Stopping a Refugee Crisis Before it Starts in the Pacific Islands
By: Jakob Meredith
Take out your phone, and instead of going on TikTok or playing today’s Wordle, go on your Maps app. Now scroll to the Pacific Ocean, that vast blue mass of water separating the Americas from Asia and Australia, and zoom in until you find an island. Chances are that once you do, that tiny little speck of land in the middle of the largest single body of water on Earth will have people on it. From the lush islands of Palau near the borders of Asia, south to the Polynesian fantasy vacation destinations of Fiji and Bora Bora, and north to the Micronesian atoll systems of the Marshall Islands and Kiribati, the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands are diverse in their cultures and histories but unified by the imminent struggle that they face against climate change. As the ocean that has sustained them for centuries begins to encroach upon their island domains due to global warming, the people of Pacific island nations can’t help but wonder how we got to this point in human-environmental history, and how do we save an entire region from being swallowed up by the ocean from whence it came?
The modern-day inhabitants of the Pacific islands are the direct descendants of peoples from Asia and Australia that made daring migrations over the course of hundreds of years to colonize the Pacific Ocean’s far-flung land territories (Stanford University, 2007). Through centuries of isolation and subsequent European colonization, Pacific islanders have developed and maintained complex and vibrant cultures and societies that are specifically adapted to their unique environment. In fact, the most substantial threat to the way of life of Pacific islanders has proven not to be the impositions of Europeans and Americans, but the omnipresent threat of global warming whose rising seas have the potential to erase the very land which they have lived on for generations (Britannica, 2021).
Inhabitants of Eita, a village in Kiribati, navigating flooding of large areas.
Through no fault of their own, the island nations of the Pacific have been thrust into the frontlines of the global fight against climate change because of their low-lying nature and situation in the world’s largest ocean and some of the world’s warmest climates. Despite the fact that the world’s most significant greenhouse gas producers are major industrial powers such as China, the United States, and the members of the European Union (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2022), Pacific Islanders are having to pay the price for centuries of unchecked climate alteration with their homes and potentially their lives. The situation that Pacific island nations are currently faced with in combating the overwhelming phenomenon of global warming is massive, and their success in doing so could dictate the futures of millions of people.
In Majuro, capital of the Micronesian nation the Marshall Islands, regular tidal shifts can threaten vulnerable infrastructure.
If the world as a whole continues on the trend of climate change and global warming that it is currently on, with sea levels rising at a rate of 0.12 to 0.14 inches per year (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, 2021), low-lying coastal areas everywhere could be rendered uninhabitable by the end of the century. This is particularly true in the islands and atolls of the Pacific Ocean, which have a mean elevation of 1-2 meters, or 3-7 feet (Pacific Coastal and Marine Science Center, 2021). It could take only a matter of decades for some of the most low-lying areas in the Pacific to begin being completely submerged by the surrounding ocean, and the humanitarian consequences of such an occurrence would be catastrophic. As of now, there are approximately 9.96 million people living in the Pacific Island region (United Nations Development Programme, 2015) that would be forced to evacuate their lifelong homes in the face of rising seas.
If this were to occur, it would present one of the largest humanitarian crises in the century, as millions of climate refugees would be fleeing to countries around the Pacific rim that would often turn them away. While some countries, such as Tokelau and the Marshall Islands, have close political connections with New Zealand and the United States, respectively, that would provide their citizens with greater security, others are not so fortunate. For instance, in Australia, the regional power of Oceania, the government under Prime Minister John Howard claimed that it was reluctant to accept refugees from the impending environmental crises in Kiribati and Tuvalu in the near future despite the limited sizes of these populations (Tisdell, 2008).
Funafuti, the capital of the low-lying island nation of Tuvalu, has only a few decades until it is completely overcome by the surrounding ocean.
Additionally, the problem of Pacific islanders cooperating with larger countries is only compounded by misunderstanding and miscalculation of the dramatic nature of the situation that is unfolding. For those living outside of the Pacific islands, it is difficult to comprehend the level of constant fear and anxiety that having your home taken from you by a changing climate can breed within a person. This can lead to what is known as eco-colonialism, in which major world powers and scientists use countries that are battling for their lives with climate change and rising seas as far-off examples of an ongoing process that cannot immediately impact the people hearing about it (Farbotko, 2010). By reducing the islands of the Pacific and their inhabitants to nothing more than examples of something that we show no apparent desire in stopping until it begins to impact them, developed countries and industrialized powers in the world are thereby reducing the countries of Oceania to insignificance. In the mind of someone in Ohio, watching waves of water penetrate the homes of a person in an unknown nation like Tonga is inconsequential because what is affecting those people is not affecting them. But this issue of perception and lack of comprehension of the severity of the situation facing the islands of the Pacific must change drastically in order to make serious gains towards helping their cause. If a refugee crisis were to unfold as a result of this climate crisis, those attitudes of ignorance and misunderstanding of the Pacific refugees would only grow once they began migrating into those countries that had for so long observed their plight from the sidelines and did nothing, and could be the difference between life and death for many societies.
