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SOUTH PACIFIC: Climate Change Refugees Look to Australia, N.Z.

Stephen de Tarczynski

MELBOURNE, Sep 1 2008 (IPS) - With the apparent effects of global warming already being felt among Pacific island nations, Australia and New Zealand are being urged to do more to prepare for ‘climate change refugees’.

"In Tuvalu and Kiribas we’re already starting to see the effects of king tides and storm surges on the coastline, but in particular, on people’s crops," says Damien Lawson, national climate justice coordinator from Friends of the Earth Australia.

"People on the islands are not going to just be affected when the sea rises up and covers their land. They’re already affected by sea water encroaching through the ground water and having a big effect on their capacity to grow crops," he says.

Global warming is regarded as one of the major factors causing sea level rise. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects seas to rise by between 18 and 59 centimetres by the end of the century.

As a result, inhabitants of low-lying Pacific island nations are among the most vulnerable to the effects of global warming.

A report released in July by Make Poverty History – a coalition of more than 60 aid, community and faith-based organisations, including Friends of the Earth – noted that two villages on Kiribati have already been abandoned due to climate change.


Additionally, some 2,000 people on Papua New Guinea’s isolated Carteret Islands – which are disappearing beneath the waves – are preparing to be evacuated to Bougainville, 86km to the southwest. They are regarded as some of the world’s first ‘climate change refugees’.

With more pacific islanders expected to be forced to leave their homes over the coming decades as seas rise, calls for Australia and New Zealand to prepare to aid environmental refugees are growing louder.

Prior to the 39th Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) – held on Aug.19-20 in Niue – representatives of more than 100 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the region released an open letter addressed to the prime ministers of Australia and New Zealand, Kevin Rudd and Helen Clark.

"We welcome the past acknowledgement of the problem the Pacific faces and expressions of a willingness to help, but now is the time for action. Therefore we call on the Australian and New Zealand governments to recognise the urgency of climate change and the particular threat it poses to the peoples of the Pacific," wrote the NGOs.

Among the actions demanded by the NGOs – which also includes a call to reduce carbon emissions – is that Australia and New Zealand establish a plan to assist climate change refugees.

"The primary focus should be on mitigation, then adaption within the Pacific and then resettlement within the Pacific," says Lawson.

But the NGOs also want the region’s two largest nations to develop an extension of their immigration quotas specifically for climate change refugees.

Lawson told IPS that putting a plan in place now to cater for the anticipated increase in refugees from the Pacific who may ultimately require resettlement outside their own homelands can avert problems associated with a rushed implementation of such a scheme in the future.

"Part of what we’re saying is that by Australia and New Zealand increasing our migration from the Pacific we can actually create both a resource space and a cultural bridgehead, if you like, for the larger numbers of people who may have to resettle in Australia and New Zealand in the future," he says.

Lawson argues that the two nations are the region’s best equipped to aid in such a resettlement. "Australia and New Zealand are some of the richest countries in the world and so [we] have the capacity to be assisting our other neighbours who ultimately have far fewer resources."

But capacity to help is not the only criteria according to the Friends of the Earth activist.

"Both Australia and New Zealand have very high per capita emissions. We’re some of the industrialised countries which are most responsible for causing climate change," says Lawson.

While the two nations are responsible for about 1.3 percent of total carbon dioxide emissions – with Australia emitting 1.2 percent and New Zealand just 0.1 percent – their per capita emissions of greenhouse gases are among the world’s highest.

The Australian Greenhouse Office says that Australians emit more greenhouse gas per person than any other nation, while Greenpeace places New Zealand in the top 12 greenhouse gas emitters per capita in the world.

Lawson argues that this obliges Australia and New Zealand to act, especially given the paradox that exists with Pacific islanders being comparatively low emitters of climate change-causing gases.

Island nations in the Pacific "have a very low emissions profile. So, even though they’re some of the people most affected by climate change, they are the least responsible for it," he says.

Lawson welcomed the Pacific Islands Forum’s focus on climate change – the theme of the recent summit – which noted the vulnerability of island nations to the effects of global warming.

"We were happy that a very strongly-worded statement came out of the conference of the importance of mitigation by industrialised countries and there was recognition in there of the importance of putting in place a whole range of strategies with Australia, New Zealand and Pacific island countries working together," he says.

The leaders of the forum’s members – including Rudd and Clark – issued its first-ever declaration on climate change, acknowledging "the serious current impacts of and growing threat posed by climate change to the economic, social, cultural and environmental well-being and security of Pacific Island countries."

Despite such recognition of the effects of global warming and a declared intention to do more to address the associated problems, the governments of Australia and New Zealand have remained tight-lipped about establishing a quota for climate change refugees within their own migration streams.

But NGOs intend to keep calling for such a plan to be introduced.

"The Australian and New Zealand governments are very reluctant at this point to explicitly accept that responsibility, but that’s certainly what we’re campaigning around," says Lawson.

 
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