The gathering focused particularly on climate change and specifically on the issue of the Cartaret islands in the autonomous region of Bougainville and the Manam islands in Madang province.

Matthew McGarry, of Catholic Relief Services, part of the Catholic Caritas network, said, "every day and every year that passes, we see climate change as one of the greatest advocates of misery and despair". Read more

However if relocation proves necessary it will not be the first time that i-Kiribati have found themselves, en-mass, in a ‘strange' land.

The recently appointed Apostolic delegate to the Solomon Islands, Archbishop Mathew Kurian Vayalunkal received at a true i-Kiribati welcome when he visited the parish of St. Eusebius, Noro.

In Caanan he was honoured with floral wreaths, speeches, dances and gifts at the ‘Maneaba' (meeting house).

The people have been resettled by the British from the then Gilbert islands several decades ago.

In 1930s, because of over crowding 700 i-Kiribati moved to three atolls in the uninhabited Phoenix-islands group in the extreme south of Kiribati.

But in the early 1950s, after repeated droughts and associated water shortages, the British authorities made the decision to re-relocate the settlers.

Solomon Islands was chosen on the basis that it was more sparsely populated than Kiribati.

The first wave of i-Kiribati arrived in the Western Province in 1953. They were assigned land to the west of Gizo town on Gizo Island.

Today pockets, or sub-communities, of i-Kiribati are found scattered across the Western Province, especially in Gizo Island, Waghena Island, and in the villages of Canaan, Rawaki on Kohingo Island, and Baeroko to the north of Noro.

Vayalunkal presented his credentials to the Governor General of Solomon Islands, Frank Kabui, on Thursday Feb 9th.

Pope Francis named Vayalunkal as the Apostolic Nuncio to Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands in September 2016

The 49-year-old has been in the Vatican diplomatic service since 1998. He served in Guinea Conakry, Korea, Dominican Republic, Bangladesh, Hungary and in Egypt.

In 2010, after the earthquake in Haiti, he was sent there for few months to assist the humanitarian support of the Holy See.

Source

• kottayamad.org
• theislandsun.com
• methodist.org.uk
• Image: theislandsun.com

Extinction is hardly less serious than genocide, yet its quarry have no legal basis to relocate.

Pasifika nations have little to no voice in international energy policy, and exert, at most, limited influence over international law.

At COP21 these inequities have been at the fore, as the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), in partnership with the U.N. Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (UNESCAP), presented a sweeping survey among the populations of Kiribati, Nauru, and Tuvalu, alongside much-needed policy recommendations for the international community.

The survey—launched by UNESCAP but executed largely by locals—canvassed 852 households (6,852 people) in these three countries.

It's the first comprehensive look at the migration patterns and climate anxieties of these islanders.

As Tuvalu's Prime Minister Enele Sosene Sopoaga put it in a prepared statement: "The results from this unprecedented survey show us empirically what we already know.

"Pacific islanders are facing the brunt of climate change impacts and are increasingly finding themselves with fewer options."

What can the rest of us do? Some straightforward stuff with job training, risk-management tools (simple facilities for storing water, for example), and, perhaps most crucially, international law.

To ease migration, the U.N. also advocates training island citizens as nurses, schoolteachers, and police.

Such training would help strengthen visa applications for emigration to better-elevated countries, and help émigrés find good work once they get there.

Source

• psmag.com
• Image: psmag.com

He sleeps in a raised fibro hut.

He lives with his grandparents and several cousins, attends second grade at a local school and swims in the mouth of the Mataniko River, alongside the community's cotes of pigs and chooks, and where the waterway dumps into the Pacific Ocean.

According to some here, Micah has spent his whole life as a climate change refugee.

He will soon be forced to move.

Anglican priest Fr Nigel Kelaepa says both the growth and expected end of the settlement can be linked to climate change triggered by wealthy countries' greenhouse gas emissions.

"I believe the people here are climate change refugees," Kelaepa says ahead of attending the United Nations climate summit starting in Paris on November 30, in part to speak about his on-camera role in a World Vision funded documentary, Fading Sands.

Mich's people are Polynesian, hailing from Ontong Java - an outlying atoll about 400 kilometres to the north.

The shanty town known as Lord Howe Settlement (not to be confused with the Australian island) is small, but has expanded dramatically in recent years.

There are now more than 1000 people, crowded in an expanding labyrinth of small buildings that spreads between the city's main road to the water.

What was about half a dozen shacks in the early 1970s, mostly home to people needing to visit the capital for medical treatment, gradually grew into a permanent settlement.

Now, in the wake of a storm and flood that last year brutalised Honiara, community leaders are questioning its future.

Source

• theage.com.au
• Image: theage.com.au

The Polynesia Against Climate Threats declaration calls for a joint effort to protect the ocean and the environment, and will be taken to world leaders at a major climate change conference in December.

The declaration was signed by the leaders in French Polynesia on Friday.

It calls for an international support mechanism to be established to compensate for the impacts of climate change and to protect displaced populations.

The leaders say they want the international community to limit global warming to below 1.5 degrees celsius by 2100, and to financially support the countries in implementing adaptation solutions.

Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand has been promoting awareness of the environmental challenges that the people of Oceania face.

"Already vulnerable Pacific communities are living with early impacts of climate change," says Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand's director, Julianne Hickey.

"In the long term it is the poorest communities and future generations who will have to bear the costs of adapting to the environmental devastation that climate change will bring."

"We recently hosted Ursula Rakova from the Carteret Islands in Papua New Guinea, whose people have been forced by rising seas to move to the mainland - and have seen nothing of climate change adaptation funds that the world community is supposed to make available."

The Caritas Aotearoa New Zealand director says that in his Encyclical, Laudato Si, Pope Francis hasn't flinched from acknowledging the immensity and urgency of responding to environmental degradation faced by many people, especially the poorest.

Source

• radionnz.co.nz
• caritas.org.nz
• caritas.org.nz
• Image: radionz.co.nz