Excerpt from time.com
The climate crisis is creating an increasingly uncertain future for people in most parts of the world. Paradoxically in my region, the Pacific, it is making our future increasingly certain—but not in a way that gives any kind of comfort.
During this century, several Pacific Island nations will become uninhabitable. For my country Tuvalu, which sits halfway between Hawaii and Australia, this could happen in the next two to three decades. Other Pacific Island countries on the climate change frontline may have a few decades longer, but our final destination is no longer a matter of guesswork.
Most societies see climate change as mainly about cutting carbon emissions or mitigating future impacts. We are facing a looming situation far more profound: the near certainty of terminal inundation. Our peoples, in my generation or the next, will be unable to exist on the islands that have nurtured our ancestors for centuries.
Tuvalu and our Pacific neighbors have done nothing to cause climate change. Carbon emissions combined across the entirety of the Pacific Islands amount to less than 0.03% of the world’s total—even less if we speak of historical emissions. The existential threat we face is not of our making. But it will remake us.
