Climate Change Forces Community Evacuation

Perhaps the first people to be displaced as a direct result of man-made global warming, inhabitants of the Carteret Islands near Papau New Guinea have been forced to permanently evacuate.

2,600 people live on the small coral atolls. Rising sea levels have eroded much of the coastlines of the low-lying Carteret Islands situated 50 miles from Bougainville Island, in the South Pacific.

The Ecologist’s blogger Dan Box witnessed the first five families move to Bougainville to prepare the ground for full evacuation. They are not, as the Daily Mail and the Times predicted, “the world’s first climate-change refugees”. People have been displaced from their homes by natural climate change for tens of thousands of years, and by manmade climate change for millennia (think of the desertification caused in North Africa by Roman grain production).

The main problem appears to be rising sea levels. The highest point of the islands is 170cm above the sea. Over the past few years they have been repeatedly inundated by spring tides, wiping out the islanders’ vegetable and fruit gardens, destroying their subsistence and making their lives impossible.

Their numbers might be small, but this is the event that foreshadows the likely mass displacement of people from coastal cities and low-lying regions as a result of rising sea levels. The disaster has begun, but so far hardly anyone has noticed.

Source: The Guardian

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