Is not looking good for Kiribati. The Islanders there are facing what looks like a losing battle against fossil fuels and the climate change it has and is causing. Already parts of the islands are permanently under water, and last June the water went over the new sea wall.
Timeon didn’t understand or acknowledge climate change when he was younger, but in the 1980s, he started noticing changes that his traditional knowledge of the land and ocean couldn’t account for. Ancient beliefs and customs were called into question. There was unprecedented flooding, killing trees and crops. The land eroded over the years, under siege from both sides of the narrow island. The road had to be moved inland three times, before they built a seawall. The community meeting house, the maneaba, always has to be built in the centre of the village. But now it sits on one side off the island. The rest of the land is simply gone, claimed by the sea.
Scientists say the global sea level rise is caused by two main factors: water expanding as it warms, and large-scale melting of glaciers and polar ice caps. Modeling from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) found that it would rise at an accelerated rate this century. Timeon can measure the sea level by other means.
“When I first got married I lived over on that side, in my wife’s parents house. Now, the place where we lived is in the sea right now,” he says.
“No more,” he adds in English. Buzzfeed
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