Last week, the president of Kiribati (pronounced “Kiribass”) — a nation of 33 atolls, scattered across two million square miles of the central Pacific Ocean — warned that rising sea levels have doomed his country of 92,000 people.
Speaking in New Zealand as part of World Environment Day, Kiribati President Anote Tong said entire communities have been relocated and important crops destroyed by seawater. If climate change isn’t stopped, President Tong warned, Kiribati could be submerged by the close of the century. Yahoo! NEWS has more of President Tong’s remarks:
“I am not a scientist but what I know is that things are happening we did not experience in the past,” Tong said.
“We may be beyond redemption, we may be at the point of no return where the emissions in the atmosphere will carry on to contribute to climate change to produce a sea-level change that in time our small low-lying islands will be submerged,” he said.
“Villages that have been there over the decades, maybe a century, and now they have to be relocated. Where they have been living over the past few decades is no longer there, it is being eroded.”
Whether rising global temperature, which accounts for the increase in worldwide sea level, can be capped soon enough to spare Kiribati remains to be seen. Scientists doubt it. From the aforementioned Yahoo! NEWS report:
Scientists gathered by the UN in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say emissions of greenhouse gases would need to be capped by 2015 if global temperature rises are to be limited to two degrees Celsius.
Even restricting temperature rises to two degrees would doom Kiribati and some other island nations, United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) executive director Achim Steiner said.
“At two degrees of global warming we are already destroying the places that people have called their homes for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years,” he added.
The Lilypad
The folks at Pruned discovered a fanciful, Buckminster Fuller-esque solution by French architect Vincent Callebaut. It’s called the Lilypad (pictured), “a half aquatic and half terrestrial city able to accommodate 50,000 inhabitants and inviting the biodiversity to develop its fauna and flora around a central lagoon of soft water collecting and purifying the rain waters.”
Read more about the Lilypad and it’s designer — and see some stunning images — at Archinect.
Learn more about Kiribati
In 2001, the Ocean Alliance conducted a five-year scientific voyage to study the health of the world’s oceans. From October 2000 through February 2001, the ninety-three foot Odyssey explored the Republic of Kiribati, documenting its low-lying coral atolls with coastal lagoons. To see a log of the study, including videos of Kiribati’s disappearing atolls, visit VOYAGE OF THE ODYSSEY online.
[via Pruned]
