What Happens When Your Country Drowns?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Meet the people of Tuvalu, the world's first climate refugees.

—By Rachel Morris

IT'S A BRIGHT, BALMY SUNDAY afternoon and I'm driving through the western outskirts of Auckland, New Zealand, the kind of place you never see on a postcard. No majestic mountains, no improbably green pastures—just a bland tangle of shopping malls and suburbia. I follow a dead-end street, past a rubber plant, a roofing company, a drainage service, and a plastics manufacturer, until I reach a white building behind a chain-link fence. Inside is a kernel of a nation within a nation—a sneak preview of what a climate change exodus looks like.

This is the Tuvalu Christian Church, the heart of a migrant community from what may be the first country to be rendered unlivable by global warming. Tuvalu is the fourth-smallest nation on Earth: six coral atolls and three reef islands flung across 500,000 square miles of ocean, about halfway between Australia and Hawaii. It has few natural resources to export and no economy to speak of; its gross domestic product relies heavily on the sale of its desirable Internet domain suffix, which is .tv, and a modest trade in collectible stamps. Tuvalu's total land area is just 16 square miles, of which the highest point stands 16 feet above the waterline. Tuvaluans, who have a high per-capita incidence of good humor, refer to the spot as "Mount Howard," after the former Australian prime minister who refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned that low-lying island nations are particularly endang­ered by rising seas and will also be buffeted by more frequent and more violent storms. Already, warmer ocean temperatures are eating away at the coral reefs that form Tuvalu's archipelagic spine. Tuvaluans themselves point to more tangible indicators of trouble—the "king tides" that increasingly sluice their homes, the briny water oozing up into the "grow pits" where they used to cultivate taro and other vegetables. As Julia Whitty predicted in this magazine in 2003, the prognosis has become sufficiently dire that the residents of Tuvalu and other low-lying atoll islands "are beginning to envision the wholesale abandonment of their nations." Around one-fifth of the 12,000-some inhabitants have already left, most bound for New Zealand, where the Tuvaluan community has nearly tripled since 1996.

Inside the church I find a vibrant scene, suggesting both the resilience of Tuvaluan culture and its ability to adapt. Rows of green plastic chairs are filled with several hundred chattering churchgoers, some in traditional lavalavas—vivid cotton skirts emblazoned with flowers—others in Western dresses and suits. A border of bright blue, yellow, and pink stars rings the upper walls—in Tuvalu these might be constructed from frangipani blossoms, but here they are woven from the plastic bands used to tether shipping cargo. As soon as I sit down, a young man in a dapper dark suit strikes up a conversation. He came here in 1997, is making good money, and hasn't been home once. "You may have heard the news about Tuvalu—with global warming, the sea is rising," he says cheerfully. "So better we come here to be safe." Tuvaluans, resigned to fielding reporters' questions about their homeland's impending doom, often offer observations like this unprompted.

The tiny island of Tepuka Savilivili is among those most at risk of disappearing.

After the service, the congregation drifts outside to the gravelly yard, where a group of visitors from the islands is reenacting the crucifixion of Christ on a makeshift stage draped with threadbare astroturf. Reverend Elisala Selu, a thoughtful, soft-spoken man who has worked second jobs to avoid burdening his congregants, explains that Tuvaluan politicians are reluctant to encourage the mass evacuation of their voting base, and so the church, wanting people to be prepared, has taken matters into its own hands. It instructs followers not to assume that, like Noah, they will be delivered by God from the rising waters, and hosts groups of congregants who visit New Zealand to see if they might like to relocate here. But, Selu confides, life in New Zealand isn't always easy. The Tuvaluans are one of the country's poorest communities. Just over half the adults have found work; the median income is about $17,000 for men, $10,000 for women. There are those here illegally—overstayers, in Pacific parlance—who struggle to make ends meet; Tuvaluans on the run from debt collectors after buying cars on shady financing schemes; children left unattended for long hours because their parents work multiple jobs as cleaners or laborers or farmworkers. Then there's the jarring adjustment to urban Auckland from a place where most citizens don't pay rent or buy food, but sleep on grass mats beside the road on warm nights, go fishing or pick breadfruit when they're hungry, and where, as one jovial Tuvaluan remarked to me, "the only crime is cycling in the night without a torch [flashlight]." Selu frets about the new generation of Tuvaluan children born in New Zealand. "We try to run away from the sea rise in Tuvalu, but this is another sea-level rise," he says with a wry smile. "The next generation gets caught by two cultures. Before Tuvalu sinks physically, our identity might sink in a foreign country."

