Imagine waking up one morning and realising that your village was swallowed up by the sea. Or imagine what you would do if the land you live in has become so saline, that it is as good as no land at all because you can grow no food now. These are all becoming a painful reality for human beings in some parts of the world.
The small Pacific island nation of Kiribati, which is threatened by rising oceans, has become the first country on earth to buy land in another country for their citizens – climate refugees! Kiribati’s President, Anote Tong, pointed out that, based on scientific predictions of sea level rise, the coral atolls that make up his homeland will be underwater within a century. “We have nowhere else to go,” Tong said in an interview. “We already have communities which have had to relocate because what was their home was no longer there. And so we are feeling the impact now already.” Tong’s government recently bought land in Fiji, and has been considering a variety of potential ways for the country of about 100,000 people to adapt.
In the village of Doun Baba Dieye, in Northern Senegal we can see ruins of the houses in the sea close to the shore. In an interview with Frankie Taggart in 2013, a local fisherman Diagne said, “My house used to be two kilometers from the sea. I could grow things here because there was fresh water which came from the river,” surveying a stretch of wet sand and rubble which, until last year, had been his living room. Doun Babe Dieye, settled by the Normans in 1364, was the first casualty among many districts of the Senegalese city of St Louis, the former colonial capital of French west Africa which, little-by-little, is disappearing underwater. “It was a beautiful village with lots of greenery everywhere,” recalled Diagne, the last to leave when the sea claimed his village with 40 houses last year.
Flooding from sea level rise, storm surges and tidal surges are all leading to increased soil salinity in Bangladesh. Large swatches of land in Rosetta in Egypt have become unfit for any form of agriculture because of increased salinity of the land caused by rising sea levels and flooding.
On October 17, 2009 the entire cabinet of the Maldivian government held a cabinet meeting underwater. As many islands of the Maldives are sinking, the Ministers wanted to raise awareness of climate change and rising sea levels.
All this is also having an impact on insurance premiums. The Financial Times reported in June 2013, that ‘warming oceans may make parts of the word uninsurable according to insurers’. While, globally insurers are facing increasing pressure from extreme weather events causing damage to infrastructure, land masses sinking into the sea is an added dimension to their problems. USD 129 billion worth of New York City real estate now lies in flood zones. Sea level rising is of considerable importance to India, with more than 40 million people living in the coast that is under threat.
“What keeps us up at night is climate change. We see the long-term effect of climate change on society, and it really frightens us,” said Eric Smith, CEO of Swiss Re, one of the largest reinsurance companies of the world. Losing sleep… losing land!
(The writer is an author, speaker, trainer, consultant, an entrepreneur and an expert in applied sustainability. Visit: www.CBRamkumar.com)
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