http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0719-09.htm
Published on Saturday,
July 19, 2003 by the Guardian / UK
Islanders Consider Exodus As Sea Level
Rises
Tuvalu
Leaders Look for a New Home Before Waves Wash Their Low-Lying
Country Away
by David Fickling
Faced with the prospect of being swamped by rising sea levels,
the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is considering evacuating
its 9,300 residents.
With a highest point
just five metres above sea level, Tuvalu
is one of the world's most low-lying countries. Half its population
is crammed on the 30 hectare (75 acre) Funafuti atoll, which is
only three metres above the waves.
With global sea levels
predicted to rise by more than 80cm over
the next century, Tuvaluans are living on borrowed time. The only
solution, according to the government, is to transport the entire
population overseas.
"We don't know
when the islands will be completely covered,"
says secretary to the Tuvalu government Panapasi Nelesone.
"But we need to start working on this now."
Nearly 3,000 Tuvaluans
already live overseas, and a government
programme is now relocating 75 more every year.
But Tofiga Falani,
the president of the Tuvalu Congregational
church, says that more urgent action is needed. "We must
know
that someone will be able to provide land for us, before a storm
washes our islands away altogether," he said.
He is in Melbourne
this week lobbying Australia to set aside land
to serve as a new home for Tuvalu's people when they finally quit
their nine inhabited atolls.
Fresh data on sea level
rises have given a new urgency to his
concerns. The consensus last year from Australia's national tide
facility (NTF), which monitors Pacific ocean, levels, was that
there had been no significant changes around Tuvalu for 10 years.
Some analysts even
suggested that the aftermath of El Nino could
cause sea levels in the area to drop by up to 30cm in future.
That view is changing.
The most recent figures
suggest that Tuvalu's sea levels
have risen nearly three times as fast as the world average
over the past decade, and are now 5cm higher than in 1993.
The NTF's Bill Mitchell
says that such figures should still
be regarded as provisional. "We've had a large El Nino which
appears to have raised sea levels across the western Pacific,
so rises in future may well not be as dramatic."
Tuvaluans are used
to seeing islets vanish beneath the waves
with cyclones, but their country is likely to become uninhabitable
long before the waves finally close over them.
Islanders already drink
from rainwater tanks to preserve
the atolls' scanty groundwater, but the seepage of salt water
into farmland has destroyed crops and made islanders dependent
on canned imports.
Tuvalu's Polynesian
people arrived in the islands 2,000 years
ago by way of Tonga, Samoa and Tokelau, but international
borders mean fewer relocation options are available.
The neighbouring state of Kiribati has dozens of uninhabited
islands, but it is facing its own population pressures.
Eleniu Poulos, president
of UnitingJustice Australia, a church
agency, says that the Tuvaluans should be granted one of the
uninhabited islands at the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef.
"You spell an
end to a culture if you split them up, but
they would be happy to give up their national sovereignty
as long as they're able to stay together. Australia has
no shortage of land," she said.
Canberra's immigration
department is believed to take
a dim view of the Tuvaluan desire for land to call their own.
But Panapasi Nelesone
says: "We cannot just float on the
water hoping that the sea will go down again."
© Guardian Newspapers
Limited 2003
###
