Strange climate of neglect
Rowan Callick, Asia-Pacific editor
From: The Australian December 12, 2009 12:00AM
Pacific island nations are under threat from a great deal more than global warming.
THE climate change conference opened with a 24-year-old banker from Fiji, Leah Wickham, weeping as she said: "All the hopes and dreams of my generation rest on Copenhagen."
Said Wickham, a Suva-based Greenpeace activist: "Fifty years from now, my children will be raising their own families. It is my hope that they will still be able to call our beautiful islands home. It is my hope that our culture and our identity will never be compromised. I'm on the front lines of climate change."
Her commitment to her cause is estimable, her passion palpably sincere.
But there is a danger that by concentrating so much energy and expectation on yet another external deus ex machina, a remote industrialised world at once blamed for all wrongs and for their salvation, the islands will wind up drowning in their own tears.
The Australian Associated Press report from Copenhagen described "some scientists" as saying that "low-lying island nations such as Fiji are vulnerable to rising sea levels". They must indeed be some scientists.
Every tourist who arrives at Fiji's Nadi airport gazes up at the mountains that tower nearby. Fiji's main island, Viti Levu, which contains 70 per cent of the population, rises to Mt Tomaniivi's 1324m. Vanua Levu island rises to Mt Batini's 1111m, Taveuni to Mt Uluigalau's 1241m and Kadavu to Mt Washington 822m. In comparison, it is "low-lying island nations" such as England that are truly vulnerable, with a highest peak rising only 978m, or Denmark at just 173m.
Australia's National Tidal Centre, based at the Bureau of Meteorology in Adelaide, administers the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project, which is the only Pacific-wide operation that monitors increases in the sea level.
Other assessments are based on computer modelling, which in turn relies on assumptions that may be contestable.
The tidal centre's equipment shows that the sea level in Fiji has been rising by 5.3mm a year since the equipment was installed in October 1992. The average annual global rise has been about 3mm in recent years, double that of the 20th century. At that rate, the sea level around Fiji will be 47cm higher by the start of the next century. It is a safe bet that in 2059, Wickham's children will still be able to call their beautiful islands home. By then, the sea will probably have risen 26.5cm.
The plight of Kiribati, subject of intense climate-change focus, is of greater concern. The tidal centre's readings show that the sea level there is rising considerably slower than around Fiji, at 3.3mm a year. But this is more threatening for a genuinely low-lying atoll nation, covering 3.5 million square kilometres straddling the equator, whose average height is below 3m.
Assuming a continued rise of this dimension, by the start of the next century the sea will have risen 31.5cm, or 12.7 per cent of an island of an average height of 2.5m.
Among the islands, there is a vast range of factors to be considered in assessing the reason for changing sea levels: tectonic plate movement, the removal of groundwater because of excess populations, mining sand for construction, the removal of vegetation, El Nino and La Nina, and what the tidal centre calls "a decadal slosh of Pacific sea level, with sea levels having risen in the southwest Pacific and fallen in the northwest Pacific since 1992".
But evidence of the effect of climate change as a leading factor is significant, manifest not only in rising sea levels in some areas but also in the increasing number and size of king tides, and likewise of storms and cyclones.
The next biggest danger in the islands region, after climate change, is the reorienting of environmental efforts, of development plans, of the process of government, towards this process. If it is indeed true, as Wickham said, that "all the hopes and dreams of my generation rest on Copenhagen", that would truly be a cause for grave concern.
It would mark a retreat from taking your life into your own hands -- a useful definition of development -- back to a form of cargo cult reliance on remote mechanisms, on the generosity or guilt feelings of foreigners.
In Papua New Guinea, home of some of the most famous cargo cults, villagers have been tricked out of their savings by "carbon cowboys" selling them memberships of false organisations they expect to repay them mightily. This scam is based on the claim that wealthy people in Australia and elsewhere will send the organisations, for reasons the villagers find unfathomable, mani bilong skai, or sky money, for forgoing development, especially of their forests. The story contains just sufficient seeds of the truth about carbon trading to be convincing.
