Year 3, Month 3, Day 16: Octopus’ Garden Edition

Reprinting the Kiribati story in the New York Daily News:

Tong has been considering other unusual options to combat climate change, including shoring up some Kiribati islands with sea walls and even building a floating island. He said this week that the latter option would likely prove too expensive, but that he hopes reinforcing some islands will ensure that Kiribati continues to exist in some form even in a worst-case scenario.

“We’re trying to secure the future of our people,” he said. “The international community needs to be addressing this problem more.”

Tong said he hopes that the Fiji land will represent just one of several options for relocating people. He pointed out that the land is three times larger than the atoll of Tarawa, currently home to more than half of Kiribati’s population.

Although like much of the Pacific, Kiribati is poor — its annual GDP per person is just $1,600 — Tong said the country has plenty of foreign reserves to draw from for the land purchase. The money, he said, comes from phosphate mining on the archipelago in the 1970s.

I’d love to see a floating island. Sent March 10:

No doubt it’s hard for Americans to be overly concerned with the impending disappearance of the Pacific nation of Kiribati. With a quarter the population of Staten Island, the tiny state is to all intents and purposes statistically nonexistent in the larger sphere of international relations.

But the plight of Kiribati deserves our attention and concern. As a poor country with a negligible carbon footprint, it has contributed nothing to the accelerating consumption of fossil fuels that now endangers its existence; as a nation on the front lines of climate change, it offers us a preview of the dangerous times ahead.

While neighboring Fiji may be able to supply the necessary acreage for a hundred thousand climate refugees to rebuild their lives, the tragedy of a homeland lost beneath the rising sea is not something we in the industrialized world should ignore. There are no climate-change denialists in Kiribati.

Warren Senders