Tuvalu and other low-lying island countries like Kiribati and the Maldives are, in one sense, the starkest example of how climate change will reshape the world. But Auckland's Tuvaluan community also represents a best-case scenario—so far their migration has been orderly, and their numbers are minuscule compared with the millions of impoverished people who live in global warming hot spots like Africa's Sahel, coastal Bangladesh, and Vietnam's deltas. Koko Warner, an expert on climate change and migration at the United Nations University in Bonn, says the displacement of those populations could be "a phenomenon of a scope not experienced in human history."

Yet little has been done to prepare. In fact, our understanding of exactly how global warming will affect people—how many lives will be threatened, and what we could do to avert a succession of humanitarian disasters—remains extremely rudimentary. As Bill Gates has caustically observed, "It is interesting how often the impact of climate change is illustrated by talking about the problems the polar bears will face rather than the much greater number of poor people who will die unless significant investments are made to help them."

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/200...limate-refugees

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Tuvalu's total land area is just 16 square miles, of which the highest point stands 16 feet above the waterline.

...

Tuvalu and other low-lying island countries like Kiribati and the Maldives are, in one sense, the starkest example of how climate change will reshape the world.

So 16 square miles where the highest point is no more than 16 feet above sea level is rendered unlivable and somehow that is going to reshape the world?

[one...two...tree 2,762]

Tuvalu's total land area is just 16 square miles, of which the highest point stands 16 feet above the waterline.

...

Tuvalu and other low-lying island countries like Kiribati and the Maldives are, in one sense, the starkest example of how climate change will reshape the world.

So 16 square miles where the highest point is no more than 16 feet above sea level is rendered unlivable and somehow that is going to reshape the world?

That's just the tip of the iceberg...so to speak.

[w¡n9Nµ7 §£@¥€r 123]

Tuvalu's total land area is just 16 square miles, of which the highest point stands 16 feet above the waterline.

...

Tuvalu and other low-lying island countries like Kiribati and the Maldives are, in one sense, the starkest example of how climate change will reshape the world.

So 16 square miles where the highest point is no more than 16 feet above sea level is rendered unlivable and somehow that is going to reshape the world?

That's just the tip of the iceberg...so to speak.

uh huh.

[NickD 203]

Due to the melting of the ice age 10,000 years ago, many ancient civilizations or better yet, what is left of them have been found deep underwater. Where was Al Gore back then?

[Gary and Alla 3,696]

Tuvalu's total land area is just 16 square miles, of which the highest point stands 16 feet above the waterline.

...

Tuvalu and other low-lying island countries like Kiribati and the Maldives are, in one sense, the starkest example of how climate change will reshape the world.

So 16 square miles where the highest point is no more than 16 feet above sea level is rendered unlivable and somehow that is going to reshape the world?

Sounds like lots of good reasons to leave. Good riddance...and lets have a bit of global warming in Vermont while we are at it!

[Saddle Bronc 124]

Gee, I (wrongly) thought by looking at the title that it was about the federal deficit/debt.

[scandal 951]

Tuvalu's total land area is just 16 square miles, of which the highest point stands 16 feet above the waterline.

...

Tuvalu and other low-lying island countries like Kiribati and the Maldives are, in one sense, the starkest example of how climate change will reshape the world.

So 16 square miles where the highest point is no more than 16 feet above sea level is rendered unlivable and somehow that is going to reshape the world?

Just wait till the Bangladeshis want to move uphill into the Himalayas. (Most of Bangladesh is less than 12m above sea level)

And for the Dutch to head for the Alps. (Netherlands: 27% of area, 60% of population below sea level)

[Saddle Bronc 124]

Tuvalu's total land area is just 16 square miles, of which the highest point stands 16 feet above the waterline.

...

Tuvalu and other low-lying island countries like Kiribati and the Maldives are, in one sense, the starkest example of how climate change will reshape the world.

So 16 square miles where the highest point is no more than 16 feet above sea level is rendered unlivable and somehow that is going to reshape the world?

Just wait till the Bangladeshis want to move uphill into the Himalayas. (Most of Bangladesh is less than 12m above sea level)

Eh, that's been more-or-less the case for donkeys-years now--which is why India's government has belatedly started constructing fence around that not-so-nice neighbour it liberated in 1971!

[Darnell 8,480]

What Happens When Your Country Drowns? - Move to Australia, grow sheep in the outback.

Or Marry a New Zealander, grow better sheep.

No, I'm serious.

[웃 910]

Gee, I (wrongly) thought by looking at the title that it was about the federal deficit/debt.

Below we highlight current credit default swap prices and the year-to-date change for the sovereign debt of 39 countries. As shown, default risk has declined for every country except Japan in 2009, including Dubai.

http://www.bespokeinvest.com/bespoke/2009/...fault-risk.html

[DEDixon 39]

listening to a 88 y.o. woman on the radio yesterday, she said she didn't care about much of anything, i can relate. i don't care what happens to the world and i don't care what happens to the USA either.