Our inconsiderate attitude towards the struggle of Pacific Islanders with climate change and the refugee crisis that could unfold if we do not address their worries properly is reflected in our ignorant assertions that they may want to leave their homes in the first place. While it may not be possible to live underwater, the people of Oceania do not want to be seen by the international community as climate refugees fighting a hopeless battle against rising seas. In Tuvalu, one of the most low-lying nations in all of the Pacific, the people are seeing firsthand the havoc that climate change and rising oceans are wreaking on their homeland. However, they are not willing to give up on the place that they love, and have even suggested a $300 million land reclamation project that would provide the capital island with 10 meters elevation and high density housing to support migrants from outlying islands with lower elevations (de Jong & Gallagher, 2021). The people of Tuvalu are not only hesitant, but simply refusing to give up on their island even though many of them say that is disappearing quickly. In a broader sense, the broad classification of Pacific Islanders as “climate refugees” preemptively demonstrates not only our desire to disregard their cause for maintaining their homelands and fighting climate change itself, but our complete inability to recognize that these people do not want to leave their land and are not ready to be seen as victims of a catastrophe that can still be prevented (McNamara & Gibson, 2009). If everything in the power of the more powerful countries, and by association those countries more responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, is not being done to help the cause of Oceania’s citizens, then we are just as responsible for the future international plight developing in this region as the environment itself.
Pacific Islanders do not appreciate the label of “climate refugees” that is often thrust upon them by the international community.
Despite the rather dire circumstances and trajectory that it would appear the entire Pacific region appears to be on, there is a huge supply of hope originating from the inhabitants of this desolate yet diverse place whose resilience has enabled their survival for generations. For instance, in the volcanic Melanesian state of Vanuatu, whose greenhouse gas emissions account for only 0.0016 percent of the world’s total levels, there has been a substantial government response to the imminent threat posed by climate change in the form of innovative policies and plans for both the present and future (Espinosa C., 2022). As one of the countries with the most to gain from addressing climate change with progressive national policies, Vanuatu has become a regional leader in the effort to mitigate its contribution to global warming and develop ambitious plans for doing so. While major powers around the world were busy agreeing to the Paris Climate Agreement in 2016, Vanuatu’s government was outlining a national Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction Policy designed to take an even more active role in combating climate change (Government of Vanuatu, 2016). It is the hope of countries such as Vanuatu that by adopting more stringent policies against climate change, they will reduce the likelihood of the eventuality already accepted by so many Western countries: that they and other Pacific countries will have vanished by the end of the century and that their people will have been forced to flee.
In closing, I would like to reiterate that there is hope. While the situation may seem dire, there truly is the potential for a future in which the people of nations across Oceania from Kiribati and the Marshall Islands to Vanuatu and Samoa are able to remain in their ancestral homes and preserve the societies that have survived countless hardships before. But it takes all of us. These countries that are experiencing climate change and watching the oceans rise around them cannot be expected to carry the weight of saving their territories on their own. Larger geopolitical entities and bodies like the United Nations need to take greater action in order to see real change, and to a large extent, they are, with projects like the Pacific Adaptation to Climate Change Project spearheading international efforts to diagnose and remedy the issues occurring (United Nations Development Programme, 2015).
I’ll leave you with a story emblematic of this hope for the future. In 2019, a group of ambassadors to small Pacific island nations teamed up in their effort to advise the United Nations General Assembly about their newest annual development plan. Upon addressing a panel of experts from global powers like China, the United States, India, and various European countries, the presidents and ambassadors of tiny nations like Vanuatu, Micronesia, and Fiji felt that they “were heard by the global community” (Westerman, 2019). The onset of a massive refugee crisis from these nations is not a foregone conclusion, and all it will take is a little dedication, creativity, and understanding from the rest of the world to make sure that these people are able to thrive even more in the future.
Works Cited
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