Nakibae Teuatabo鈥榮 worst nightmare is waking up to discover his home being washed away by the ocean waves. This elder statesman lives on one of the islands that makes up the South Pacific state of Kiribati-pronounced Kiribas-where he is climate change coordinator. His homeland will be swallowed up by rising sea levels unless global warming is stopped in its tracks. You may remember Kiribati, it rocketed from obscurity to instant television fame on New Year鈥檚 Eve as the first place on Earth to see in the third millennium. Fred Pearce met Teuatabo to assess the island鈥檚 chances of being around at the start of the fourth.
What evidence have you seen of global warming in the South Pacific?
We know that the climate is changing. On some islands, we鈥檙e getting many more cyclones. On others there are more droughts. We are asking, 鈥渨hy? Is it global warming?鈥� Apart from causing coastal erosion, higher tides are pushing salt water into the fields and into underground freshwater reservoirs. In some places, it just bubbles up from the ground. This is making soils too salty for root crops and is polluting drinking water. We often have to bathe in salt water. You鈥檒l know all about coral bleaching in waters which are getting warmer. But for us, this is not just an issue of biodiversity or tourism. The reefs are where we get many of our fish. If the reefs die, so will our food supply.
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Are any of your people planning to leave the islands for good?
We are very attached to our land. It鈥檚 not like in the West where people move all the time. Our land comes to us down the generations. It is part of who we are. But people do move. Many of the islanders from Banaba, which is a part of Kiribati, were moved to Fiji in the 1940s when their island was mined for phosphates. But some of them have come back recently. If our whole race had to move-become environmental refugees-that would feel like the end.
When did you first notice the effects of global warming in the South Pacific?
It started in the 1970s. I was working then in the ministry for rural affairs and spent a lot of time in Kiribati鈥檚 outer islands. Coastal erosion was becoming a problem even then. Villagers living near the sea had to move away as the sea gobbled up their land.
Were you personally affected in any way?
Yes. Eight or nine house plots in the village that my family belongs to have been eroded away. I remember there was a coconut tree outside the government quarters where I lived. The beach all around it was eroded, and eventually it disappeared. But erosion is not the only problem for the trees. The droughts are much worse than they used to be. We can go more than six months without rain these days. Now the next row of coconut trees is withering, too. Our elders say we have never had droughts that last so long. The droughts may be because of El Ni帽o. But if the El Ni帽os are stronger, that must be part of climate change.
This doesn鈥檛 seem particularly alarming. After all, the disappearance of a few trees and a bit of beach wouldn鈥檛 matter much in most places鈥�
Kiribati is spread over 3.6 million square kilometres. That鈥檚 bigger than Western Europe. But more than 99.9 per cent of it is ocean. Our actual land area is 700 square kilometres on 33 islands. We are small, narrow and very vulnerable. The atolls are just rings of narrow islands surrounding a lagoon, with the open ocean on the outside. Some of the islands are only a few metres wide in places. Imagine standing on one of these islands with waves pounding on one side and the lagoon on the other. It鈥檚 frightening.
According to the South Pacific Geoscience Commission, sea levels are now rising by 2.5 millimetres a year. We are losing small islands and strips of land between the larger islands all the time. In Kiribati, the bridges linking Tarawa and Betio were destroyed by tidal surges. And the islet of Tebua Tarawa, which was once a landmark for fishermen, has gone. On some islands, old survey pegs put into the land above the beach have disappeared into the water.
What do villagers make of all this? Do they blame global warming? Or do they have other explanations?
People know that the tides are getting higher, but until recently they knew nothing about global warming. We held a workshop and talked to them about it. You might say we led them on. But then they began to tell us about changes in the environment they had been noticing. For example, fishermen told us they were catching different types of fish and that sands pits weren鈥檛 moving in the way they used to.
How much store do you set by traditional ways of weather forecasting? Or do you think it has outlived its usefulness now that we have supercomputers to predict the weather?
I used to disregard traditional knowledge. But then one day a fisherman came to my house, where I was building a sea wall. He didn鈥檛 like my wall because he said it would stop the waves carrying sediment along the shore, which might cause more erosion elsewhere. He said I should put coconut fronds on the shore instead to trap sediment. This would protect my house from the waves. And trapping the sediment would prevent erosion elsewhere on the island.
