Kiribati: SLOWLY DROWNING
Kiribati, an island republic in the South Pacific, is sinking under the sea. The indigenous inhabitants can do nothing to stop it. They feel the world has left them in the lurch. Blog by Carsten Stormer, 2010 and Translated from German and edited by Roger Gwynn.
The Reverend Baranite Kirata is sitting in his fishing boat. He takes a nylon line out of a toolbox, feels the hook with the tip of his forefinger and throws the line into the ocean.
“In the old days we used to live very simply here,” Baranite declares. “Our community was quite happy as it was, with no telephones, no television sets, just the sea and the fish.” The old days, meaning just a few years earlier. Nowadays modern things are coming in, imported from China, Japan, Australia — TV sets, fridges, computers, mobile phones, motorbikes, and quantities of tinned food, plastic containers, plastic bags. Rubbish ends up on the beaches, where it sits and rots or floats around on the sea; for there is no refuse collection service in Kiribati. And on the horizon, Korean trawlers are netting every last fish out of the ocean.
It’s a Sunday. The sea is as smooth as a carpet. Over there on the beach, the inhabitants of Kiribati are dozing in hammocks under coconut palms, drinking kava or strumming their guitars and singing Micronesian songs. Baranite Kirata is 56 years old and a pastor in the Kiribati Protestant Church. He is also a kind of climate change warden for his community. He throttles the engine, stands up and points seawards. A strip of solid ground is just visible rising a few centimetres above water level. Seagulls and crabs are foraging on its surface.
A sandbank?
“Actually no, it used to be an island!” says Baranite Kirata. His parents used to bring him here for picnics when he was a child. The locals used to call the island Viketawa, Place Flooded with Moonlight. Nowadays it’s more like Place Flooded, full stop. Only at low tide are a few centimetres of soil exposed above water level.
“This has convinced many of the sceptics that Kiribati really has got a problem,” says Baranite Kirata. The people of Kiribati call this problem Bitakini Kanoan te Bong, which translates as “alteration of daily weather” or simply “climate change”. If things don’t improve, in 25 years’ time the Republic of Kiribati will no longer exist. It will have vanished from the map, swallowed by the sea simply because in other parts of the globe people are clearing rainforests to make cattle ranches, setting up factories and power stations and burning ever more fuel, releasing millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
112,000 Kiribatians live on 32 atolls scattered over an area of 811 square kilometres. Most of the people make their living from fishing. The gross domestic product is below 700 dollars per head per year. It’s a poor country, and because even its highest parts are a mere two metres above sea level Kiribati will be one of the first places to be engulfed by the sea as the greenhouse effect causes the oceans to rise. The sea level is rising steadily, a few millimetres every year, so gradually that even the local people hardly notice. Only those who live close to the shore wonder why their drinking water has suddenly gone brackish, or why the waves are eating away more and more of their property.
It’s the same thing in Tuvalu, Fiji, Samoa and the Maldives. All these countries are gradually disappearing under the sea. Their inhabitants are helpless. None of them knows how to defend themselves from rising sea levels, and meanwhile, the rest of the world is simply sitting back and watching.
Baranite Kirata is in a hurry. A storm is brewing and he doesn’t want to be out at sea in his tiny dinghy any longer, but anyway, an old friend will be expecting him in a couple of hours. Back on land, the pastor climbs into a rusty blue van. In this, his official vehicle, he putters along the coast road which connects the north of Kiribati to its south. It runs thirty kilometres in a straight line with the South Pacific to left and right. On the roadside wrecked cars rust away, women stand to try to sell a few fish or a bunch of bananas while children splash around in the sea. The surf crashes against storm-battered sea walls.
Rising sea level isn’t the only problem, explains Pastor Kirata as he drives along. More tropical storms are hitting Kiribati than ever before, and they are increasingly violent. Unusually long periods of drought are also being experienced. As a result coral reef, the islands’ natural protection from the sea, are dying, salt water is penetrating the land, drinking water is becoming brackish. Piped fresh water is already such a scarce commodity that the supply is only turned on for a few hours each day. Meanwhile, young people and even some older ones are leaving the islands because they can see no future there. The best brains are being syphoned away to Australia and New Zealand. Eventually, the rest of the population will follow — as climate refugees.
