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For an early glimpse at the challenges climate change migration will bring, you need only look at the mess in the Carteret Islands, a ring of South Pacific atolls off Papua New Guinea. Worsening storm surges are ripping away the low-lying islands, bit by b
For an early glimpse at the challenges climate change migration will bring, you need only look at the mess in the Carteret Islands, a ring of South Pacific atolls off Papua New Guinea.
Worsening storm surges are ripping away the low-lying islands, bit by bit. Saltwater is ruining the island's banana, yam and breadfruit crops, and has made the groundwater undrinkable. Record high tides a year ago swept through the main island, cutting it in two and persuading even the most reluctant that it is time to go, visitors say.
"My lasting memory of the place is the sound of axes chopping down dead breadfruit trees for firewood," remembers Dan Box, a freelance journalist who visited the islands last year to make a BBC radio documentary.
The low-lying atolls, off the coast of the Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville, are now the first in the world to launch a full evacuation, aimed at moving all 2,000 or so residents elsewhere.
It's not going very well, says Box, who spent two weeks in the Carterets in April and May, on a journey funded in part by the Royal Geographic Society.
A five-year-old government-run evacuation effort, organized by the regional government, has yet to relocate its first evacuee, he said. And an effort by the frustrated islanders themselves to find a new home isn't going much better, with only five people relocated so far.
Why? Land is scarce on Bougainville, the islanders' intended destination, and finding room for scores of migrants is excruciatingly difficult, particularly if the aim is to keep them together, Box said.
The Catholic Church has provided the would-be migrants with a few tiny pockets of land for resettlement, but some of them lie 60 miles apart, Box said.
"It's hard to imagine moving a population on that basis," he said. "Even if it works, the cohesion and social identity is gone."
Just as troubling, Bougainville is home to a tribal society still recovering from a bloody civil war. While the Carteret islanders have clan ties to some Bougainville groups, fitting them into the island's charged social structure is a challenge, Box said.
Then there's the bureaucracy and the perpetual lack of funds, which have handicapped both the government's and the islanders' own relocation efforts, he said.
'DEAD EASY' EVACUATION
But the worst part, Box said, is that in relative terms "this evacuation from the Carterets is dead easy."
The planned relocation involves moving only a couple thousand people from one area to another in the same region. Think of the challenges facing the Maldives, he said, which hopes to perhaps move its entire population to India and carve out some kind of political sovereignty there, something there is little precedent for in international law.
The Carterets "gives you an example of what will happen in so many places to too many people," Box said. "We have to take the opportunity to learn from this, so when we are faced with 10 million people on the move we have a better case model to sort out that evacuation."
For now, the Carteret islanders are surviving on fish, rainwater, a few coconuts a day, what little survives of their crops and the occasional unpredictable emergency delivery of food and bottled water rations, which arrive on a barely seaworthy boat from Bougainville, Box said.
They hope richer nations "who got them into this will do something to get them out," he said. But "the reality is they're very aware they're going to have to do this on their own."
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