Barun Roy: A climatic Armageddon?

ASIA FILE

Tuvalu has just 50 years more to live while for countries like the US, global warming doesn't even exist.

How many islands are there in the Philippine archipelago? Ask a Filipino, and the reply inevitably will come as another question: At high tide or low? It's a joke, but when we're talking of 7,107 islands, of which only 2,000 are inhabited and no more than 500 are larger than one square kilometre, it matters little if at any given time there are a few islands more or a few less.

But it does matter for Tuvalu. This nation of nine tiny atolls and 12,000 people, spread over 1.3 million square kilometres of the central Pacific Ocean, has a landmass of only 26 square kilometres and its highest point is just five metres above sea level. With the sea rising by about 20 cm per decade, there's a real danger that Tuvalu will one day disappear under the waves.

At the current rate of sea rise, Tuvalu has some 50 years to live, probably just enough time for the world to do something to at least halt, if not reverse, the trend. "All countries must make an effort to reduce harmful emissions and check global warming before it's too late for countries like ours," Tuvalu's deputy prime minister, Tavau Teii, said at a recent environmental conference in Seoul.

As scientists and environmentalists discuss global warming and argue its likely impact, small countries like Tuvalu are actually facing the consequences. Kiribati (population: 107,800) has lost at least two islets already while in the Marshall Islands, home to 62,000 people, some 60 hectares of dry land, 8.6 per cent of the total land area, are in danger of being swallowed. Vanuatu, with its 212,000 people, still juts above the sea but low-lying areas are being evacuated. People have started moving out of Papua New Guinea's Carteret Island that experts say might vanish as early as 2015. In almost all the Pacific nations, coral reefs and fishing grounds are being ravaged as floods, storms, erosions, and other coastal hazards continue to surge.

The danger worries even bigger archipelagos like Indonesia and deltaic countries like Vietnam. More than 50 per cent of Indonesia's economy is coastline-related, and, at the rate the global mean sea level is predicted to rise "" between 2 cm and 10 cm per decade "" its low-lying coastal cities, like Jakarta and Surabaya, will be under increasing threat.

Half of Vietnam's rice production comes from the Mekong Delta as well as much of its fish. Changes in climate would bring on more typhoons, floods and soil loss that could be disastrous for the economy. Scientists say a one-metre rise in the global sea level would destroy over 12 per cent of Vietnam's most fertile land.

Nearer home, in the Sunderbans, satellite imagery shows a steady rise in the sea level over the past two decades. In the Indian part of the delta, Lohachara, once an island of some 10,000 people, is gone, Ghoramara is disappearing, Sagar has lost some 7,500 acres of its land, and about a dozen other islands are waiting to vanish.

Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable, and when Fakhruddin Ahmed, the chief adviser to its interim government, spoke at the recent UN meeting on climate change of his country and others being "on the threshold of a climatic Armageddon," he wasn't being overly panicky. About 10 per cent of Bangladesh is hardly one metre above the mean sea level and readings taken at Hiron Point, Char Ganga and Cox's Bazar all show it's steadily rising. Experts believe a one-metre rise could wipe away almost 60 per cent of the country.

Concern is equally high in the Maldives (population: 369,000), which has started taking its own precautions while waiting for the international community to act. An entire island is being reclaimed from a lagoon as an alternative urban site to overcrowded Male and will be built to a height of two metres above sea level. Hulhumale, as the project is called, will eventually be able to accommodate over 100,000 people.

Sea level rise is only one aspect of the looming climatic danger. There are many other ways the threat affects the world and threatens to create many more millions of climate refugees. Yet, how keen is the international community to do something?

The Nobel Committee has done its job by awarding the 2007 Peace Prize to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This December, more alarms will be sounded at an international summit in Bali to discuss the global warming issue. But don't forget that, at the 2002 UN conference in New Delhi, India refused to discuss specific emission targets for countries like itself. At the last meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation, Australia's prime minister, John Howard, blithely said: "The next meeting will never achieve what we would like, but the world will not come to an end."

For the United States, the problem simply doesn't exist.