UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres yesterday sent out a global climate “SOS” at the Pacific Islands Forum in Tonga, unveiling research that shows the region’s seas rising much more swiftly than global averages.
“I am in Tonga to issue a global SOS — Save Our Seas — on rising sea levels. A worldwide catastrophe is putting this Pacific paradise in peril,” Guterres said.
Sparsely populated and with few heavy industries, Pacific island nations collectively pump out less than 0.02 percent of global emissions every year, but the vast arc of volcanic islands and low-lying coral atolls also inhabit a tropical corridor that is rapidly threatened by the encroaching ocean.
Photo: AFP
The World Meteorological Organization has been monitoring tide gauges installed on the Pacific’s famed beaches since the early 1990s. A new report released by the top UN climate monitoring body showed seas had risen by about 15cm in some parts of the Pacific in the past 30 years.
The global average was 9.4cm, the report said.
“It is increasingly evident that we are fast running out of time to turn the tide,” said Celeste Saulo, the forecasting agency’s top official.
Some sites, particularly in Kiribati and the Cook Islands, measured a rise that matched or was just under the global average, but other sites, such as the capital cities of Samoa and Fiji, were rising almost three times higher.
In low-lying Pacific island nation Tuvalu, land is already so scarce that throngs of children use the tarmac at the international airport as their own makeshift playground. Scientists have warned that, even under some moderate scenarios, Tuvalu could be almost entirely wiped off the map within the next 30 years.
“It’s disaster after disaster, and we are losing the capacity to rebuild, to withstand another cyclone or another flood,” Tuvaluan Minister for Home Affairs, Climate Change and Environment Maina Talia said on Monday on the sidelines of the forum. “For low-lying island states, it’s a matter of survival for us.”
The plight of the Pacific island nations has been easily overlooked in the past, given their relative isolation and lack of economic might, but the region is increasingly seen by scientists as a climate canary in the coal mine, hinting at the trouble potentially facing other parts of the planet.
“This new report confirms what Pacific leaders have been saying for years,” Australian climate researcher Wes Morgan said. “Climate change is their top security threat. Pacific nations are in a fight for survival, and cutting climate pollution is key to their future.”
Surrounded by millions of square kilometers of tropical ocean, the South Pacific is uniquely threatened by sea-level rise. The vast majority of people live within 5km of the coast, according to the UN.
Rising seas are swallowing up scarce land, and tainting vital food and water sources.
Warmer waters are also fueling more intense natural disasters, while ocean acidification kills the reefs that nourish marine food chains.
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