Start planning for climate-change refugees from Pacific islands: scientist
By Staff Writers, Majuro (AFP) Oct 19, 2009 Pacific islands in danger of being obliterated by rising sea levels should seek aid for relocation at a crunch UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, a Fiji-based scientist said. “By 2100, I don’t see how many islands will be habitable,” professor Patrick Nunn, a climate change researcher at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji said ahead of the opening of a regional climate change conference Monday. Nunn is chairing the Pacific Climate Change Roundtable meeting in the Marshall Islands capital Majuro, where 14 Pacific countries and territories are devising their strategy for the December conference. New scientific projections showed that sea levels were rising faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected in its 2007 report, Nunn said. “We’re now looking at a more than one metre (three feet) sea-level rise by the end of the century,” he said. For low-lying coral atoll nations such as the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu, habitation will become impossible. “The biggest challenge is getting policy makers to understand the need for a profound change in the way Pacific people live,” he said. “Relocation is one of the most difficult things to talk about and to convince people that the home they’ve lived in for centuries is no longer a viable option,” said Nunn, who has researched climate change for 24 years. …
