Grammy Awardee Ricky Kej Visits Kiribati Archipelago

Grammy Award winner Ricky Kej recently visited archipelago Kiribati in the South Pacific to make a documentary on raising global awareness of environment issues.
The documentary deals with Kiribati which is facing the threat of being submerged over the next few decades due to rising water levels.
Kej said that in Kiribati, he was granted the opportunity to record an extended interview with Kiribati's three-time President Anote Tong, whose speech at the December 2015 United Nations COP21 conference in Paris had inspired him.
Tong was in office from July 10, 2003-March 11, 2016.
"At the conference, Tong had called for bold action to address climate change and his message to the conference could not have been clearer," Kej told PTI on World Environmental Day today.

Kej said Tong has been spreading awareness that the rising sea levels in the last several decades have slowly eaten away his country's 313 square miles, and now the country's 102,000 people face the prospect of becoming the world's first climate change refugees.

"For many world leaders, climate change exists as an abstract concept or a theory that remains to be proven, but for Tong, it is a reality he faces every day," Kej said.
Kej said Tong told him that the Fourth Assessment Report of the Inter-governmental Panel on climate change was fairly conclusive that it (climate change) was human induced and that within this century, countries like his will be under water.

"For long I have admired President Tong. For me, he is Mahatma Gandhi of the Pacific. So, when given the opportunity to create a project to raise awareness about climate change, I looked to the example of Tong for inspiration," Kej said.