World's First Climate Change Refugees to Be Rescued in 2009
by Warren McLaren, Sydney on 11.10.08
Photo by Pip Starr from Flickr
Early in 2009 40 families, who’ve been called the ‘world's first climate change refugees,’ will relocated from their flooded Pacific Island to the nearby Papau New Guinean island of Bougainville. About a third of the 2,000 Carterets Islanders have apparently refused to be relocated, in an ongoing program that will take six years and millions of dollars. But they may have no choice in the matter, because its is expected that their island home will submerged by 2015. The photo above shows one of their island has already been severed in half.
Waters around the atoll have risen 10 centimetres in the past 20 years. This may not sound like much but when your total land area is only 0.6 square kilometres and you have a maximum elevation of 1.2 metres above sea level you tend to notice such changes. It has, for example, as this video from YouTube indicates, devastated local agricultural crops that now succumb to the rising high tides of salt water.
One of the elders interviewed in the vid believes they are victims of the greenhouse gas emissions created by developed countries. This is not a a new story as such, it has been much reported on during the past two or three years, but it’s only now that a timetable with funds, seems to have come together to help those islanders who will move.
Sources:: Solomon Times, Digital Journalist, Pip Starr, and Friends of the Earth.
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nope. sorry. oceans not rising, their island is RECEEDING. due in part to their overpopulation, density, and use of available land.
THEIR fault, not "OURS".
Strangely the sea level isn't rising on islands only 200km away. Perhaps because they are on the other side of the subduction zone trench that is dragging the Cateret Islands down.
Strange that this article's headline definitely blames climate change without considering the more likely cause of a sinking island positioned smack right on top of one of the work's active plate tectonic boundaries.
Echoing the points of Martin:
This has nothing to do with climate change. This point has been made clearly on documentaries that highlight the island's plight. It is purely a matter of a sinking island.
When will my fellow environmentalists learn; if we keep making bogus claims about the effects of climate change, our collectively credibility will go down the toilet.
No journalism at all is far better than irresponsible, deceptive and sensationalistic journalism
Heard a radio report this morning about the government of the Maldives Islands beginning to set aside capital for purchasing new lands in preparation for their own islands' loss due to climate change.
Lame post with zero research. The islanders aren't climate change refugees, the islands sit on a tectonic plate, the islands have raped the surrounding coral, and may may be naturally sinking anyway. A split island isn't climate change, it what SAND does, or have you guys never been to a beach before?