Social and environmental crisis
For the last 20 years, the Pacific's island nations have struggled with modernization and changing lifestyles, and have suffered even more keenly from related environmental problems. A 1998 report by Global Environmental Change and Human Security entitled "Environmental Change, Vulnerability and Security in the Pacific" describes the region as facing three different environmental crises:
(1) Resource exploitation
The pressure to grow the economy (especially as population growth eats into economic gains) has accelerated the islands' exploitation of their natural resources, resulting in environmental degradation. For example, rainforest coverage on Pacific islands has fallen rapidly as a result of excess logging. This in turn has led to soil erosion, flooding, and species loss.
In addition, competition among foreign powers for economic and political perks, the need of the local governments to expand revenues, and the actions local governments have taken under pressure have not only failed to generate win-win situations but have frequently also extracted brutal environmental and human costs.
Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea provides a well known case in point. In the late 1960s, the Australian colonial government granted a private Australian mining company a concession to build the world's largest open-pit copper mine. After independence in 1975, the PNG government continued the concession and thereafter took a completely hands-off approach to environmental management. Not only did copper mining come to dominate the island's economy and provide the government with 20% of its revenues, it also led to severe pollution of the Jaba River and the ocean, loss of forests, and social unrest. The mine shut down in 1989 after secessionists attacked it, but it left the environment and a shattered community in urgent need of restoration.
Nuclear weapons testing and the dumping of nuclear waste by Western powers in the last century represent the region's most extreme examples of environmental exploitation. The Great Powers saw the remote and sparsely populated Pacific atolls as uniquely well suited to such activities. The United States carried out the first of the Pacific-island weapons tests on Bikini Atoll in 1946. It continued testing weapons there for 12 years, forcing the islanders to relocate twice and afflicting many with radiation sickness. The region's last recorded test (the 188th!) was carried out by the French in 1996 on Moruroa Atoll, a French territory.
(2) Trash
Rapid urbanization, population growth, and, in a few places, industrialization, have made waste disposal another pressing regional issue. They have also highlighted the Pacific islands' lack of environmental governance. The islands have no mechanisms in place for monitoring environmental impacts, nor for overseeing the importation, use, and disposal of dangerous chemicals. Ordinary citizens are consuming canned foods, using plastic utensils, driving cars, and riding motorcycles oblivious to just how little environmental carrying capacity their islands have.
Ironically, large imported items like electrical appliances, cars, machinery and computers quickly rust and/or break down in the region's humid, salty conditions. Since the islands also lack the parts, tools, and skills to effect repairs, breakdowns are permanent, turning these items into toxic trash that the islands are ill equipped to recycle. Even though the situation has improved in recent years as Australia, New Zealand, and Taiwan have provided island governments with recycling concepts and techniques, the capital cities of these island nations remain disfigured by mountains of trash that will take time to bring down.
(3) Climate change
Atmospheric scientists have been publishing reports on global climate change and forecasts of rising sea levels since the 1990s. These are clearly the most vexing of the islands' environmental challenges.
Let's first look at rising sea levels. Because coral atolls sit at an average of less than five meters above sea level, they are likely to suffer severe consequences from a rise in sea levels. These include coastal erosion, the disappearance of the mangrove trees that protect the shore, reductions in the amount of arable land, and saltwater intrusions into aquifers.
In addition, the newest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in March 2009, forecasts that average sea levels will rise by more than one meter by the end of this century. The prospect of "drowned islands" serves as a powerful warning on the effects of global climate change.
But Liu Tzu-ming, an assistant professor in the Department of Tourism and Hospitality at Taiwan's Kainan University and an expert in the management of ecological resources, says that sea-level forecasts have long been a subject of heated debate within the scientific community and notes that there are several models in use. For example, one model suggests that snowfall in the Antarctic is likely to increase, ameliorating the rising sea levels expected to result from rapid melting in the Arctic. Meanwhile, a 2010 study argues that gravitation is actually causing sea levels in the Pacific to fall.
Rather than getting hung up on whether sea levels are rising or falling, perhaps the top priority should be to deal with the immediately apparent effects of climate change, such as the increasing strength and frequency of wind and waves, changes in rainfall patterns, which are reducing the capacity of soils to retain water, and acidification of the oceans, which is resulting in coral bleaching and death. The last is particularly relevant to islanders, who live in a symbiotic relationship with the sea. When coral dies, the islands lose a natural protective barrier, allowing large waves to sweep in unobstructed. Collapsing reef ecosystems also cause dramatic declines in populations of the large predatory fish that feed on reef fish. This directly impacts the foundations and food security of these fish-dependent island nations.
In this aerial view of Tarawa, Kiribati's second-largest atoll and the site of its capital, the light-blue inner circle is the lagoon, the deep blue outside it is the ocean, and the winding, ribbon-like strip between is the beautiful, fragile island itself. Tarawa has an average height above sea level of just 2 meters.