Hungry ocean devours Kiribati island paradise

By KATHY MARKS

TARAWA - The ocean should be Teatu Tsuria's friend. A villager in the tiny South Pacific nation of Kiribati, he lives on a soft, white beach fringed with coconut trees and catches enough fish in his canoe to feed his five children.

He wakes up each morning to the whisper of the waves and falls asleep at night fanned by a cooling sea breeze.

But the ocean is Tsuria's most implacable foe. It is killing his crops and poisoning his water.

In the next decade it will swallow his thatched wooden hut and his modest plot of land; within a few generations, it may have annihilated his homeland.

Kiribati - 33 coral atolls strung across two million square miles of the Pacific - is steadily vanishing beneath the waves.

Around the world, sea levels are rising as greenhouse gases discharged by industrialised countries warm the oceans.

The future is bleak for low-lying island states - and Kiribati, barely 2m above sea level, could be the first to go under.

The latest round of international talks on global warming collapsed in The Hague seven weeks ago, after a dispute over implementation of a minuscule cut in carbon dioxide emissions. Despite a dramatic appeal for action by 40 vulnerable island nations, no date was set for the resumption of negotiations.

Wealthy, developed countries believe that they can afford to bide their time.

For the 92,000 inhabitants of Kiribati, one of the world's most remote spots, the matter is rather more urgent. The ground is literally disappearing beneath their feet.

As the seas continue to rise, they could be forced to emigrate en masse, together with tens of millions of other people in low-lying island and coastal communities around the globe.

Tsuria has watched the tide creep ever closer, devouring large chunks of beach and felling 30-year-old palm trees.

A ferocious storm in 1997 flooded his home and the pits in which he cultivated taro. Nothing grows here now.

The water in his well has turned brackish. His family can no longer drink it. If they wash with it, they develop rashes.

"When we came here 11 years ago, the sea was about 2m further away," says Tsuria, who lives in the village of Eita, on Tarawa, the densely populated main atoll.

"I am very worried but there is nowhere for us to move to. All of the land is occupied and, anyway, I have no money for another plot. What will become of my children and my grandchildren?"

Similar stories can be heard all over Tarawa, a horseshoe-shaped chain of islets surrounding a central lagoon.

Pancake-flat and barely 500m wide, the atoll is being eaten away from both sides, with the population squeezed into an ever narrower strip of land between the lagoon and the Pacific.

So badly eroded are Tarawa's beaches that the Mormon Church imported several tonnes of sand from Australia to build a new house of worship.

The international community, too, should spare a thought for beautiful, dirt-poor Kiribati as it digests the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that collates the work of 3000 leading scientists.

Its report predicts that sea levels will climb 14cm to 80cm by 2110.

The effects will be borne disproportionately by the world's most impoverished countries, says the panel.

Even if greenhouse-gas emissions were reduced sharply in the immediate future, it says, "sea levels will continue to rise due to thermal expansion for hundreds of years."

For Kiribati the implications are clear.

Before the end of the century, its citizens could become the first environmental refugees, their 3000-year-old Micronesian nation wiped off the map.

As you drive along Tarawa's single paved road, with the deep blue ocean unfolding on one side and the turquoise lagoon on the other, it is difficult to comprehend that this place faces oblivion.

But all around Tarawa are signs of severe coastal erosion. Two uninhabited islands, Tebua Tarawa and Pikeman, have vanished beneath the surface of the lagoon.

Many families have built crude sea walls to protect their homes from the unusually high spring tides.

The people of Kiribati joke that they will have to climb to the tops of coconut trees to escape the ocean.

But as flooding pollutes the underground fresh water supplies, the islands will become uninhabitable long before the last morsel of land is submerged.

- HERALD CORRESPONDENT