At a meeting of the Pacific Churches Conference (PCC) in 2007 Pastor Kirata had given a passionate speech about the local effects of climate change, and his words had had the desired effect. The PCC had decided to take the issue seriously and in due course, they issued an urgent appeal to the world community in which they asked not only for protection and asylum to be given to victims of climate change but also for steps to be taken to tackle climate change itself.
“But our people can’t afford to wait until the world takes action,” sights Pastor Kirata. “We’ve got to hurry, the water is already up to our necks!” So the PCC, together with the charity Bread for the World, has gone ahead and set up a pilot project with the aim of educating people in the Pacific area about the consequences of climate change and working with them to develop adaptive and protective measures.
“It’s going to be no easy task protecting Kiribati from rising sea levels,” Baranite Kirata admits. People have come up with all sorts of fancy schemes: building dykes, erecting barrages, making artificial reefs with concrete blocks or even ships’ hulls. More sensible is the idea of planting mangroves so that their matted roots can stabilize the seashore. But all of these plans would be very expensive to implement and none of them would stop the sea from rising.
As he drives the clergyman recalls the exceptionally violent winds which swept the islands last November, how the sea came right up to his house and the pond in front was flooded, letting all his tilapia fish escape.
After an hour’s drive along Kiribati’s only road Pastor Kirata stops in the village of Temaiku at the southern tip of Tarawa, Kiribati’s main island. Here the effects of climate change have been particularly stark.
It is low tide. Dead reefs are sticking out of the water as in some bizarre lunar landscape; snapped off coconut palms lie in the mud, and a lone man is dragging a lump of coral across the beach towards his hut made of wooden planks and sheets of plastic.
Kiareti Muller is 66 years old, a thin man with a deeply lined face. As soon as he sees Baranite Kirata he drops the coral and looks at his feet in embarrassment. What he is doing is illegal, officially banned, as it hastens the demise of the islands. For Kiareti Muller is breaking lumps of coral off the reef, to sell to neighbours for a paltry sum or to patch up his own sea wall which is always getting damaged by the waves.
Pastor Kirata looks at him questioningly.
“I’ve got to mend my wall,” Kiareti pleads, “and coral is the only material available!” Nowadays the sea comes right up to his front door whenever there’s a spring tide with the full moon.
“There’s something I must show you,” says Kiareti, taking hold of Baranite Kirata’s hand. He leads him a few yards and stops at a hole in the ground a few metres from his hut, under a pandanus tree. This was once his family’s spring, but recently it has turned salty. His wife now has to walk half an hour to get to the nearest freshwater source.
Kirata drives on past the airfield, which goes underwater when high tides are accompanied by gales, then take a left turn off the tarmacked main road, passing the Ministry of Agriculture, crosses a bridge and finally comes to a halt in Bonriki, a village in east Tarawa.
Kabiri Kokia, preceded by his monumental paunch, comes up and greets Baranite Kirata with a cordial hug. They know each other well, having gone to the same school. Over the past three or four years, the sea has robbed the 56-year-old giant of more than five metres of his land. Every year the water gets a bit closer, he complains. With a sweeping gesture, he indicates the extent of his property. Where nothing remains now but a small pile of rubble, a year ago another house was standing. The sea came in and swept it away. “Come, look at this,” says Kabiri Kokia, hitching up his robe and wading a few yards into the shallow water. “Look, we used to have a terrace here where we would barbecue fish with our friends of an evening.”
For several hours the two old friends discuss the vanished past and the uncertain future over comforting glasses of kava. Then the pastor gets up and stretches, ready for the drive home.
“I’ll see you next year — God willing,” he says, trying to sound hopeful, as the ocean crashes menacingly against the shore.
