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Posted at 1:51 p.m., Thursday, February 15, 2007

Pacific island nation likely to be evacuated, leader says

Bloomberg News Service

TARAWA, Kiribati — Efforts to combat global warming will come too late to prevent the evacuation of Pacific islands swamped by rising sea levels and severe weather, said Anote Tong, president of Kiribati.

"We can't out-move the changes in the weather and the sea level rise," Tong said in Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, a 33-island archipelago about halfway between Hawai'i and Australia. "We have to consider leaving rather than wait."

Most of Kiribati will be uninhabitable by the middle of this century because of weather damage and rising tides, Tong said in a telephone interview. The government is already looking at ways to permanently move the population of about 105,000 people off the islands.

A 1.3 degree increase in the average global temperature since 1901 has caused polar ice caps to melt, resulting in seas rising more than a tenth of an inch a year since 1993. Pacific islands are vulnerable because many of them are low-lying atolls only a few yards above sea level.

Pacific island people, who traditionally derive most food and income from the sea, mostly live close to the shoreline.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said on Feb. 2 that global warming is more than 90 percent likely to have been caused by humans, and predicted temperatures will probably increase by another 2 to 11 degrees by the end of this century. Sea levels will probably rise 7 to 23 inches, the panel said.

Kiribati has 700 miles of coastline and 21 of its islands are inhabited. People have been steadily moving their homes back from the shore as the sea rises.

"Some villages have already had to relocate," Tong said. "On one island, Bayang, north of Tarawa, there is nothing we can do, they just have to leave. If we keep moving back from the shoreline on the lagoon side then we will eventually get to the ocean side. We live on very narrow strips of land, so adaptation is not so relevant."

The sea level around Kiribati has been rising 5.3 millimeters a year since 1993, Australia's National Tidal Centre said. In Tonga, it has risen 7 millimeters a year, in Tuvalu 5.7 millimeters a year, in the Solomon Islands 6.5 millimeters and 6.2 millimeters a year in Papua New Guinea.

"Some of the very solid buildings are now under threat very seriously because, what was previously the shoreline, is now on the edge of public buildings," Tong said. "It's creating a lot of problems for the government. We don't have the resources to rebuild."

The government has had to call for volunteers to assist it in building retaining walls to protect taro plants from the rising sea, Tong said. Taro is the country's biggest crop.

Financial aid from Britain, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and China provides more than 10 percent of Kiribati's gross domestic product of $59 million in 2005, according to U.S. government data. Its main industry is tourism, which provides one-fifth of GDP.

Many other Pacific island nations also face the prospect of being overwhelmed by the sea, said John Church, a climate researcher at Australia's government science agency.

"For some, it could be decades, for others longer," he said. "There is no detailed survey on this and there probably needs to be."

The rise in sea levels means tropical cyclones "have more impact," said Neil Ericksen, director of the International Global Change Institute in Hamilton, New Zealand.

"Storm surges can produce waves up to 7 meters (20 feet) high, depending on the strength of the cyclone," Ericksen said. "If you're on a low-lying atoll during a surge you'll be left holding onto the coconut trees."

Natural disasters affected 3.4 million people and caused about 1,700 deaths in the Pacific region during the 1990s, the World Bank has said.

Ten states formed the Pacific Islands Climate Change Assistance Program in 1997. It focuses on assessing how vulnerable countries in the region are and also looks at ways to respond to the threat. The forum reports to the U.N. Convention on Climate Change and is supported by countries such as Australia and New Zealand.

The Kyoto Protocol is the only binding worldwide agreement that commits countries to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are the biggest contributor to global warming. It has been ratified by 169 countries with Australia and the U.S. the only developed nations not to join the agreement.