Awash in a Rising Sea
By Curtis A. Moore
How global warming is overwhelming the islands of the tropical Pacific
OUR ALUMINUM SKIFF plows through Tarawa Lagoon's emerald waters, throwing up a spray that glitters in the sunlight like a cascade of diamonds. North and west is the barely visible village of Naa, and beyond that lies what I've come to see or, more accurately, not see: Tebua Island.
According to local legend, Tebua has existed since creation. But now, I've been told, it is gone, swallowed by the sea. Its fate, some say, was triggered by global warming--the unnatural increase in the Earth's temperature caused by air pollutants that trap solar heat.
Tebua's disappearance is not the only sign that global warming is making itself felt in the distant reaches of the Pacific, where scientists have long predicted that rising waters would engulf low-lying islands. Other islands have disappeared, too. Cemeteries are crumbling into the ocean. Salt has poisoned water supplies. Malaria and other diseases have spread. And large ocean surges have engulfed once-safe homes with no warning.
Events like these provide a powerful confirmation that global warming is not just a distant threat but is underway, with dire implications for the people of the Pacific. "The hard truth is that it is probably too late to save mid-Pacific islands like Tarawa," says climate authority Irving Mintzer of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. "Absent a miracle or something comparable, many will almost certainly disappear within our lifetimes."
For me, the true test will be spelled by the answer to a simple question: Has Tebua really disappeared beneath the waves as reported? To see for myself, I've traveled 12,000 miles over three hard days for International Wildlife.
Tebua lies off Tarawa Atoll on the extreme western edge of the nation of Kiribati (KEER-ri-bas), a group of islands stretching across the Pacific in an area nearly the width of the United States. Kiribati is so low--three feet or less above sea level in most places--that from a distance, islands disappear into an azure vault of sky. It is "the place where heaven meets ocean," according to its people, the I-Kiribati.
Despite its immense size, Kiribati has no railroads, military, newspapers or manufacturing facilities. It covers roughly 2.5 million square miles of ocean--into which Alaska could be dropped with room left over for another 20 to 30 U.S. states. But the land area itself is a mere fly speck--just 275 square miles. Economically, Kiribati is even tinier. Its total gross national product (mostly from export of copra, or coconut meat, used to make soaps and oils) is roughly equal to that of about 2,900 Americans.
To understand Tarawa's geography, picture the open jaws of a crocodile. The bottom jaw is South Tarawa. At its tip lies Betio (BAY-see-oh), site of the bloody battle for "one square mile of hell," where more than 1,700 U.S. Marines and sailors were killed pioneering the amphibious landing techniques that made island-hopping victory in the Pacific possible during World War II. The top jaw is North Tarawa. At its tip, where the crocodile's snout would be and just off shore from the northernmost village of Naa, lies Tebua.
Before I head out for Tebua, I stop to see Nakibae Teuatabo, the country's foremost specialist on global warming. To introduce me to his atoll, he sets out with me in my rented Toyota to navigate Tarawa's only road, a narrow asphalt strip with a faded centerline and ragged, crumbling edges. We pass Scout Island, so named for the generations of I-Kiribati Boy Scouts that have camped there. It has shrunk by around one-third. The coconut palm trees on its fringes have died and those remaining in the center are circled by encroaching salt bushes that can tolerate shallow, saline waters. They grow everywhere. Unlike the palms, however, they provide neither shade nor food. "This is my model for what will happen to Kiribati," Teuatabo says.
Like the salt bush, evidence of global warming is everywhere on Tarawa. It starts with energy-sapping heat. Since 1920 in the southwest Pacific, atmospheric temperatures have risen about 1 degree C (an increase of 1 degree Celsius equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), although the world as a whole has warmed less--about 0.6 degrees C over the past century, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In all, if you include Australia and New Zealand, there are 14 island nations and more than a dozen and a half other dependencies that stretch for more than 7,000 miles across the Pacific (see map, page 30). Among them, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Samoa, Vanuatu and New Caledonia have warming rates higher than 1 degree C per century.
Throughout the region, the weather has changed dramatically. According to Jim Salinger, senior climate specialist at New Zealand's National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research, there have been shifts in rainfall throughout the Pacific. It's wetter in French Polynesia and to the east and north; drier to the west and south, with more frequent droughts, in Kiribati, Fiji and New Caledonia.
