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Climate Crisis: Low-Lying Island Nations Appeal To UN Security Council

By Countercurrents.org

17 February 2013
Countercurrents.org

The Marshall Islands and other low-lying island nations appealed to the UN Security Council to recognize climate change as an international security threat that jeopardizes their very survival.

Tony deBrum, a minister and assistant to the Marshall Islands president, said on February 15, 2013 the island nations are facing opposition from Security Council permanent members Russia and China and a group of more than 130 mainly developing nations, which argue that the UN's most powerful body is the wrong place to address climate change.

DeBrum told reporters after a closed Security Council meeting on the "Security Dimensions of Climate Change," organized by Britain and Pakistan, that he hopes more council members will be convinced that "this is a security issue and not just an economic-political-social issue."

The low-lying islands, which are already being inundated with sea water, want the council to bring its "political weight" to the issue and help their countries survive, for example, by harnessing new technologies and ensuring alternative energy supplies, he said.

DeBrum said it was "ironic, bizarre perhaps" that 35 years after he went before the Security Council to seek the independence of the Marshall Islands he was back again "to appeal for the survival of my country."

He said climate change has already taken a toll on the Marshall Islands. Wells have filled with salt water, making drinking water scarce and in turn affecting food production. One small island in a lagoon is now under water, and coastlines are being eroded.

The impact of climate change is also causing migration to other islands, as well as to Australia and the United States, he said.

In an interview on February 15, 2013 with The Associated Press, Rachel Kyte, the World Bank's vice-president for sustainable development, said that since the council's last discussion of climate change "the sense of immediacy and urgency has increased."

"The question is: Do you want to keep on cataloguing all of the terrible things that are going to happen if we continue on a business as usual track, or are we actually going to start doing anything about it?" she said.

Kyte said she explained to the council that "it is possible to stop the worst from happening but it will require real, concerted policy action globally at every country level."

"Economically we know what to do, but politically it's going to take leadership," she said. "And every day we don't act we make the job more difficult for ourselves."

"What the Security Council has to do is understand that everything has to be seen through this lens. Climate change is changing the future scenarios for every country," Kyte said. "It's framing decisions on security, economic security, food security."

Germany's Deputy UN Ambassador Miguel Berger recalled that in July 2011, at his country's initiative, the Security Council discussed the security implications of climate change at a formal meeting and adopted a presidential statement expressing the council's concern about the possible adverse effects of climate change on international peace and security.

Berger told the council that Germany was happy to see the council taking up the issue again and stressed that all UN entities, including the Security Council, need to intensify their efforts to combat climate change and its security implications. He called for these implications to be included in Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's reports to the council on climate change.

"Let us not forget: Climate change and its security implications will shape tomorrow's world in a way that is almost impossible to overestimate," Wittig said. "We should also consider whether a U.N. special envoy on climate and security could help us to tackle the foreign and security policy implications of climate change."

Pakistan's UN Ambassador Masood Khan said the meeting would galvanize actions in all UN forums to combat climate change.

"Our response should not be anchored only in politics; it should also be guided by science and technology," Khan said. "Our response should not just counter immediate threats; it should forewarn and prepare us for the impending threats that impinge on our security."

Climate crisis is not only threatening existence of Pacific island-nations. Rapid erosion and rising sea levels are also increasingly threatening the existence of islands off the coast of Bangladesh and India. In an earlier report [2] from Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh, John Vidal said:

Kutubdia is one of many islands off Bangladesh and India affected by increasingly rapid erosion and some of the fastest recorded sea-level rises in the world. These "vanishing islands" are shrinking dramatically. Kutubdia has halved in size in 20 years, to about 100 sq km. Since 1991 six villages on the island of fishermen and salt workers have been swamped and about 40,000 people have fled.

John Vidal informed:

Most of these people have relocated to the coast near Cox's Bazaar.

The report said:

At the current rate of erosion Kutubdia will be off the map within 30 years, along with dozens of other coastal islands. Sandwip, near Chittagong, covered 600 sq km 50 years ago. It is now a tenth of the size, its area having halved over the past 20 years alone. Further north along the Bay of Bengal, 12 islands – home to 70,000 people – are said by the Bangladeshi government to be "immediately threatened" by the rising seas; 90 others in Indian waters, collectively housing more than 4 million people, are said to be at real risk. Sagar Island is expected to lose at least 15% of its area in the next eight years, and may yet suffer the same fate that befell the island of Lohachara, which in December 2006 became the first inhabited island known to be lost to rising sea levels.

Scientists attribute the disappearance of these islands to a combination of natural and possibly manmade events. The villagers say they are victims of climate change.

The report added:

Sea surface temperatures in the Bay of Bengal have significantly increased, which could theoretically have caused the expansion of water. In addition, more intense cyclones and higher tides have also been observed, while increased flows from some of the giant rivers that flow into the Bay of Bengal may also be contributing.

"There is a close correlation between the rate of sea-level rise and the sea surface temperature," says Sugata Hazra, head of oceanography at Kolkata's Jadavpur University.

No scientific monitoring of sea-level rise has been done on Kutubdia, but increases of nearly 8mm a year have been recorded over 20 years at Cox's Bazaar. This is nearly three times the average for Bangladesh and up to five times the worldwide average sea-level rise.

"Land has always been lost to erosion in the Bay of Bengal, but this is now becoming exacerbated," says Saleemul Huq, senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London.
"There has been a step change in the numbers who have had to move and the rate of erosion is higher than in the past. Whether it is climate change is not clear, but this can be seen as the beginning of a trend which is expected to grow exponentially."

Predicted sea-level rises of up to a meter over the next century would inundate the homes of millions of people. At the present rate of 8mm a year it may only take about 25 years to raise levels 20cm, enough to permanently waterlog and destroy the land and drinking water of as many as 10 million people in the south of the country. A one-meter rise along the only partly defended 450 mile (720km) Bangladeshi coastline would result in nearly 20% of the country being submerged and 30 million more people being displaced.

A recent report prepared by Jadavpur University and the World Wide Fund For Nature (WWF) estimates that a million of the 5 million people living in the delta will become climate change refugees by 2050.

Source:

[1] 2/15/2013, “Islands Want Climate Change Seen As Security Threat By UN”, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/16/islands-climate-change-un_n_2697955.html?utm_hp_ref=climate-change

[2] The Guardian, Jan 29, 2013, “Sea change: the Bay of Bengal's vanishing islands”,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/2013/jan/29/sea-change-bay-bengal-vanishing-islands

 




 

 


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