The campaign that took Wickham to Copenhagen is pushing the industrialised nations to hand over at least $US150 billion ($163.5bn) to what used to be called developing countries, to help them adapt to climate change. Australia is already spending $150 million in aid during three years on adaptation measures, mostly for Pacific countries.
These island nations mostly have remained mired in the lowest quartile of the UN's Human Development Index despite -- or possibly because of -- their extraordinarily high per capita aid incomes. Their prime priorities should be to increase the number of jobs available and to improve the delivery of services, especially of education and health. Better living standards will make it easier -- although still, in a few cases, extraordinarily challenging -- to adapt to climate change.
Such progress requires fighting corruption -- which is endemic in many island countries, now also including Fiji, with its unaccountable government's monopoly on power -- as well as aid dependency.
How much of that proposed $US150bn would be likely to be spent usefully? How much of any cash pumped into the developing nations' climate change kitties would be diverted from other, longer established projects and programs for supporting those countries? And what of the environmental problems palpably caused by islanders: the disposable nappies and drink cans that clog lagoons, the new causeways that destabilise tidal flows around islands, the average in Kiribati of almost six children a family?
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said after embracing Wickham: "Give us two more weeks of talking and I promise that we will deliver."
We all want a more balanced and livable world, and international efforts are important. But, sadly, talking in Copenhagen is unlikely to deliver a significant improvement in island environments. Responsibility for that still lies substantially within the grasp of islanders themselves and with their constantly globetrotting government leaders.
And there's an intriguing, contrarian postscript to how the Copenhagen efforts are being perceived in the Asia-Pacific region's biggest developing country.
The South China Morning Post has reported this week on how China, while participating at Copenhagen as a leader of the now bitterly divided developing world, may be quietly anticipating global warming with as much relish as trepidation. For "if 3600 years of history is anything to go by, Chinese civilisation has flourished when temperatures have been at their warmest and declined when the climate cooled".
Xie Zhenghui, deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' International Centre for Climate and Environmental Sciences, says: "In my opinion, the sooner the temperature increases, the better. The longer it takes, the more extreme weather we will have to face.
"Extreme weather is the hallmark of transitional periods. Once we enter the warm and stable periods like those in the Han and Tang dynasties, we will be fine."
Wang Zijin, an environmental historian at Beijing Normal University, says: "In the long term, warming may not be a curse but a blessing [for China].
"If the temperature continues to rise, we may not see the return of elephants but it will be very possible that rice and bamboo can again grow along the Yellow River. Xinjiang, Gansu and Inner Mongolia will become much more habitable than today."
industrialised world at once blamed for all wrongs and for their salvation, the islands will wind up drowning in their own tears.
described "some scientists" as saying that "low-lying island nations such as Fiji are vulnerable to rising sea levels". They must indeed be some scientists.
Every tourist who arrives at Fiji's Nadi airport gazes up at the mountains that tower nearby. Fiji's main island, Viti Levu, which contains 70 per cent of the population, rises to Mt Tomaniivi's 1324m. Vanua Levu island rises to Mt Batini's 1111m, Taveuni to Mt Uluigalau's 1241m and Kadavu to Mt Washington 822m. In comparison, it is "low-lying island nations" such as England that are truly vulnerable, with a highest peak rising only 978m, or Denmark at just 173m.
Australia's National Tidal Centre, based at the Bureau of Meteorology in Adelaide, administers the South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project, which is the only Pacific-wide operation that monitors increases in the sea level.
Other assessments are based on computer modelling, which in turn relies on assumptions that may be contestable.
The tidal centre's equipment shows that the sea level in Fiji has been rising by 5.3mm a year since the equipment was installed in October 1992. The average annual global rise has been about 3mm in recent years, double that of the 20th century. At that rate, the sea level around Fiji will be 47cm higher by the start of the next century. It is a safe bet that in 2059, Wickham's children will still be able to call their beautiful islands home. By then, the sea will probably have risen 26.5cm.
The plight of Kiribati, subject of intense climate-change focus, is of greater concern. The tidal centre's readings show that the sea level there is rising considerably slower than around Fiji, at 3.3mm a year. But this is more threatening for a genuinely low-lying atoll nation, covering 3.5 million square kilometres straddling the equator, whose average height is below 3m.
