Papua New Guinea's Carteret Islands And Their Inhabitants Wait For The Last Tide - Times Of Londo

[hatrack]

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The people of the Carteret Islands — among the smallest, most beautiful and most remote inhabited islands in the world — are hungry and afraid. Since the sea poisoned their fruit trees, their children have lived on an unbalanced diet of fish and coconuts and their pot bellies and the yellowing tips of their black hair hint at malnutrition. Most of them are desperate to leave and plans are being drawn up to move them to higher, safer ground on the larger island of Bougainville, 120km (75 miles), across the water. But however blighted the lives of the 2,600 Carteret islanders are, this is a problem far greater than just for them. The Carterets are a portent of catastrophe to come — not only for the other low lying atolls of the South Pacific, but for low-lying coastal communities across the world, from Bangladesh to New Orleans. If environmental scientists and campaigners are correct, the rising seas are the result of global warming caused by the release of greenhouse gasses. Some time next year the islanders will become the world’s first climate-change refugees; within a few years, barring a dramatic reversal, their home will literally go down in history as the first inhabited territory in the world to be swallowed up by global warming.

“We have no cars and no factories and no aeroplanes,” says Bernard Tubin, a leader on the island of Piul. “We are the victims of this greenhouse-gas emission and we are totally innocent. America sends someone to the Moon, wars are being fought and millions are being spent on warheads and ammunition. So why is it that Russia and the US and Japan and Australia cannot do anything to help us?” Even by the standards of Papua New Guinea, the anarchic nation of mountains, jungles and islands north of Australia, the Carteret Islands are about as remote as can be. From the capital, Port Moresby, you fly to the island of Buka in the autonomous province of Bouganville. After an 11-hour journey by fishing boat, you see six crinkly indentations emerge on the horizon. They are perched on the lip of a circular reef, none at their highest point more than 170cm above sea level. These are the Carterets, the islands at the beginning of the end of the world. They are named after a British naval captain, a contemporary of Captain Cook, who came across them in 1767. Two and a half centuries later, the most modern charts still mark them in the wrong place. Philip Carteret described them as “scarce better than large rocks”, and during the Second World War a Japanese bomb obliterated one of the smaller islets.

The silhouettes of a few wrecks jut above the circular coral atoll, most of them fishing boats from Taiwan, which plundered the giant clams that used to litter the sea bed. But nothing in the history of the Carterets has been as momentous as their continuing destruction. There have been high tides and coastal erosion for decades, but it was not until the 1980s that they were identified as a cause for long-term anxiety. The population was expanding and at first this seemed to be the cause of overcrowding. But then islanders who had been away for a few years began noticing that areas that had previously been land were under water. “When I was a small boy this shore began out there,” Mr Tubin says, pointing to a spot 150 metres out to sea. “One year ago it was five metres out from here. There were houses here, and fruit trees.”

The authorities erected a series of sea walls of heaped up giant clam shells and wire cages stuffed with coral; their rusting remnants litter the islands. A team of Australian botanists tried to plant stands of mangrove, which bind coastlines with their tough roots; but few of the trees survived. The Government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) had bigger things to worry about in the shape of a civil war that raged on the island of Bougainville throughout the 1990s. “We have to rely on the national Government of PNG,” Mr Tubin says. “But PNG is a dysfunctional, failed state.” In the 1980s the island of Huene was cut in two by the sea and its twin, Iolasa, is quickly going the same way.

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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2513189,00.html

[YankeyMCC]

1. “We have no cars and no factories and no aeroplanes,”

And there's the social inequity dimension of the crisis right there.