Kiribati: An Island Going Under?

The small Pacific Island countries are considered to be amongst the most vulnerable to rising global sea level. According to the national Red Cross and Red Crescent’s World Disaster report of 2005, there has been a 21% increase in the number of people killed by weather-related disasters in this part of the world in the last 20 years. This greater level of risk is predominately generated by their typical physical properties; a high shoreline to land ratio, low lying topography, and a close proximity to sensitive coral reef ecosystems. However, with economies reliant on primary productivity and high rates of rural to urban migration, this vulnerability is also enhanced by interwoven socioeconomic factors.  

The country of Kiribati is one such example. Given that very few points across the thirty-two coral atolls and reef islands are higher than 2 m, it is of little surprise that it is currently encountering problems characteristic with sea level rise. These include severe erosion to coastal areas and a continuous salinisation of water supplies and agricultural land. The latter is generally considered to be the greatest threat to the island, as the porous underground water table is breached by ever rising sea levels, contaminating already limited fresh water supplies. Additionally, the number of ‘king tides’ or storm surges battering the islands has increased from one, to six or eight every year, initiating significant erosion events and chronic flooding. A number of regions have already been abandoned to flooding, how many others will be lost before the end of the century?

Flooding, and the removal of fertile agricultural land has also contributed to large scale internal migration into the more urbanised South Tarawa. As one of the poorest nations in the Pacific (GNI is just $2000 per capita), this area was very poorly equipped to deal with such an influx. As such, overcrowding and poor quality public amenities have contributed to significant declines in public health and life expectancy.

However, a big effort is currently being made to not just reverse this trend, but to better adapt Kiribati to a changing climate. One of the main reasons I chose this case study is because it recently became the first country in the world to have a climate change adaptation strategy commissioned by the World Bank. The programme’s success will undoubtedly be incredibly influential in determining the future of the nation, and I will attempt to analyse current progress in my next post. Can the programme stop Kiribati being the first country to be wiped from the map?

High Tides

In my first post, I briefly touched upon the widely debated link between conflict, migration and climate change. However, there are other seemingly less complex, and certainly less controversial, cause-and-effect relationships between climate change and population displacement. For example, it has been estimated that sea-level rise will displace 150 million by 2100, either as result of submerged land or chronic flooding.   

Reconstructions of past sea level show that considerable fluctuations have occurred throughout geological time, but conditions seem to have remained relatively stable for the past 6000 years. This however, appears to have changed within the last 100-150 years; studies suggest that sea level has risen at a rate of approximately 1.74 mm per year over this period of time.  

Sea level measurements from 23 tide gauge records in geologically stable environments during the 20th century (Douglas, 1997).

Two of the main contributing factors to this sea level rise are:

• Thermosteric change: An increase in atmospheric temperature contributes to the warming of the surface ocean. This leads to an expansion in the overall volume of water and is thought to have contributed to approximately 2.5 cm of the sea level rise observed in the last 100 years.
• Melting ice sheets: In Antarctica, rapid shelf loss is already being witnessed at the Antarctic Peninsular and new research highlights a number of other ice shelves which may collapse completely within the next century, assuming similar emissions. The Greenland ice sheet is also vulnerable. Were the entire sheet to disappear, it would contribute to 7 m of global sea level rise.

Using the IPCC’s 6 different radiative forcing scenarios, a sea level rise of between 0.6 and 1.6 m is predicted to occur by end of the century. Putting this into perspective, a 0.8 - 2.0 m rise would be enough to drown many U.S. East Coast cities, and some low lying Pacific islands may be lost completely. Surges and flooding will also be greatly exacerbated during storm events. Consequently, it is thought that rising sea levels could result in loss and damages that are equivalent to ten percent of yearly global GDP by 2100.

Whilst there are discrepancies as to the scale of change, there is an overwhelming consensus that sea levels will continue rise. It would however, be too simplistic just to get a map, cross out the the areas that would be expected to disappear or encounter extreme flooding, and assume that all of the people living there will move. For the people who do move, it is also not possible to isolate sea level rise as the direct reason for this, with many other factors likely to be influential. Therefore, in my next few posts I will aim to look at a range of case studies, comparing the predicted impacts and potential responses between contrasting countries.

Introduction: Shifting Society

It would have been difficult to ignore the topic dominating headlines in recent months; mass-migration into Europe and the resultant humanitarian crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people have made the perilous journey across the Mediterranean, with the haunting images reported sparking an international outcry. Clearly, the migrant crisis is very closely connected to countries that are either involved in civil war, or battling extremism. However, there is a growing consensus which considers another significant factor to be at the root of this; climate change.      

A recent article in the Guardian discussed the relationship between a five-year drought in Syria, and the outbreak of civil war. It has been proposed that the severity of drought in this region, which resulted in widespread crop failure and mass migration into cities, was strongly forced by anthropogenic change. You only have to scroll briefly through the comments below the Guardian article to see how controversial many perceive this discussion to be. Whilst it would be wrong to suggest that climate change is the sole instigator of the conflict, it could also be argued that it is wrong to ignore the role that it has played as a ‘risk multiplier, contributing to social and political unrest.

Syrian citizens were called by Bashar al-Assad to pray for rain, at the peak of the drought. Photograph: Youssef Badawi/EP

This is a debate which I not only find to be incredibly interesting, but also something which I think will become critically important in future years. With rising levels endangering the existence of low lying islands and an expected increase in natural disasters, many areas will be put at risk. Consequently, I wanted to use this blog as a platform to consider the discussions and theories that currently exist around this highly contentious relationship, and to better understand the role that the climate may have in shaping future global population distribution.