The hungry ocean eats away at Kiribati

TARAWA, Kiribati (PINA Nius Online) — The ocean should be Teatu Tsuria’s friend. A villager in Kiribati, he lives on a soft, white beach fringed with coconut trees and catches enough fish in his canoe to feed his five children.

He wakes up each morning to the whisper of the waves and falls asleep at night fanned by a cooling sea breeze.

But the ocean is Tsuria’s most implacable foe. It is killing his crops and poisoning his water.

In the next decade it could swallow his thatched wooden hut and his modest plot of land.

Around the world, sea levels are rising as greenhouse gases discharged by industrialized countries warm the oceans.

The future is bleak for low-lying island states such as Kiribati, parts of which lie barely two meters (6.6 feet) above sea level.

The latest round of international talks on global warming collapsed in The Hague late last year after a dispute over implementation of a minuscule cut in carbon dioxide emissions. Despite a dramatic appeal for action by 40 vulnerable island nations, no date was set for the resumption of negotiations.

Wealthy, developed countries believe that they can afford to bide their time.

For the 92,000 inhabitants of Kiribati, the matter is rather more urgent.

Tsuria has watched the tide creep ever closer, devouring chunks of beach and felling 30-year-old palm trees. A ferocious storm in 1997 flooded his home and the pits in which he cultivated taro. Nothing grows here now.

The water in his well has turned brackish. His family can no longer drink it. If they wash with it, they develop rashes.

Says Tsuria, who lives on Tarawa, the densely populated main atoll: “I am very worried but there is nowhere for us to move to. All of the land is occupied and, anyway, I have no money for another plot. What will become of my children and my grandchildren?”

So badly eroded are Tarawa’s beaches that the Mormon Church imported several tons of sand from Australia to build a new house of worship.

The international community, too, should spare a thought for Kiribati as it digests the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that collates the work of 3,000 leading scientists.

Its report predicts that sea levels will climb 14 centimeters (5.6 inches) to 80 centimeters (32 inches) by 2110.

The effects will be borne disproportionately by the world’s most impoverished countries, says the panel.

Even if greenhouse-gas emissions were reduced sharply in the immediate future, it says, “sea levels will continue to rise due to thermal expansion for hundreds of years.”

For Kiribati the implications are clear.

Before the end of the century, its citizens could become environmental refugees from their Micronesian nation.

As you drive along Tarawa’s main road, with the deep blue ocean unfolding on one side and the turquoise lagoon on the other, it is difficult to comprehend what this place faces.

But all around Tarawa are signs of severe coastal erosion. Two small uninhabited islands, Tebua Tarawa and Pikeman, have vanished beneath the surface of the lagoon.

Many families have built crude sea walls to protect their homes from the unusually high spring tides.

The people of Kiribati joke that they will have to climb to the tops of coconut trees to escape the ocean.