A ‘Marshall Plan' for the Pacific: Islands aim to stave off climate disaster

By Bruno Vander Velde

In what is being called a “Marshall Plan” for the Pacific, a coalition of five low-lying island nations on Wednesday announced an ambitious effort to adapt to a changing climate that threatens their very existence.

The initiative, called “Pacific Rising,” would employ a three-pronged campaign of investment, capacity-building and cultural preservation for these islands as they face sea-level rise from the melting of polar ice.

The plight of these islands has been highlighted heavily during the ongoing climate talks in Paris, where Pacific Rising was announced. U.S. President Barack Obama even met with Pacific leaders recently, telling the assembled gathering, “I’m an island boy,” referring to his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia.

Yet for all the recognition of the issue, a resolution remains elusive as of this article’s publication, with the issue of loss and damage — which may entail compensation for the countries most vulnerable to climate impacts but which bear little or no responsibility for the carbon emissions causing them — proving a contentious issue in the Paris talks.

The tough part: No one, not even Pacific Rising’s backers, know what a resolution looks like, other than it could require full-scale migration off the islands. What they agree on is that action must start now.

“Imagine living in a place where you know it’s going to go away someday, but you don’t know what day that wave’s going to come over and wash your home away,” said oceans expert Greg Stone, an executive vice president at Conservation International and an adviser to the government of Kiribati, one of the countries in the coalition. “It’s a disaster we know is going to happen.”

The Pacific Rising initiative, explained:

What is happening in the Pacific?

A disaster in slow motion is unfolding for some 30,000 low-lying islands and islets in the Pacific:

• Higher and warmer waters are magnifying the destructive power of tropical storms.
• Storm surges are eating away at coastal lands and damaging arable land needed for food crops.
• Invading seawater is contaminating the islands’ fragile supply of drinking water.

“For every inch of sea-level rise, these islands lose 10 feet of their freshwater table to saltwater intrusion,” Stone explained. “So it’s not just about the day the water finally goes over the island; it’s also about the day that there’s just not enough water left and everyone has to move off the island.”

That has already begun to happen, with islanders in the nation of Kiribati being forced to move from more remote areas to urban centers such as Tarawa, which has seen its population double in the past 20 years, putting greater pressure on the city’s infrastructure and social services. Meanwhile, Tarawa itself is in dire straits, with predictions that the island will be mostly inundated by 2050.

How is this issue playing out in the Paris climate talks?

The stated aim of the talks — to reduce emissions sufficiently to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, is not enough, the islands’ leaders say, urging a more ambitious target of 1.5 degrees to prevent them from what has already started to happen in these places.

As Enele Sopoaga, the prime minister of Tuvalu, said at the talks last week: “Tuvalu’s future … is already bleak [and] any further temperature increase will spell the total demise of Tuvalu. No leader in this room carries such a level of worry and responsibility. Just imagine you are in my shoes, what would you do?”

The prospect of reparations to island countries for the cost of adapting to climate change has caused a rift among parties to the climate negotiationsand raised fiendishly complex ethical and legal questions.

“It’s the moral challenge of our time,” CI’s Stone said. “It’s like, we live in a neighborhood, you had a huge party that got out of control, and you accidentally burned down your neighbor’s house. The next morning, you see it, and you ask your neighbor, Oh, that’s so sad — what are you going to do now?”

Enter Pacific Rising, which offers a way forward without disputing the cause or assigning blame for the crisis.