As temperatures have risen, so too has the single greatest threat to the survival of the Pacific Islands: the level of ocean waters, which has crept upward inexorably. Although the melting of glaciers and ice caps causes between 10 and 30 percent of sea-level rise due to global warming, the bulk of the increase occurs because ocean waters expand as they warm. Measurements confirm not only that the Pacific waters are hotter, but that sea levels have risen. Over the last century, the global rise has averaged 1 to 2 millimeters per year. But according to two tidal gauges bolted to the new jetty in Betio--one installed by the University of Hawaii, the other by Australia's Flinders University--the levels in Tarawa are climbing much faster: 3.3 millimeters (about an eighth of an inch) each year.
Temperature and sea-level increases that might be inconsequential elsewhere can be devastating in the Pacific, where their effects are magnified by natural climatic oscillations, especially periodic El Niño events that create continent-sized pools of warm water. Some believe global warming has intensified the strength and frequency of El Niños, which now come at record power and almost without respite. Because these accelerate the cycling of water, dry spells become droughts, and heavy rains become downpours, triggering floods. And since a 1-foot vertical increase in sea level can consume 100 or more feet of beach width, waves flood homes and wash away precious sand, which disappears forever. Because of global warming, says Mike McCracken of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, "the baseline is rising, so each round will be worse."
I find more evidence of this rising water on Tarawa at every turn. In the village of Eita, roughly 30 feet from where Ueanmone Saipolua cooks the family meals, and a few feet left of the path to the beach, lies the grave of her great uncle, who has lain there for half a century. His headstone is pitted, the stone coffin canted sharply. The soil beneath it has been washed away, leaving the coffin to slide into the sea.
A few miles away at the much larger cemetery at Betio, ancient gravestones are also reported to have washed away. Now only yards from the rising tides, the graves are littered with faded aluminum cans and other flotsam left by ocean overwash.
So badly eroded are Tarawa's beaches that the Mormon Church recently imported several tons of sand from Australia to build a new house of worship here. In nearby Bairiki, Tarawa's administrative center, concrete houses have crumbled into the sea. Many families have built crude seawalls to protect their homes.
They have good reason to worry. Here on Tarawa, on a sunny day in January 1997, Teunaia Abeta watched as a high tide came rolling in from the atoll's turquoise lagoon and did not stop. There was no typhoon, no rain, no wind, "just an eerie rising tide that lapped higher and higher," according to one account, swallowing up Abeta's thatched-roof home and scores of others.
Another Tarawa resident, Teatu Tsuria, has suffered damage of a different sort. "When we came here 11 years ago, the sea was about two meters further away," he says, and that change has had a huge impact: A violent storm in 1997 flooded not only his home, but the pits where he raises taro, a root crop that is a staple of the Pacific island diet. Now nothing will grow, and the water in his well has turned brackish, unfit for drinking or even bathing.
Higher and hotter seas are taking their toll in other places as well: In the Marshall Islands, there have been surges over seawalls, bridges and roads (on Majuro Island, the airport flooded). In the Federated States of Micronesia, 40 families ran out of water.
In Tuvalu--which consists of nine coral atolls strung over 360 miles--seven families have already fled for a higher island, Niue. In low-lying areas, the country's water is so salty that many farmers now grow taro in tin-lined containers or concrete-lined planting beds. The future looks so bleak that Tuvalans have appealed to Australia and New Zealand to grant them permanent residence if their islands are submerged.
On the higher islands, the damage to crops has been of a different sort. In 1998, drought killed two-thirds of Fiji's cane crop and halved Tonga's squash production. Food and water shortages have become so severe and frequent in Papua New Guinea, the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and other areas that it is now almost routine for France, Australia or the United States to ship in emergency relief supplies. Australia recently rushed US$15 million in food into regions of Papua New Guinea where residents were starving.
