Kiribati Islands buy land in Fiji - global warming sea level rise

The president of Kiribati, a group of low lying islands in the Pacific, has said it's too late to try and stop the rise in sea levels that likely will inundate the Kiribati Islands. He's therefore taken the step of buying land in Fiji for his people to flee to. 

I note the article is over a year old. Why aren't we hearing about this in the main stream media? The Paris climate talks are all the more urgent.

The people of Kiribati, a group of islands in the Pacific ocean particularly exposed to climate change, now own a possible refuge elsewhere. President Anote Tong has recently finalised the purchase of 20 sq km on Vanua Levu, one of the Fiji islands, about 2,000km away. 

The Church of England has sold a stretch of land mainly covered by dense forest for $8.77m. "We would hope not to put everyone on [this] one piece of land, but if it became absolutely necessary, yes, we could do it," Tong told the Associated Press. Kiribati has a population of about 110,000 scattered over 33 small, low-lying islands extending over a total area of 3.5m sq km. 

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For many of these countries, which are represented by the Alliance of Small Island States, the impacts of climate change are "irreparable", as Tong has often stressed. "Whatever is agreed within the United States today, with China [the two largest sources of CO2 emissions], it will not have a bearing on our future, because already, it's too late for us ... And so we are the canary. But hopefully, that experience will send a very strong message that we might be on the frontline today, but others will be on the frontline next," he said in an interview on CNN last month. This explains why small island states think it is so important to set up an international mechanism for loss and damage, to compensate for the irremediable consequences of global warming. more