The island of Naghotano is something shy of a kilometer square and home to about 600 people. Radiating out from the small church, almost every inch of the island not used as footpaths – there are no vehicles here – is occupied by a structure of some kind. There’s a primary school, a guesthouse, two stores with basic supplies, a few water tanks, and the rest of the island is jammed with multigenerational houses. Most houses are little more than a crude assemblage of reed walls with roofs of some combination of tin, trap and palm.
As the population continues to grow, rising sea levels are chewing away at Naghotano and the other islands of the Pacific archipelago year after year. In March 2015, Cyclone Pam hammered and flooded the island nation of Vanuatu, leaving more than 100,000 homeless. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that hundreds of millions of people in developing countries will be displaced by the end of this century. The people of Naghotano need no scientific reports to know that the tropical storms during the winters are getting more destructive. The winter of 2011 was the worst in memory – a storm surge that lasted for several days tore across the island destroying homes. While there is not a collective sense of urgency among the locals, the community was awakened to the fact that climate change must be addressed when one’s home is just at the sea level.
Displacement Solutions is a Geneva-based nonprofit that helps guide the resettlement process for communities in the wake of conflict, disaster, development and – increasingly – climate change. Some 50 to 200 million people, mostly in subsistence coastal communities, could become displaced as soon as 2050, the United Nations estimates. Just about a year ago, reports from the South Pacific confirmed that five of the Solomon Islands have returned to the ocean. Tough the submerged islands were relatively small and uninhabited, other islands in that archipelago have lost large swaths of their inhabitable area since 2011, and an exodus has begun. As various offices and organizations dawdle, the clock continues to tick. The rising seas won’t wait for committees to be formed, or budgets to be secured, or action plans to be formalized.
As the population continues to grow, rising sea levels are chewing away at Naghotano and the other islands of the Pacific archipelago year after year. In March 2015, Cyclone Pam hammered and flooded the island nation of Vanuatu, leaving more than 100,000 homeless. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that hundreds of millions of people in developing countries will be displaced by the end of this century. The people of Naghotano need no scientific reports to know that the tropical storms during the winters are getting more destructive. The winter of 2011 was the worst in memory – a storm surge that lasted for several days tore across the island destroying homes. While there is not a collective sense of urgency among the locals, the community was awakened to the fact that climate change must be addressed when one’s home is just at the sea level.
Displacement Solutions is a Geneva-based nonprofit that helps guide the resettlement process for communities in the wake of conflict, disaster, development and – increasingly – climate change. Some 50 to 200 million people, mostly in subsistence coastal communities, could become displaced as soon as 2050, the United Nations estimates. Just about a year ago, reports from the South Pacific confirmed that five of the Solomon Islands have returned to the ocean. Tough the submerged islands were relatively small and uninhabited, other islands in that archipelago have lost large swaths of their inhabitable area since 2011, and an exodus has begun. As various offices and organizations dawdle, the clock continues to tick. The rising seas won’t wait for committees to be formed, or budgets to be secured, or action plans to be formalized.