“By 2100, I don’t see how many islands will be habitable,” said Professor Patrick Nunn, the pro vice chancellor and a climate change researcher at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji who is chairing the Pacific Climate Change Roundtable meeting in Majuro that opened Monday.
Fourteen Pacific countries and territories are attending the Majuro meeting to sharpen their strategy for the United Nations meeting on climate change in December in Denmark.
Scientific projections show the pace of sea level is “rising faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected in its 2007 report,” Nunn said. “We’re now looking at a more than one meter sea level rise by the end of the century.”
For coral atolls such as the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Maldives — most of which are barely a meter above sea level — habitation will be impossible.
“But it is a mistake to perceive this as an Oatoll issue,’” Nunn said.
“In most larger islands in the Pacific, there is much less concern for sea level rise because they have a hinterland to move to. It’s not as easy as it sounds.”
He says it is urgent that political leaders of countries with low-lying areas start planning for relocation. “It needs sound planning,” Nunn said.
“If relocation is to happen by 2050, then by 2020 a plan must be in place.
“The biggest challenge is getting policy makers to understand the need for a profound change in the way Pacific people live,” he said.
While the world has heard much about the need to relocate the population of tiny Tuvalu, there are three times the Tuvalu population living in the Rewa Delta in Fiji who will be affected by sea level rise, he said.
“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, who has researched climate change for 24 years from his Fiji base.
Nunn warned that New Orleans, Venice, Bangladesh and the Marshall Islands — among others — are all facing the specter of sea level rise.
While various mitigation and adaptation projects are being proposed for low-lying areas to withstand sea level rise, Nunn believes “there are no real options in Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands and other atolls other than to move people.”
If relocation planning is left to the last minute it could result in a loss of cultural identity, Nunn said. He urged governments to engage with each other to address the urgent need for relocation planning. “Anyone looking objectively at this region has to see the need for relocation,” he said. “People don’t want to hear it, but if planning is done now on a government-to-government basis, communities could be successfully relocated.”
