tropical sky.
But below the surface is an undercurrent of unease.
Waves that washed over southern Vaiaku last year and again in May were the first to cross the island when the weather was clear.
The rogue wave in May woke Tauaa in the middle of the night and when he opened his door, sea water rose to his thighs.
"The Bible says that in the future things like this will happen," he said. "No one can stop the Lord from coming back."
Scientists attribute Tuvalu's problems to global warming.
Globally, the mean temperature has risen 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century, melting glaciers and polar sea ice. In Tuvalu, a gauge installed by Australian scientists has registered an average annual sea-level rise of .22 inches since 1993.
As the oceans have risen, erosion has damaged coastlines. Higher tides have also caused sea water to mix with Tuvalu's groundwater, killing local crops, said Faatasi Malologa, director of Tuvalu's office of lands and survey.
"Soon, we will need hanging gardens," he said.
In the short term, Katrina-like hurricanes pose a greater threat to coastal communities. In the southwestern Pacific Ocean, the number of category 4 and 5 storms has increased since the 1970s.
Tuvalu's largest islands have escaped a direct hurricane strike for more than a decade, but the likelihood of a devastating storm has increased as the oceans have warmed and risen, scientists said.
"For Tuvalu, each hurricane is like Russian roulette," said Ian Fry, an Australian scientist employed by Tuvalu's environment ministry.
ENVIRONMENTAL REFUGEES
Researchers are focusing on the atoll nation as an example of how climate change could push tens of millions of people off their land.
One quarter of the world's 6.6 billion people live in coastal regions, according to the IPCC, and many of the world's largest cities are on coastlines. Many of Asia's poor, sprawling megacities sit in low river deltas and are particularly threatened.
A report last year by the Lowy Institute, an Australian public policy think tank, warned that a 17-inch sea-level rise would flood 11 percent of Bangladesh and displace 5 million people.
Developed Western cities will also face challenges. In New York, flooding caused by higher sea levels and storm surge could be "several meters deep and flood levels currently expected once every 100 years could be expected once every four years," the IPCC report states.
Alisita Melton, a spindly 41-year-old mother of five, embodies Tuvalu's high stakes.
She does not understand the science of climate change. But she worries that storms are becoming stronger and is saving money to move her family to the Marshall Islands, a central Pacific Ocean nation of 60,000 people.
"I've heard they are bigger than Tuvalu, so I think we'll be able to get away from the sea if we need to," she said.
Tuvalu's foreign minister is pessimistic. Sopoaga served as Tuvalu's first U.N. ambassador until 2006 and tried to highlight the global costs of climate change by urging the world's rich nations to take in Tuvalu's citizens.
But he has started to worry that countries may prefer to house the world's global warming victims than to reduce their emissions.
"They could put us in Nevada or in Brisbane, (Australia). That would be much cheaper," he says. "But this is our home. We love Tuvalu."
Among the world's industrialized nations, 19 have increased their greenhouse gas emissions over 1990 levels.
In the United States — which has refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty that set binding targets for reductions in these emissions — annual emissions increased 16 percent between 1990 and 2004, according to the United Nations.
Many scientists believe that China surpassed the United States as the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases last year. Developing countries, including China, have no binding restrictions on climate change pollutants under the present phase of the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012.
"We are hostages to the world and nobody seems to be providing any real, tangible help," Sopoaga says. "Instead, everyone is asking us when we will leave."
Evi Tauaa is asking himself that question.
He can see the ocean from either side of his house and keeps thinking about the wave that broke across the island in May.
Two of his sons live in New Zealand and they have urged him to move there, but he is 60 and his only visit to Auckland was jarring.
"There was too much traffic," he said, laughing quietly. "It was very dangerous."
But the unsettled feeling that the sea has turned more violent has stuck with him and he is thinking of leaving.
"This is my home, but I am worried," he said. "We could be washed away by a big wave."