Kiribati will be ‘underwater by 2050’ with 135k locals forced to move | World | News
The island country Kiribati, located in the Micronesia subregion of Oceania in the central Pacific Ocean,will become uninhabitable by 2050 and will have completely disappeared in the next few decades.
As a result, its permanent population of around 135,000 will be forced to abandon their homes and move elsewhere.
The reason for this is rising sea levels, brought about by climate change.
The president of Kiribati looked to buy land in Fiji in 2012 as “climate change insurance” for the island’s population. He said that soon, “moving won’t be a matter of choice. It’s basically going to be a matter of survival”.
In addition to increasing water levels, ocean pollution is also a serious problem. The islands are also vulnerable to natural disasters including tsunamis.
The issue of plastic pollution has been a key challenge for Kiribati as it hurts both its marine biodiversity and its economy that relies primarily on tourism and fishing.
The state comprises 32 atolls and one remote raised coral island, Banaba. Its total land area is 313 square miles, dispersed over 1.3 million square miles of ocean. More than half of Kiribati’s permanent population live in the Tarawa atoll.
The islands’ spread straddles the equator and the 180th meridian, making Kiribati the only country in the world located simultaneously in all four hemispheres.
Kiribati gained independence from the United Kingdom, becoming a sovereign state in 1979. It is a member of the Commonwealth, the World Bank, the IMF and became a full member of the UN in 1999.
Addressing climate change has been a central part of its international policy, as a member of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), which also includes the Maldives, Fiji, the Cook Islands and the Seychelles.
According to the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, two small uninhabited Kiribati islets, Tebua Tarawa and Abaneau, disappeared underwater in 1999. The sea level at Christmas Island, in the 50 years between 1972 and 2022, has risen five centimetres.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that sea levels will rise by about 50 centimetres by 2100 due to global warming and a further rise would be inevitable.
The islands’ exposure to sea level changes are exacerbated by the Pacific decadal oscillation, a climate switch phenomenon that results in changes from periods of La Nina (cold phase) and El Nino (warm phase).
There may be some hope, however. The atolls and reef islands are said to be able to respond to changes in sea level. Gradual sea-level rise allows for coral polyp activity to raise the atolls with the sea level.
However, if the increase in sea level occurs at a rate faster than coral growth, or if polyp activity is damaged by ocean acidification, then the resilience of the atolls and reef islands is less certain.
Paul Kench at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and Arthur Webb at the South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission in Fiji released a study in 2010, in which they found that the three major urbanised islands – Betio, Bairiki and Nanikai – increased by 30 percent (36 hectares), 16.3 percent (5.8 hectares) and 12.5 percent (0.8 hectares) respectively.
The study by Kench and Webb recognised that the islands are extremely vulnerable to sea level rise and concluded that: “This study did not measure vertical growth of the island surface nor does it suggest there is any change in the height of the islands.
“Since land height has not changed the vulnerability of the greater part of the land area of each island to submergence due to sea level rise is also unchanged and these low-lying atolls remain immediately and extremely vulnerable to inundation or sea water flooding.”