Assuming a continued rise of this dimension, by the start of the next century the sea will have risen 31.5cm, or 12.7 per cent of an island of an average height of 2.5m.
Among the islands, there is a vast range of factors to be considered in assessing the reason for changing sea levels: tectonic plate movement, the removal of groundwater because of excess populations, mining sand for construction, the removal of vegetation, El Nino and La Nina, and what the tidal centre calls "a decadal slosh of Pacific sea level, with sea levels having risen in the southwest Pacific and fallen in the northwest Pacific since 1992".
But evidence of the effect of climate change as a leading factor is significant, manifest not only in rising sea levels in some areas but also in the increasing number and size of king tides, and likewise of storms and cyclones.
The next biggest danger in the islands region, after climate change, is the reorienting of environmental efforts, of development plans, of the process of government, towards this process. If it is indeed true, as Wickham said, that "all the hopes and dreams of my generation rest on Copenhagen", that would truly be a cause for grave concern.
It would mark a retreat from taking your life into your own hands -- a useful definition of development -- back to a form of cargo cult reliance on remote mechanisms, on the generosity or guilt feelings of foreigners.
In Papua New Guinea, home of some of the most famous cargo cults, villagers have been tricked out of their savings by "carbon cowboys" selling them memberships of false organisations they expect to repay them mightily. This scam is based on the claim that wealthy people in Australia and elsewhere will send the organisations, for reasons the villagers find unfathomable, mani bilong skai, or sky money, for forgoing development, especially of their forests. The story contains just sufficient seeds of the truth about carbon trading to be convincing.
The campaign that took Wickham to Copenhagen is pushing the industrialised nations to hand over at least $US150 billion ($163.5bn) to what used to be called developing countries, to help them adapt to climate change. Australia is already spending $150 million in aid during three years on adaptation measures, mostly for Pacific countries.
These island nations mostly have remained mired in the lowest quartile of the UN's Human Development Index despite -- or possibly because of -- their extraordinarily high per capita aid incomes. Their prime priorities should be to increase the number of jobs available and to improve the delivery of services, especially of education and health. Better living standards will make it easier -- although still, in a few cases, extraordinarily challenging -- to adapt to climate change.
Such progress requires fighting corruption -- which is endemic in many island countries, now also including Fiji, with its unaccountable government's monopoly on power -- as well as aid dependency.
How much of that proposed $US150bn would be likely to be spent usefully? How much of any cash pumped into the developing nations' climate change kitties would be diverted from other, longer established projects and programs for supporting those countries? And what of the environmental problems palpably caused by islanders: the disposable nappies and drink cans that clog lagoons, the new causeways that destabilise tidal flows around islands, the average in Kiribati of almost six children a family?
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said after embracing Wickham: "Give us two more weeks of talking and I promise that we will deliver."
We all want a more balanced and livable world, and international efforts are important. But, sadly, talking in Copenhagen is unlikely to deliver a significant improvement in island environments. Responsibility for that still lies substantially within the grasp of islanders themselves and with their constantly globetrotting government leaders.
And there's an intriguing, contrarian postscript to how the Copenhagen efforts are being perceived in the Asia-Pacific region's biggest developing country.
The South China Morning Post has reported this week on how China, while participating at Copenhagen as a leader of the now bitterly divided developing world, may be quietly anticipating global warming with as much relish as trepidation. For "if 3600 years of history is anything to go by, Chinese civilisation has flourished when temperatures have been at their warmest and declined when the climate cooled".
Xie Zhenghui, deputy director of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' International Centre for Climate and Environmental Sciences, says: "In my opinion, the sooner the temperature increases, the better. The longer it takes, the more extreme weather we will have to face.
"Extreme weather is the hallmark of transitional periods. Once we enter the warm and stable periods like those in the Han and Tang dynasties, we will be fine."
Wang Zijin, an environmental historian at Beijing Normal University, says: "In the long term, warming may not be a curse but a blessing [for China].
"If the temperature continues to rise, we may not see the return of elephants but it will be very possible that rice and bamboo can again grow along the Yellow River. Xinjiang, Gansu and Inner Mongolia will become much more habitable than today." |
