Climate Change: Weathering The Storm
You can’t help but stare, open-mouthed and goggle-eyed, at the mighty banyan trees of Vanuatu.
They’re immense. And spectacular. As much a feature of life on these islands as the Ni-Van people themselves. But one of the other regular features of life in Vanuatu are the tropical cyclones that pound the country.
During cyclones, entire villages would wriggle down into the tree’s extensive root system, tucking children into the cavities, and waiting out the storm.
And it’s why the massive banyans are more than a magnificent centrepiece of village life. Because for as long as people have lived on these islands, the trees have been a traditional cyclone shelter.
Vanuatu’s people have lived with cyclones for many thousands of years, and the banyans are how they’ve lived with them. During cyclones, entire villages would wriggle down into the tree’s extensive root system, tucking children into the cavities, and waiting out the storm.
Even if the trees are uprooted, the entire root structure comes up, leaving those within safely cocooned and protected from flying debris.
But in 2017 not everyone lives in a village, or has a nearby banyan tree, and even if they did, the effects of cyclones linger for weeks, and months, and sometimes years.
Lusi, Ula, Winston, Pam, Cook, and Donna. All tropical cyclones to affect Vanuatu within the last three years. All damaging.
Because beyond the winds, the salt spray, and the rain, there are other ways a cyclone can hurt.
The day after Donna, we bounced our way down a pot-holed dirt road to a small community in Teouma Valley, half an hour outside of Port Vila, the capital of Vanuatu. There, a small group of families had gathered in an unused kindergarten, fleeing from their riverside homes when the waters began to rise and the winds began to intensify.
The solid building meant they were safe and dry while they waited out the storm. But waiting out the storm’s lasting effects wouldn’t be so easy.
“There is nothing right now. There is nothing. Right now we are just eating the cassava damaged by Cyclone Pam and all the water. But once the cassava has rotted there is nothing there to eat.”
The people we met earn money from growing and selling produce such as yams, ginger, maize, papaya, and cassava.
Vanuatu’s rich soils and tropical climate ensure near-perfect conditions for growing crops. But the winds and rains from Cyclones Cook and Donna left trees stripped of their leaves, crops drowning in waterlogged fields, and damaged fruit rotting.
“All the bananas the wind destroyed and took down and then the wind swept them away…When you go to our gardens there is nothing there. It’s totally bare. It looks like someone has swept the place. As if there was never anything there in the first place.”
Kouia was one of the mothers we met, still sheltering in the kindergarten, and wondering where they could go next.
The increasing effects of climate change mean the storms that have always been a feature of the Pacific are not only becoming more prevalent, but more violent.
“Where we live at the bridge the water rose up and wrecked all out things so that there is nothing left standing. All our houses, our kitchens, are all down,” she says
The increasing effects of climate change mean the storms that have always been a feature of the Pacific are becoming more prevalent, more violent, and more likely to develop out-of-season. Local wisdom says out-of-season cyclones, like Donna, are more unpredictable, making them more dangerous.
It is children who will experience the full impact of climate change. Kouia’s daughter Serah, just eight years old, has already lived through three major cyclones.
“During Cyclone Pam my family went to a big school in Port Vila where we took shelter. I was afraid because I could see trees falling down. Now with Cyclone Cook and Cyclone Donna it is very different. My family tried to move to town to take shelter but no transport will take us. We stayed here instead. I see the water rising and I am afraid that the water will take me away.”
It’s a frightening experience Kouia doesn’t want her child experiencing, but she and her family are left with little choice. Escape is no option, when you have no way of escaping, and nowhere to escape to.
“I go to sell my produce at the market in town and at the roadside market just here. I plant kumala [sweet potato], manioc [cassava] and island cabbage but with Cyclone Donna the water has taken all of my crops,” says Kouia. “There is nothing right now. There is nothing. Right now we are just eating the cassava damaged by Cyclone Pam and all the water. But once the cassava has rotted there is nothing there to eat.”
With no crops, Kouia has no income. With no income, she has no idea how she will be able to continue to pay for her children to stay at school.
That’s where UNICEF can assist — working alongside Vanuatu’s government to offer education programmes, providing clean water and medication, and ensuring that people have the tools to help them back to their feet.
At the kindergarten, arrangements were made for Engineers Without Borders to look into the buildings sanitation system, and for UNICEF’s team to stop by and check that the children’s medical and educational needs were being met.
It’s relatively straightforward stuff, but reducing the impact of climate change is a far more difficult.
So what can we do? At the very least, we can ensure that people living in the developed world are aware of what climate change is doing to the lives of people like Kouia and her family.
Rising sea levels, more frequent droughts, increasingly violent storms, and disrupted weather patterns mean millions upon millions of people are under threat from the economic impact of climate change as much as the environmental impact.
And for so many people, the days of weathering the storm within the reassuring roots of the village banyan tree, are well and truly gone.
Words and video by Lachlan Forsyth.
To support UNICEF’s work for children in the Pacific, visit unicef.org.nz
