Climate change poses a Pacific problem
The tiny nation of Tuvalu is facing a crisis. A number of the islands including the capital Funafuti are suffering acute water shortages. On the island of Nukulaelae it is estimated that without intervention the water supplies would have run out by week’s end.
Australia and New Zealand are immediately responding by shipping in temporary desalination plants and fresh water supplies and helping repair existing desalination units. Water tanks, the great bulk of which have been supplied through Australian aid, are part of the longer term solution.
Yet water tanks are only of use if it rains. And here, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Tuvalu is experiencing a drought.
Tuvalu is a country comprising nine coral atolls: Low lying strips of land never more than a kilometre wide – usually much less. Parts of Funafuti are as wide as the road.
The sea is omnipresent and the people are seafarers. Their lifestyle, their culture and their sustenance is all about the sea. While in past centuries this centred on fishing and traditional forms of navigation, today the largest source of private sector income is derived from remittances of Tuvaluans crewing large international ships.
And so when the sea, a fundamental source of security and comfort, is transformed by climate change into a source of threat and fear, the feeling of vulnerability is indescribable.
While rising sea levels force the people of Tuvalu to comprehend their homes literally sinking in the future, it is a related threat which is challenging their existence in the present. Changing weather patterns are undermining their water security.
In a country with no rivers or dams small variations to weather patterns wreak havoc. Even a mildly longer drought than normal has the potential to be catastrophic. And one of the longest droughts in the history of the country has left traditional water collection methods along with modern water tanks bereft of water.
Anote Tong is the President of another coral atoll nation: the Republic of Kiribati. Like its neighbour Tuvalu it faces all the challenges and feels all the vulnerabilities presented by climate change. Together they are the canary in the global coal mine of climate change.
At the end of 2009 in Copenhagen, President Tong came to international prominence as he sought to tell the story of the most vulnerable communities to climate change in the world. Australia’s special relationship with the Pacific compels us to lend our voice in the telling of that story.
In July this year, along with Marcus Stephen the President of Nauru, I participated in a debate in the United Nations Security Council on climate change. The debate was sponsored by the nations of the Pacific Ocean to highlight that for them climate change represents an existential threat to their security every bit as real as any armed conflict.
What struck me at the Security Council was that virtually no-one in that room had ever seen the peculiar nature of life on a coral atoll. The idea that there are countries where there are no hills to run for, and that water is ceasing to flow from taps right now was beyond the parameters of the understood threat.
The debate helped lead to the first ever visit by a UN Secretary-General to Kiribati. To witness Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon see firsthand the sea erosion which comes to within a few meters of the country’s main runway, the spoiling of the water table which means that many of the island’s wells are no longer useable, and to meet people who have the sea come into their living room every king tide was to witness a moment in history.
The water crisis in Tuvalu has its connection with the debate around a carbon price in Australia.
This is not to say that the motivation for pricing carbon in our economy is to provide secure drinking water in Tuvalu. We all understand that Australia alone will not redress climate change.
The motivation for pricing carbon in Australia is to ensure that Australia is not left behind as the rest of the world moves. In a global economy where dependency upon carbon is penalised we cannot allow ourselves to be so exposed. And living, as we do, in the most carbon dependent economy in the developed world the prosperity of our future industry demands that we move to address our carbon dependency now.
Yet the connection does lie in the global story of climate change. For lest there be any doubt that the world is in fact moving, the very real experiences of Tuvalu and Kiribati along with those of the Aral Sea, the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Amazon Basin are the driving force which will see the global will to act on climate change grow in intensity each and every day.
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