Pacific islands look for model to combat changes due to global warming

[xchrom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/may/07/pacific-islands-global-warming-climate


Fish supplies in the Pacific will be particularly affected by global warming ... a fishing boat at Sorong fishing port, in Indonesia's Papua region. Photograph: Romeo Gacad/Getty

With islands and atolls scattered across the ocean, the small Pacific island states are among those most exposed to the effects of global warming: increasing acidity and rising sea level, more frequent natural disasters and damage to coral reefs. These micro-states, home to about 10 million people, are already paying for the environmental irresponsibility of the great powers.

"Pacific islands are the victims of industrial countries unable to control their carbon dioxide emissions. The truth of the matter is that we have no option but to accept this and adapt," says Dr Jimmie Rodgers, the head of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), a regional development organisation. At the initiative of France's Research on Development Institute (IRD) and New Caledonia University, 30 or so scientists from the Pacific basin spent a week at the end of April discussing the design of a sustainable development model suited to local conditions – in particular, pressure from the climate on ways of life that reach back several millennia.

In a study published by the journal Nature Climate Change, the SPC and IRD draw attention to the considerable impact of global warming on food security on these islands. Fish stocks, the main source of protein for islanders and the basis for development, will be particularly affected. Currently about 1m tonnes of tuna and tuna-like fishes are caught every year in the region.

For the Kiribati group of islands, fishing accounts for 40% of GDP, whereas on the Marshall Islands fisheries and fish processing represent a quarter of overall revenue. "The rising temperature of surface waters, which is greater in the western part of the ocean basin, will encourage tuna to migrate east towards Polynesia," says Johann Bell, principal fisheries scientist at SPC and one of the authors of the study.