This sort of knowledge isn鈥檛 necessarily in books. It is based on our experience over the centuries in interpreting the environment. If you ask traditional elders, they鈥檒l still say that the sky moves and the Earth does not. But we know they see changes in the weather earlier than weather scientists.
Can traditional knowledge help in understanding global warming?
This is a difficult question to answer. Traditional knowledge of the weather patterns is no longer very reliable. But that鈥檚 not because there鈥檚 anything wrong with the system. It鈥檚 that the unpredictability of climate change is interfering with the elders鈥� ability to forecast weather patterns. Elders try and predict the weather from their knowledge of constellations in the sky. So, for example, when a particular constellation appears, they鈥檇 tell farmers to plant seeds, believing that rains will soon appear. Similarly, they know all about El Ni帽o from changes in the volumes of tuna fish catches. But these forecasts no longer work, which is both a cultural loss and bad for farmers. Climate change is not only eroding our land, it is also wiping out our traditional knowledge.
Another problem is that knowledge is not talked about in the islands. Each clan and lineage has its own fund of knowledge, and they won鈥檛 share it.
On some islands, people have had to move the graves of their ancestors to stop them being flooded. Has that happened in Kiribati?
Yes, these are sacred places where people go to pray.
Greenpeace says insurance companies will no longer insure property on the islands. Is this true?
I don鈥檛 know. It may be true for some hotels. But in general, most people on the islands don鈥檛 have property insurance. For one thing, you cannot buy land. The islands have always been owned by those who occupy them and their ancestors who are buried there. We treat the islands like people. If we lost our land and homes, insurance wouldn鈥檛 be a lot of use to us.
The Maldives authorities are planning to evacuate people from the three islands most threatened with inundation. What do you think the future holds for your islands?
We don鈥檛 have any evacuation plans yet. But our islands will become fragmented. Then, who knows? I hope I don鈥檛 wake up in the ocean one morning.
Meteorologists say that a 1.5-metre rise in sea levels is inevitable, even if global warming comes to a halt by the middle of the next century. Could your islands survive that?
I don鈥檛 think our atolls would survive that. Even a rise of 30 centimetres would be very serious. Many of our atolls are no more than 2 metres above sea level at the highest point, and cyclones already raise the water higher than that sometimes. We don鈥檛 have many options. People are already moving inland. We want to establish mangroves as a first line of protection against cyclones.
What should Western countries do to help islands like yours?
We think that the industrialised countries should pay part of the costs of sea walls or other options, such as planting mangroves. But so far, developed countries have not committed themselves to any actual projects. Worse, the international climate negotiations that have taken place would allow them to escape curbs on future emissions in return for helping environmentally vulnerable islands. This is unfortunate.
If action on global warming may not stop small islands from going under, then should you perhaps be focusing on other issues, such as suing for compensation?
We still think that something can be done at the global level to prevent the eventual demise of small atolls. But while we鈥檝e signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, Kiribati reserves the right under international law to pursue compensation against any losses it might sustain.
What form of compensation might you want? Money, or the right to emigrate to a developed country?
The question is framed in terms of two alternatives: would we like money in return for losing our island home, or would we like to emigrate to a rich country? We haven鈥檛 even begun to think about alternatives. I think of 鈥渆migration鈥� as being the stage when you know you鈥檙e losing the battle. We鈥檙e nowhere near that. One president in Kiribati has likened emigration to the 鈥渟inking Sun for Kiribati as a people鈥�. That sums up how we feel. For most people, there are no alternatives. We are not prepared to lose our home.
What do you say to those in the West who complain that measures to combat global warming interfere with their quality of life by raising utility bills and the cost of owning a car?
We are suffering from the actions of industrial nations, who are employing delaying tactics rather than trying to help us. We emit very few greenhouse gases ourselves-less than a sixth of the global average per head of population. But there are not very many of us in the South Pacific compared to the population of China or the United States. Perhaps this is why we are being forgotten. But for us, this is not an issue of numbers, it is a question of survival. In the West, you spend millions of dollars a year protecting endangered species. Soon, we will be endangered too.