{"id":376757,"date":"2022-09-29T06:01:44","date_gmt":"2022-09-28T20:01:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/?p=376757"},"modified":"2022-09-29T06:01:44","modified_gmt":"2022-09-28T20:01:44","slug":"drowning-island-nations-this-is-how-a-pacific-atoll-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/drowning-island-nations-this-is-how-a-pacific-atoll-dies\/","title":{"rendered":"Drowning island nations: \u2018This is how a Pacific atoll dies\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>
President of the Marshall Islands David Kabua addresses the 77th session of the United Nations General Assembly, at U.N. headquarters, Tuesday, Sept. 20, 2022. (AP)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

While world leaders from wealthy countries acknowledge the \u201cexistential threat\u201d of climate change, Tuvalu Prime Minister Kausea Natano is racing to save his tiny island nation from drowning by raising it four to five meters above sea level through land reclamation.<\/p>\n

While experts issue warnings about the eventual uninhabitability of the Marshall Islands, President David Kabua must reconcile the inequity of a seawall built to protect one house that is now flooding another one next door.<\/p>\n

That is the reality of climate change: Some people get to talk about it from afar, while others must live it every day.<\/p>\n

Natano and Kabua tried to show that reality on Wednesday on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly. Together they launched the Rising Nations Initiative, a global partnership aimed to preserve the sovereignty, heritage and rights of Pacific atoll island nations whose very existence have been threatened by climate change.<\/p>\n

Natano described how rising sea levels have impacted everything from the soil that his people rely on to plant crops, to the homes, roads and power lines that get washed away. The cost of eking out a living, he said, eventually becomes too much to bear, causing families to leave and the nation itself to disappear.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is how a Pacific atoll dies,\u201d Natano said. \u201cThis is how our islands will cease to exist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Rising Nations Initiative seeks a political declaration by the international community to preserve the sovereignty and rights of Pacific atoll island countries; the creation of a comprehensive program to build and finance adaptation and resilience projects to help local communities sustain livelihoods; a living repository of the culture and unique heritage of each Pacific atoll island country; and support to acquire UNESCO World Heritage designation.<\/p>\n

The initiative has already gained the support of countries like the United States, Germany, South Korea and Canada, all of which have acknowledged the unique burden that island nations like Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands must shoulder.<\/p>\n

A U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released in February spelled out the vulnerability of small island developing states and other global hotspots like Africa and South Asia, whose populations are 15 times more likely to die from extreme weather compared to less vulnerable parts of the world.<\/p>\n

If warming exceeds a few more tenths of a degree, it could lead to some areas \u2014 including some small islands \u2014 becoming uninhabitable, said report co-author Adelle Thomas of Climate Analytics and the University of the Bahamas. On Wednesday, Natano noted that Tuvalu and its Pacific neighbors \u201chave done nothing to cause climate change,\u201d with their carbon emission contribution amounting to less than .03% of the world\u2019s total.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the first time in history that the collective action of many nations will have made several sovereign countries uninhabitable,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Representatives from other nations who attended Wednesday\u2019s event did not deflect responsibility. But whether they will do enough to turn things around remains to be seen.<\/p>\n

Several have pledged money to help island nations pay for early warning systems and bring their buildings up to code to better protect them from hurricanes and other weather events. But there was less talk of mitigating the problem of climate change and more about how to adapt to the devastation it has already wrought.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe see this train coming, and it\u2019s coming down the track, and we need to get out of the way,\u201d said Amy Pope, deputy director general of the International Organization for Migration.
\nGermany\u2019s climate envoy, Jennifer Morgan, who also attended Wednesday\u2019s event, spoke of her country\u2019s target to reach carbon neutrality by 2045. But while Germany remains committed to phasing out coal as a power source by 2030, it has had to reactivate coal-fired power plants to get through the coming winter amid energy shortages as a result of Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine.<\/p>\n

For the president of the Marshall Islands, wealthy nations could be doing much more. During his speech to the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday, Kabua urged world leaders to take on sectors that rely on fossil fuels, including aviation and shipping. He pointed to the Marshall Islands\u2019 carbon levy proposal for international shipping that he says \u201cwill drive the transition to zero emission shipping, channeling resources from polluters to the most vulnerable.\u201d<\/p>\n

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has likewise encouraged going after the world\u2019s largest polluters. During his opening remarks to the assembly on Tuesday, he pushed for richer countries to tax the profits of energy companies and redirect the funds to both \u201ccountries suffering loss and damage caused by the climate crisis\u201d and those struggling with the rising cost of living.<\/p>\n

In the meantime, as wealthy countries urge action instead of words in their own U.N. speeches, Kabua, Natano and their fellow island nation leaders will continue to grapple with their daily climate change reality \u2014 and try to continue to exist.<\/p>\n

By PIA SARKAR\u00a0<\/strong>
\nAssociated Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While world leaders from wealthy countries acknowledge the \u201cexistential threat\u201d of climate change, Tuvalu Prime…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":376758,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[23792],"class_list":["post-376757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-local-news","tag-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=376757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376758"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.saipantribune.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}