Niwa says sea level changes could create flooding around school buildings and roads. Then it would be difficult for children to get to and from their classrooms.

Infrastructure would be affected. Seawater in pipes would cause school toilets and sinks to back up.

Niwa says despite warnings of likely disruption, the Ministry of Education has few adaptation plans in place.

If a big storm hit today, Niwa reports that 31 schools would be at risk of flooding, with no sea-level rise factored into their plans.

When the ocean is 50cm higher (a mark we'll reach in the next 45 to 90 years), 65 schools could be affected. That will become 94 of our 2,500 schools when sea levels rise a metre.

The Ministry of Education requires schools to develop a 10-Year Property Plan. These help schools upgrade and maintain buildings and grounds - but there is little mention of sea-level rise or climate change.

When choosing the location of a new school, the ministry must look at the site's history of flooding, but there's currently no specific requirement to future-proof decisions by assessing the impacts of climate change. However, the Ministry says these requirements will be updated by the middle of the year.

Under the Zero Carbon Act, the Government must prepare the country for the expected effects of climate change, such as sea-level rise. By August next year, it must have a national adaptation plan in place.

Niwa's modelling "will provide valuable and additional insight to our property planning, monitoring of at-risk properties, and, equally, our due diligence when acquiring new land," a Ministry of Education spokesperson says.

Niwa's model used up to 1m of sea-level rise, but it's unclear when the world will reach that milestone.

To remove this uncertainty, the Government has decided plans should allow for up to 1m of sea-level rise by 2120.

Rising sea levels make extreme flooding events more likely, and increases the frequency of smaller, nuisance flooding, said Niwa hazards researcher Ryan Paulik​. He identified the number of at-risk schools using his coastal inundation model.

Once the seas are 1m higher, the extreme flooding that now hits every 100 years will occur as often as once a day, he added.
Next steps: Schools and communities should start planning for these changes as soon as possible, a Unitec researcher says.

"Otherwise it just becomes a contingent thing done at the last minute… When it's flooded, we better move it."

Catholic schools likely to be flooded

If the sea were to rise between 1 and 50cms:

• St Mary's Catholic School (Tauranga), Sacred Heart School (Petone), New Brighton Catholic School (Christchurch), St Joseph's School (Kaikoura), St Patrick's School (Kaiapoi), St Peter Chanel School (Motueka), and St Joseph's School (Invercargill) would be flooded, says the Niwa report.

A sea-level rise of 51 to 100cm would flood:

• St Anne's School (Woolston), St Patrick's School (Napier), Our Lady of the Rosary School (Waiwhetu) and St Patrick's School (Kilbirnie).

Evan's Bay Intermediate, a state school in Wellington, is also listed as at risk. It shares a common boundary with St Patrick's College Wellington, that is not listed!

Source

• Stuff
• Image: Stuff

He said: "We can see it with our own eyes - the ocean levels are increasing each year, so the island [of Viti Levu] is disappearing."

The archbishop said "Pacific Islanders are suffering from the impacts of climate change. Climate change is a matter of survival."

He said: "How am I going to tell my people that they have to learn to live with this?"

He added: "My people are weeping. Who will dry their tears?"

Referring to the rising tides, he said: "It's not just a random event.

"On the contrary, in the coming years, people living in 34 coastal villages in Fiji face upheavals that will force them to relocate their homes, due to the rise in sea level."

Chong explained that authorities have scheduled entire village populations to be moved from along the coast to areas inland, including hills and mountain regions.

He said: "Fiji's government has identified these villages as susceptible to the effects of the changes in the next five to 10 years.

"One village in the province of Bua has already been relocated to Yadua and there are plans to move the village of Tavea soon."

Chong was speaking in an interview with Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, after attending a conference in Rome related to the anniversary of Pope Francis' encyclical Laudato Si.

Chong said: "Ecological conversion doesn't happen in isolation. The conversion also has to be something internal in the heart of each individual."

He added: "Creation is a gift but at the same time [it is] a responsibility that God has given us to take care of."

Source

• zenit.org
• Image: www.aksik.org
  

The "tipping point" depends on the rate of climate change — and above all the stability of Antarctica.

These are the conclusions reached in a recently published study partly funded by the Pentagon's Strategic Environmental Research and Development Programme.

The United States has military installations or assets on a number of Pacific Islands.

The study was conducted by researchers from the US Geological Survey, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and several other institutions in the United States, Monaco and the Netherlands.

In the worst case, the paper says, it could come before 2030.

