Originally published January 6 2006
Climate change expert points to Pacific Islanders' dilemma as evidence of global warming's impact
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Taito Nakalevu, a climate change expert at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, has called the world's attention to the plight of the Lateu settlement on Tegua island in Vanuatu, where the villagers have moved their homes away from the coast because of higher water levels that Nakalevu attributes to global warming.
Rising seas have forced 100 people on a Pacific island to move to higher ground in what may be the first example of a village formally displaced because of modern global warming, a U.N. report said Monday.
With coconut palms on the coast already standing in water, inhabitants in the Lateu settlement on Tegua island in Vanuatu started dismantling their wooden homes in August and moved about 600 yards inland.
"They could no longer live on the coast," Taito Nakalevu, a climate change expert at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, told Reuters during a 189-nation conference in Montreal on ways to fight climate change.
So-called "king tides," often whipped up by cyclones, had become stronger in recent years and made Lateu uninhabitable by flooding the village 4 to 5 times a year.
The scientific panel that advises the United Nations projects that seas could rise by almost 3 feet by 2100 because of melting icecaps and warming linked to a build-up of heat-trapping gases emitted by burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and autos.
Many other coastal communities are vulnerable to rising seas, such as the U.S. city of New Orleans, the Italian city of Venice or settlements in the Arctic where a thawing of sea ice has exposed coasts to erosion by the waves.
Pacific Islanders, many living on coral atolls, are among those most at risk.
Two uninhabited Kiribati islands, Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea, disappeared underwater in 1999.
To help Lateu, Canada had provided $50,000 to build a system to collect and store up to 9,500 gallons of rain water to break dependence on springs by the coast.
In the Arctic, indigenous peoples in Shishmaref in Alaska and in Tuktoyaktuk in Canada were considering moving because of climate change, U.N. officials said.
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