Other plant and animal life also is being altered. Since 1990, malaria has appeared above 2,000 meters (just over 6,500 feet) in Papua New Guinea where previously it was too cold for malaria-carrying mosquitoes to survive. In 2001 in French Polynesia, roughly 31,000 cases of dengue fever were reported, resulting in the hospitalization of 1,040 and the deaths of 7 children. "Warming and the growing intensity of extreme weather events have contributed to the increased severity of dengue fever outbreaks in Fiji, Samoa and other parts of the world," says Dr. Paul R. Epstein, associate director of the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.
The disruptions extend into the oceans themselves. Warmer waters cause coral to "bleach," or turn white, when they expel the tiny algae that provide them color and food. This is the first step in a process that can lead to mass mortality of the vital coral colonies that not only harbor fish and other food, but literally build the islands over eons. In 1998, huge swathes of the coral at Rangiroa in French Polynesia died when sea temperatures that had previously averaged about 28 degrees C (82 F) soared to sustained levels of 33 to 34 degrees C (91 to 93 F).
Before 1980, bleaching was limited to a few small areas clearly affected by extreme, local stress, according to the Global Coral Reef Alliance. Now, however, bleaching events have hit throughout the Pacific, often with devastating consequences. In Fiji, for example, 65 percent of the reefs have been struck and 15 percent are now dead. Specific bleachings have occurred in the Cook Islands in 1994, Palau in 1998 and Fiji in 2000. The culprit, according to scientific experts, including Peter Mumby of the Department of Marine Sciences at England's University of Newcastle upon Tyne, is global warming.
Understandably, such changes trouble Nakabae Teuatabo, who is now preparing to retire from government. He is concerned in particular by the indifference of the rest of the world to the fate of Kiribati and the other island nations. Most countries agreed at the 1990 landmark Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro to take at least the half-step of holding emissions of greenhouse gases--produced by burning fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline--to 1990 levels. The agreement was voluntary, however, and the vast majority of countries have increased their pollution. In the United States, for example, emissions jumped 11 percent between 1990 and 1998.
In 1998, international negotiators hammered out a proposed agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, that would mandate reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases by roughly 7 percent. But on March 13, 2001, newly elected U.S. President George W. Bush announced that the United States would not participate. This was a blow to most islanders. The protocol, said Tuvalu finance minister Lagitupu Tuilimu, "may be the only means to safeguard the survival of an entire living society."
To complete my journey, first to Naa, then to Tebua, I travel with Nakibae Teuatabo's son Kabiea, who sits in the stern of our skiff. As we approach Naa, two men floating in a small outrigger cast hand lines. As the villagers here have done for centuries, they are seeking a catch of snapper or bonefish, which, together with taro, breadfruit, coconut and pandanas (a basketball-sized fruit that is a relative of pineapple) make up the basis of their diets. If the plants die or the fish disappear, so do they.
On Naa, we look up Toauru Utire, 61, who as a boy, waded to Tebua to harvest coconuts and breadfruit, and to fish. When he was about seven, he recalls, "there were coconut and pandana trees" on Tebua. But during his teenage years in the 1950s, trees on Tebua began to die. Sand and other sediment washed away. The island began to shrink. Finally all the trees and vegetation disappeared, leaving only a few square yards of dead coral polished by waves and wind.
Utire agrees to take us to Tebua. The trip takes only about five minutes. The island is indeed awash in the sea, but to our surprise, it is not uninhabited. We find a lone fisherman. Atop a stone and coral seawall, he has constructed a makeshift shelter of torn fabric and sticks. As we splash across the mostly submerged islet, he remains in his hut mending a fishing net.
He has lived here for two years, he explains. His family regularly wades out with food and other supplies for which he exchanges fish. During high tides--the extreme ones of October and November--Tebua is completely submerged. So he retreats atop his seawall to stay dry--a last forlorn human relict on an island claimed by the sea in a warming world.
NWF at Work: Warming and Wildlife
The tropical Pacific is not the only place facing the ravaging effects of climate change. Similar events are already confronting the United States. To help find solutions, NWF has funded research on species at risk, described in a new book of North American case studies. For more on the Federation's climate change program and on the book, see www.nwf.org/climate.
Curtis A. Moore has followed global climate change and related issues since serving as Counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Environment from 1978 to 1989.
Copyright 2001 National Wildlife Federation. All rights reserved. The above article may not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, without prior written consent of National Wildlife Federation.