DISCUSSION PAPER #12: World leaders left Copenhagen with a ‘non-deal’. The development challenges remain the same.
The sirens have sounded on climate change. Pacific islands are on the frontline and some are facing an existential threat to their very existence. The world was watching to see what would happen at the Copenhagen summit. Few were optimistic about the outcome. The Pacific Institute of Public Policy (PiPP) released a briefing paper in the lead up to the COP15 conference that canvases the most important aspects of the debate in a Pacific context: the human impact of climate change and how adaptation measures should be about meeting development challenges.
Mr Derek Brien, Deputy Executive Director of PiPP, says “in a changing climate, the development challenges remain the same. Adaptation needs to consider more than just climate-proofing infrastructure. Climate change adaptation is about development: water supply, sanitation, agricultural productivity, food security, urbanisation, economic development, health care and education”.
The latter especially may not seem obvious climate related issues, but without healthy and well educated populations, the Pacific will not have the capacity to deal with development pressures that are made all the more urgent in the face of shifting weather patterns, coastal erosion and more frequent and extreme storm events.
Even in the most vulnerable, low lying atoll states, the focus of climate change is on tackling existing and future development challenges. Kiribati (population 100,000), Marshall Islands (60,000) and Tuvalu (population 10,000) face the prospect of becoming uninhabitable over the next fifty years. Compounding the problem of rising seas and retreating land is rapid population growth, placing increasing pressures on already limited physical and social infrastructure. South Tarawa, the main atoll of Kiribati already suffers severe overcrowding with over 40,000 people crammed into less than 16 square kilometres of land. That is a higher population density than Sydney, Australia’s largest city.
Relocation is not a simple solution. The evacuation of 3,000 people from the Carteret islands, a group of five atolls in Papua New Guinea that have progressively become uninhabitable due to salt-water inundation, has been fraught with problems. Not the least of which is how to move entire communities so they can be self-sufficient and live harmoniously with the traditional land owners.
President Anote Tong of Kiribati goes to Copenhagen with an emotional message – in fifty years his country may be all but submerged. He knows his people have to move, and has a preference for a gradual outflow rather than the wholesale relocation of the population.
“Climate change adaption also needs to facilitate choice migration”, says Derek Brien, “and that will require a shift in prevailing attitudes to the subject, as well as ensuring current and future generations of Pacific islanders have access to international standards of education to compete on the global stage”.
History has demonstrated the traditional resilience and mobility of island communities. People have moved when various pressures afflicted them, from tribal war, to fresh water scarcity to the lure of Christian missions and urban life. Climate change presents just the latest challenge for islanders to make the best of a bad situation and adapt – as they always have.
This time, however, the challenge is global and there remains a need for a sustained and co-operative effort by the world’s leaders to tackle it. Copenhagen was supposed to deliver a binding post-2012 agreement. It didn’t. For the Pacific Island states, it is important to keep the discussion alive. The count down has well and truly started and for some island states there may be little time left. Climate change threatens the region in a way that may warrant declaring a state of emergency.
A copy of the briefing paper published before the COP15 conference is available here.
