Broken seawalls, like this one in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati, often have no connection with sea-level rise. Credit: Christopher Pala/IPS

By Christopher Pala
TARAWA, Kiribati, Sep 20 2013 (IPS)

Scientists say dredging, building causeways and natural climate variations are largely responsible for the flooding events that many officials here point to as evidence that climate change-induced sea-level rise is shrinking and destroying their tropical Pacific island.

At the United Nations, in multiple climate change conferences and in an interview here, President Anote Tong, the world’s unofficial spokesman for low-lying coral islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans, often says that Kiribati’s 103,000 inhabitants are fighting a rising sea on a daily basis.

He and other officials often point to widespread erosion of the island’s coastline and say that Tarawa is shrinking as the sea rises. A profile of Tong in the U.S. magazine The Nation was even headlined “Interview with a drowning president.”

“We’ve had a whole island disappear, a whole village has been evacuated, our freshwater is being contaminated and our crops are dying,” Tong told IPS in his office. He said his country was “on the front line of climate change”, adding that “time is running out” and emphasising the need for an evacuation plan.

But in fact, a scientific study showed that the southern part of Tarawa, where more than half the country’s population lives, is far from disappearing: in fact it, it is growing. A series of what the scientists called “disjointed reclamations”, involving pouring dredged coral sand over shallow reefs to create land, increased South Tarawa’s size by nearly 20 percent over 30 years.

Meanwhile, the area of the largely unpopulated north of the island remained stable (another study found similar stability in 27 other Pacific atolls).

Tetabo Nakara said that he resigned as environment minister a few years ago because Tong had forced him to focus government policy on relocation rather than on mitigation through improved coastal management, which Nakara said was more appropriate.

Climate scientists say the equatorial Central Pacific is the area in the world where the sea has risen fastest since 1950: 5.9 centimetres in just the past 20 years. That’s because an atmosphere warmed by heat-trapping gases like carbon monoxide and methane is in turn warming the ocean, and warm water takes up more volume than cold water. A second reason is that ancient glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica are melting, pouring fresh water into the sea.

Tong’s adviser on climate change, Andrew Teem, regularly shows visitors examples of what he and Tong say is damage caused by rising seas. On a recent afternoon, he pointed to a breach in a seawall in the village of Eita, one of many around the island.

“We built this wall a few years ago to keep the sea out,” he said. “It breached during a storm, and the breach has been getting bigger. We just can’t win.”

Teem pointed to another locally iconic climate-change casualty, an island in Tarawa’s lagoon called Bikeman that was once dense with coconut groves. Today, it’s a barely visible pencil line on the horizon, a sandbank that disappears at high tide.

The village of Tebunginako in the island of Abaiang, a 15-minute flight away, is also frequently mentioned as evidence that the sea is rising. Its inhabitants moved their 100 or so thatched huts and houses half a kilometre away from the shore after the sea washed away a sandbank that protected a freshwater lagoon, flooding some homes and making growing crops impossible.

Countless climate change documentaries on Kiribati posted on YouTube show footage of waves crashing into houses during storms in 2005.

But scientists who have studied Kiribati say these events have explanations that have little to do with climate change.

The seawall in Eita was built to protect a low-lying mangrove that was filled with dredged coral sand so it could be used for housing as more and more people moved into South Tarawa. But most seawalls are poorly designed and reflect the energy of the waves in such a way that these wash away the sand at the walls’ base, causing them to collapse.

Bikeman Island disappeared because a causeway was built between two parts of the atoll, blocking a pass through which sand came in from the ocean side. Without this input, wave action slowly washed the sand away from Bikeman to other lagoon-side areas that saw their beaches grow.

The village of Tebunginako asked for help to understand why erosion was so much worse there than elsewhere. Scientists reported here that a nearby pass had disappeared a century ago, again depriving the beach of fresh sand.

The dramatic flooding of 2005 happened because of El Nino, a cyclical change in currents that moves warmer water east in the Pacific and is unrelated to climate change. El Nino caused the sea level in Tarawa to rise by more than 15 centimetres, says climate scientist Simon Donner of the University of British Columbia. That level hasn’t been reached since, he pointed out in a paper published in Eos, the journal of the American Geophysical Union.

“A visit to Tarawa can provide the false impression that it’s subject to constant flooding because of climate change,” Donner told IPS. “While it’s certainly experiencing some sea-level rise, people try to attribute current events to that trend and they often make elementary mistakes.”