Most studies on the resilience of these islands to sea-level rise have projected that they will experience minimal inundation impacts until at least the end of the 21st century.

However, these have not taken into account the additional hazard of wave-driven overwash or its impact on freshwater availability.

The danger comes because of the increasing occurrence of large waves that spill across the island and sink into its groundwater.

However, a prominent expert in sea-level rise who was not involved in the study, Bob Kopp of Rutgers University, questioned that especially dire finding.

"They're asking the right questions, they're doing the right sorts of analysis, but I'm a little sceptical of some of their early-century dates for some things," Kopp said in an interview with The Washington Post.

Less dire scenarios predict the critical moment will come in the decade between 2030 and 2040 for a high warming scenario without Antarctic collapse, or 2055 to 2065 for a middle-range warming scenario.

Kopp said the middle scenario is consistent with what is known, and provided an analysis suggesting that while there is indeed a major threat, it won't arrive as soon as 2030 but could by the 2050s.

Source

• advances.sciencemag.org
• washingtonpost.com
• sputniknews.com
• impactlab.org
• Image: sputniknews.com

Fiji is the first small island state to preside at UN climate negotiations since they began in the 1990s.

The country's chief negotiator, Nazhat Shameem Khan, said others should not underestimate small states.

"If you think you're too small to make an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito," she said, attributing the quote to Anita Roddick, the founder of the cosmetics company The Body Shop.

Fiji's hosting of COP23 is significant because low-lying islands are playing the role of canary in the mine of international climate negotiations.

"Fiji being the chair this year sort of brings it home," said Rebecca Eastwood, advocacy coordinator for the Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach.

As the sea level rises, Pacific island leaders have begun facing the difficult decision of displacement for some of the 1.7 million inhabitants.

"They won't have anywhere to go. And so I think that's as stark an example as you can find on the impacts on small island nations," Eastwood said.

Fiji has enlivened a conference centre in Bonn, Germany, with canoes, dancers, huge photographs of palm-fringed islands, virtual reality shows and flowers.

At the indoor Fijian pavilion, delegates can also try out virtual reality glasses with 360-degree views showing young people re-building homes devastated by mudslides.

"We wanted to think 'how do we bring Fiji to Germany?'" co-director Kvaku Aning said. "Short of being able to smell it, or feel the rain or the sun on you, this is the best thing."

Many delegates say the Fijian approach makes an often abstract debate about greenhouse gas emissions more real. "It delivers a really stark message," said Elina Bardram, head of the European Commission delegation.

Source

• Stuff
• National Catholic Reporter
• Image: Stuff

Kiribati has a population of just over 100,000. The Marshall Islands about 52,000. And Tuvalu close to 10,000.

The problem for small Pacific Island nations is that on a world scale they don't count.

The only leverage they have is morality and common humanity.

When Micronesians sought justice and redress, the then US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger is reported as saying "There are only 90,000 people out there. Who gives a damn?"

"Many of us from the Pacific Islands are old enough to remember how our small populations were used in the past to justify some of the worst environmental and human rights abuses in the form of atomic and nuclear testing," says Teresia Teaiwa.

Teaiwa is senior lecturer in Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington.

"Today, all we have to challenge the giant perpetrators of climate change are moral arguments. And a bit of hyperbole," she says.

Recently the outgoing President of Kiribati, Anote Tong, compared climate change to trans-Atlantic slavery.

Was he really comparing climate change to nearly 400 years of brutalising enslavement of peoples stolen and sold out of Africa? Among them my maternal ancestors, Teaiwa asked.

Teaiwa is of Kiribati and African American ethnicity.

"Anote Tong's speech helped me focus my reflections in a way that I ended up appreciating."

"He made me think about slavery and climate change in simultaneously personal and systemic ways," she said.

Tong said slavery "was a system that was justified solely by its profitability."

"Morality was all that opponents of slavery had to argue against slave plantation economics."

This is the same with climate change, Tong argued.

Climate change is the consequence of a system justified solely by its profitability.

The fossil fuel and coal industries, for example, are profitable.

But they're also immoral.

They're reaping profits for the few, while spreading the costs around the world.

"If we are to learn anything additional about the abolition of slavery that might be useful to our struggle with climate change, it is probably this: abolition was achieved in what must have seemed like a glacial pace to slaves all around the world."

"And the most painful truth is that slavery has not been abolished."

"There are more trafficked and enslaved labourers today than there have ever been in human history."

"We have been and continue to be slaves to economic systems that are and always will be the ruin of us."

