Focus
Death by warming
By Leo A. Falcam
President of Micronesia
Pacific islanders are concerned about a range of security issues, but one in particular stands out today as critically important to everyone around the globe.
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For Pacific island states, climate change and its associated effects are our main security concern.
Leo Falcam is the president of Micronesia.
Climate change is bringing a rise in sea levels, intensified storms, freshwater destruction, land erosion, and saltwater that is killing crops and coconuts.
In short, this is nothing less than a form of slow death.
As you may have heard recently, the small Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is disappearing. The government of Tuvalu asked New Zealand and Australia last year to accept its entire population, some 10,000 people, as environmental refugees. Many of these island residents have started to leave Tuvalu's nine low-lying atolls, which are eroding at an alarming rate.
The forecast is that rising waters will engulf the nation within the next 50 years. But it will become uninhabitable long before then.
Thus, Tuvalu will be among the first countries in the world to vanish as a result of climate change. This is one dramatic example that has received attention in the press, but the same thing is happening to atolls throughout the Pacific, and in varying degrees, to island countries all over the world.
Last month in Tokyo, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called global warming a security "challenge" that the United States "is not shrinking away from."
But it is far more than a challenge. It is a doomsday threat of utmost urgency. The rise of sea level and other related consequences of climate change are grave security threats to our very existence as homelands and nation states.
In the face of these threats, our only avenue as resource-poor island governments has been to engage fully in the various world conferences on this subject, and to band together with a collective voice in organizations like the Alliance of Small Island States and the Pacific Islands Forum, whose 32nd meeting I will attend next week in Nauru.
The pleas of island states for action against climate change are not merely self-serving. The loss of thousands of years of island cultures might be tolerated by the world at large, and tens of millions of island peoples might be relocated, with great difficulty and human suffering. But the rest of the world also faces devastating consequences of climate change in the longer term.
Our early experience with the consequences of global warming has been considered analogous to the "canary in the coal mine" — an early warning to the global community of its own impending doom.
However, this warning will have been for naught if significant steps are not taken now, primarily by all industrialized nations, to cut back on emissions of greenhouse gases.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change assigned "common, but differentiated responsibilities" to all countries, developed and developing, in confronting climate change.
Naturally, care must be taken to minimize adverse economic consequences of the actions that must be taken. But it is equally important to invoke substantial measures without further delay.
Not long ago, the United States acted with dramatic leadership in declaring the threat of AIDS to be a global security threat. Today, we look once more to the great nations of the world to accept their leadership responsibilities as expressed in the Climate Change Convention, to cope with what is, without exaggeration, the greatest global security threat in human history.
Leo A. Falcam is president of the Federated States of Micronesia and an alumnus of the East-West Center. He was a participant in the Center's August 5-8 Senior Policy Seminar and addressed the gathering on environmental issues in the Pacific region.