In an e-mail exchange, he noted that erosion and floodings “are going to happen more and more frequently as the ocean rises. President Tong is right to sound the alarm now, because it won’t be an easy problem to solve.”

Donner contrasts this with the United States, where there is little talk and less action on sea-level rise. “No one is talking about giving up on Miami,” he said. “But they should, because the long-term picture is the same there too.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest assessment predicts a rise of anywhere between 25 cm and one metre by 2100, depending on carbon dioxide emissions.

The Roseau River runs through the centre of Roseau. Once a favourite diving spot it has been reduced to a mere spring no longer suitable for swimming. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Desmond Brown
ROSEAU, Dominica, Dec 17 2012 (IPS)

Eighty-year-old Rupert Lawrence has been living in the Dominica capital, Roseau, for nearly 60 years. Like visitors to the island, he too is fascinated by the fact that the town square has a river running right through its centre.

Sitting on his veranda on River Street overlooking the Roseau River, Lawrence recalled the words of many visitors who would remark that until then, they had never seen a river in the centre of town. But over the years, Lawrence has witnessed the transformation of the Roseau River from a deep diving spot attracting people from all over the island to a mere spring no longer suitable for swimming.

To put it bluntly, in the words of Bernard Wiltshire, an attorney who is president and founder of Waitkbuli Ecological Foundation (WEF), the Roseau River is drying up, like all the others on the island.

“They’ve been drying up because people have been using land without concern for the rivers,” he said. “That Roseau River, you could jump from the bridge into the river; head dive into the river. I remember in 1980 we could sit on the wall and dangle our feet in the water.”

Thirty years later, “the river has lost far more than two-thirds of its volume of water, and this pattern is repeated throughout the island,” Wiltshire added. He lamented that the Layou River, about seven miles north of the capital, which used to be the largest river in the country, is now “only a sand bank”.

Former national disaster coordinator Cecil Shillingford told IPS that local environmentalists have long expressed concern that the island’s rivers are drying up. He believed that development had allowed river banks to become heavily habitable.

“A lot of people pay no regard to maintaining a sort of a buffer zone along the banks of the river so they just cut everything down or even sometime rear animals on the river banks that would certainly destroy all the foliage and they would cut the trees for agricultural pursuits,” said Shillingford, who is also a disaster risk management consultant.

He said that unless there is “a radical shift in our approach to these things…the next generation might not have a Roseau River or a Grand Bay River.” He added, “A lot of policies in terms of land use planning and buffer zones and things of that nature need to be put in almost immediately. We are already late.”

Other danger zones

“In terms of coastal residences we need to start building a little further away, so there should be another buffer zone in terms of coastal communities,” Shillingford told IPS.

Wiltshire said such developmental and agricultural activities have a big part to play in climate change, and Dominica is seeing its effects. “It’s largely from the big industrial countries which seem to put their greed before the need of everyone else,” he said.

Shillingford agrees that the effects of climate change on Dominica are clear. “In recent times we have seen lots more rain…[and] more intense rain. Before, you could have a day of rainfall and you would not see any major flash flooding or even flooding in general, but now if you have a day of rain it is so intense that you could have flooding.”

“We have seen an increase in storms as well; the intensity has increased and we are certainly seeing some effects in terms of sea level rise,” Shillingford added. He noted that “before, the sea would be further away from the community”. Now, however, “It’s coming up to the community”.

In Dominica, he explained, “most of the habitation is on the coastal areas, and the western side…is much lower at sea level than the eastern side,” he added.

Combating potential consequences

One of Dominica’s efforts to combat these issues is the recently formulated Low-Carbon Climate-Resilient Development Strategy, which identifies areas that climate change is most likely to affect – namely agriculture, fisheries and ecotourism.

Shillingford noted that coastal infrastructure always takes a heavy beating during a storm. The government has to spend millions of dollars reconstructing roads after every storm. He said although massive walls are being built with government funding along the coast in many villages to combat the effects of climate change, they do not provide complete protection.

Even with a massive wall along the Dame Eugenia Charles Boulevard in the capital, the whole road was torn apart as a result of Hurricane Lenny in 1999. Nevertheless, without the wall, Shillingford said, an entire section of the capital would have been devastated.

“We had at least four or five feet of water on the road…so not even the sea walls are foolproof for the kind of effects we can have from major storm surges,” Shillingford said. He is even more concerned about tsunamis, which he said “would be the end of everybody on the west coast” of the island. “You would have half of Dominica gone.”