Source

• e-tangata.co.nz
• Image: itelegraph.co.uk

Kiribati President Anote Tong publicly thanked the nation of Fiji in a speech at the Paris climate summit for agreeing to take in his people should the worst come to pass.

"It's so heartening to hear that Fiji has undertaken to accommodate our people of Kiribati in the event that climate change renders our homes uninhabitable," the president said.

Tong said he would continue to repeat this statement to the international community because they needed to hear it.

"Because it's such a noble act from Fiji to help us," Mr Tong said.

Tong said the Pacific region would have appreciated the support of its neighbours Australia and New Zealand.

"Australia and New Zealand continue to worry about their industries.

"We had our arguments in Port Moresby, we would have liked them to come to our assistance, especially at this international forum because we do that for them whenever they ask us to.

"We give them our support and this is perhaps the most critical issue in which we need the support of all of our friends, and even our enemies."

At COP21 the prime minster of Fiji, Voreqe Bainimarama called on industrialised countries to act now and save small island states from disappearing.

"I have another message today - an invitation to those of you who think this is some distant threat to come to the Pacific and witness what I am about the tell you with your own eyes."

"The nightmare scenario is already unfolding. And not only on low-lying coral atolls like the nations I have mentioned but on mountainous volcanic islands such as those in Fiji."

"So we haven't caused this crisis. The blame lies squarely with the industrialised and emerging nations."

"Carbon emissions spewing from their factories. From the energy they burn. The cars they drive. The planes they travel in."

Source

• fijitimes.com
• fijisun.com.fj
• slate.com
• Image: cdn.ipsnews.net

Many others — about 10,000 — tried to migrate, but could not. Others became "internal migrants," placing strains on the already overpopulated capitals of Funafuti, Tuvalu, and South Tarawa, Kiribati.

The survey covered 6,852 individuals from 852 households in Kiribati, Nauru and Tuvalu.

While some believe that the habitability of their country is in question, and that they need to move, many more believed they had a right to stay in their homes, said Koko Warner of the Institute for Environment and Human Security at United Nations University, which helped lead the study.

That insistence has contributed to a raging debate over whether the Paris climate accord should include provisions for "loss and damage" resulting from climate change. .

New evidence is now suggests that these small islands will be more resilient to sea-level rise than we thought.

That is not to say that these nations won't face significant environmental challenges.

Built of sand and shingle and lying just 1-3m above the current sea level, coral reef islands in the central Pacific and Indian Oceans are considered among the most vulnerable places on Earth.

The new findings suggest that, rather than being passive lumps of rock that will be swamped by rising seas and eroded by storms, the islands are dynamic structures that can move and even grow in response to changing seas.

On the face of it, this is potentially good news for Pacific communities.

The islands they call home may be less vulnerable than is commonly thought.

But the findings also suggest that although the islands may not be swamped by rising seas, they are likely to change in size and shift their position on the surface of reefs.

The rate of these changes may also increase as sea level rises.

This raises questions for their ongoing habitation. How will physical changes to the islands affect drinking water supplies, and how will communities need to adapt their farming practices?

Questions about island change must be addressed urgently in order to inform decision making and secure the future of Pacific nations.

Source

• nytimes.com
• theconversation.com
• Image: i.telegraph.co.uk

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

"In some cases, entire regions and nations are under threat from the indisputable fact of rising sea levels," the statement says.

"Examples from this part of the world include the Carteret Islands, Fead Islands, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, the Mortlock Islands, Nukumanu Islands, the Tokelau Islands, and Tuvalu."

Last week fourteen Pacific Island nations met in Jaipur, in India to discuss rising sea levels.

Their message was clear - world leaders meeting in Paris in December must deliver on expectations of a historic deal to combat global warming.

The prime minister of Tuvalu, Enele Sopoaga, says his country is having to consider buying land in New Zealand and Australia to grow food and prepare the population to migrate.

In their statement the Bishops say relocation is fraught with difficulty.

"While offers of relocation are generous in themselves, uplifting a people from one place and planting them in another is a 'solution' that is fraught with difficulty and at times even insensitivity, to cultural identity and traditions."

The Bishops' Executive Committee has been meeting in Noumea, New Caledonia.

It is made up of the representatives of the Catholic Bishops' Conferences of Australia, CEPAC (the Pacific Island nations), New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.

Their statement has been prepared for the Conference of Peoples to be held in Paris in December.

Here is the full text of the Bishops' statement

• In English
• En Francais

Source

• Supplied
• radionz.co.nz
• abc.net.au
• Image: brookings.edu