(AFP) – Rising waters are gradually engulfing Carnie Reimers’ garden in the Marshall Islands, confronting her with a terrible choice: stay in the only home she has ever known or become, like other residents in the Pacific, a climate refugee.
Chewy Lin / AFP
“It’s not an easy subject to tackle,” this young 22-year-old activist told AFP during an event on climate organized this week on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York. .
“We are deeply rooted in our country. We don’t want to be displaced or forced to live elsewhere. It would be difficult to preserve our culture,” explains Carnie Reimers, emphasizing the emotional dimension of the impacts of global warming on her community.
The highest tides now cause, according to her, floods invading schools or blocking access to the airport. The country is even considering moving the capital to Majuro, where Carnie Reimers lives with her family.
Many have left the Marshall Islands, now forming a small diaspora, such as in the American state of Arkansas.
– “Permanent struggle” –
The Pacific nations, sparsely populated and industrialized, emit a total of less than 0.02% of annual global greenhouse gas emissions. But this vast collection of volcanic islands and low-altitude coral atolls is being hit hard by the effects of global warming, particularly rising sea levels.
“Every day is a constant struggle,” Grace Malie, a 25-year-old from Tuvalu, a tiny Polynesian archipelago that risks becoming the first nation made unlivable by global warming, tells AFP.
Locally, she explains, residents had to ration buckets of well water during a drought two years ago. Fresh water was contaminated by rising salt waters years ago, leaving the country’s approximately 11,000 residents dependent on rainwater.
Last February, a storm swept through the Funafuti atoll, capital of Tuvalu, flooding roads and infiltrating homes. According to Grace Malie, this weather episode was nothing exceptional, but with sea levels rising, any storm is likely to wreak havoc.
Since the beginning of the 20th century, average sea levels have risen more rapidly than ever over the last 3,000 years, a direct result, according to experts, of the melting of land ice and the expansion of water from sea due to global warming.
– “Question of survival” –
According to a recent report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), sea levels have risen by an average of 9.4 cm globally in thirty years. An increase of 15 cm in certain areas of the Pacific.
“It’s the difference between flooding a few times a year, or even none at all, and flooding 30 times, 60 times a year or even every two days,” Nadya Vinogradova Shiffer, head of the program responsible for this, told AFP. file within NASA.
By 2050, more than half of the area of Tuvalu’s capital will be regularly flooded, a figure expected to rise to 95% by 2100, according to official estimates.
“For us, it is a question of survival,” insisted Prime Minister Feleti Teo at the United Nations. His government is actively participating in diplomatic efforts to preserve island nations that are at risk of being submerged.
Last year, Feleti Teo signed a historic treaty with Australia facilitating permanent residency for Tuvalu nationals.
Activist Grace Malie says she knows several families already settled in New Zealand and Australia, even if for others, the very idea of leaving still remains “very taboo”.
Her grandparents vowed to stay on the islands as long as possible, a sentiment she shares. “We don’t want to think about the worst, because that will lower our hopes.”
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