Laura beach, Marshall Islands. Credit: Stefan Lins.
By Rich Bowden
Many Pacific nations face inundation by rising sea levels blamed on warming global temperatures, a Fiji-based climate expert said ahead of a key climate conference in the Marshall Islands capital of Majuro today.
Patrick Nunn, a climate change researcher at Fiji’s University of the South Pacific, told AFP on the weekend that affected Pacific countries should seek relocation aid from the climate conference talks to be held in Copenhagen in December.
Professor Nunn will chair the 14-nation Pacific meeting and will argue that scientific evidence will demonstrate that the pace of sea level change is more than that projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its 2007 report.
“By 2100, I don’t see how many islands will be habitable,” said Professor Nunn. “We’re now looking at a more than one metre sea level rise by the end of the century,” he said.
The expected sea level rise would make life on low-lying coral atoll nations such as the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu almost impossible to inhabit, said the AFP report.
Prof Nunn said that while relocation is a difficult option for the inhabitants of such countries, it is now an inevitability due to the rise in sea levels.
“Relocation is one of the most difficult things to talk about and to convince people that the home they’ve lived in for centuries is no longer a viable option,” said Nunn, adding that it was now imperative for policy makers “…to understand the need for a profound change in the way Pacific people live.”
The Pacific Climate Change Roundtable conference beginning in Wellington today has been called to discuss the Pacific’s strategy with regard to the key Copenhagen conference. One of the roundtable’s organisers, Espen Ronneberg, said the Pacific area will be among the first casualties of climate change. Ronneberg acts as climate change advisor to the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Program (SPREP).
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