[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P7jXveokDY?ecver=1]
By Caroline Zuba
The plight of countries other than The Annoying Industrial Big Ones from climate change is important too https://t.co/37oL5CW3qm #bcsfh2o
— Caroline Zuba (@zcscience) October 24, 2017
The article I posted on Twitter, shown above, is ominous, yet painfully true. Titled “Kiribati’s fight for survival,” the article discussed how the 33 islands that make up Kiribati, a low-lying nation in the Pacific, are in tremendous danger with climate change. The highest point on most of the islands is only a couple of metres above sea level. On one island, South Tarawa, there is only one road.
Rising ocean water as a result of climate change is threatening to engulf the islands. Not only will it sink Kiribati, it also leaves it susceptible to storm damage.
The most immediate concern, tied also to climate change, is fear of crop destruction. Sea incursions and king tides are ruining taro plant pits and fresh water sources. Villagers are already being forced to relocate, as evidenced from the photo. One villager says the following: “I talk about life because before this land was full of banana, babai, coconut trees, so many coconut trees, so many trees we get food from, but now how can those trees continue to live when you don’t have fresh water to give them? This is community land and so everybody has a right to live on it but now it seems like the sea has taken that away.”
The plight of the Kiribati is real for many other countries worldwide, but as the video explains, they might be our very first climate refugees. And as my discussion question asks: Who will be saved? The industrial work of countries like the U.S. and the UK are a good deal responsible for recent temperature changes that are affecting sea levels, and yet the lives of their entire populations is not at stake – the Kiribati’s are.
