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J U L Y
 2 0 1 0 Issue 42
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THE CLIMATE CHANGE REFUGEES OF THE CARIBBEAN BASIN
Rising seas from global warming, coming after years of coral reef destruction, are forcing thousands of indigenous Panamanians to leave their ancestral homes on low-lying Caribbean islands. Seasonal winds, storms and high tides combine to submerge the tiny islands, crowded with huts of yellow cane and faded palm fronds, leaving them ankle-deep in emerald water for days on end.
Pablo Preciado, leader of the island of Carti Sugdub, remembers that in his childhood floods were rare, brief and barely wetted his toes. "Now it's something else. It's serious," he said. The increase of a few inches in flood depth is consistent with a global sea level rise over Preciado's 64 years of life and has been made worse by coral mining by the islanders that reduced a buffer against the waves. Carti Sugdub is one of a handful of islands in an archipelago off Panama's northeastern coast, where the government says climate change threatens the livelihood of nearly half of the 32,000 semi-autonomous Kuna people. The 2,000 inhabitants of Carti Sugdub plan to move to coastal areas within the Kuna's autonomous territory on the Panama mainland. They are eyeing foothills a half-hour walk from the swampy beach areas. "The water level is rising. The move is imminent," said Preciado, who has been leading a group of villagers clearing tropical forest for the new settlement.  Scientists warn that sea level rise in the next century could threaten millions with a similar fate and some communities as far apart as Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and Fiji have already been forced to relocate "This is no longer about a scientist saying that climate change and the change in sea level will flood (a people) and affect them," said Hector Guzman, a marine biologist and coral specialist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. "This is happening now in the real world." CLIMATE CHANGE REFUGEES The fiercely independent Kuna, famed for rebellions against Spanish conquistadors, French pirates and Panamanian overlords, have accelerated their fate by mining coral, which they use to expand islands and build artificial islets and breakwaters. Guzman, based at a Pacific island research center on the edge of Panama City, has warned of the risks of coral mining for a decade but says speaking out against a legally permitted traditional activity is "taboo." "(The Kuna) have increased their vulnerability to storms, wave action, and above all, the action of the rise in sea level," he told Reuters. When Kuna speak in their native language the Spanish words for "climate change" are often among the few foreign words used. While some elders warn that sea level rise will get worse, many locals believe God will keep them safe. "I don't know where they get that from -- that the land is going to sink and we'd better leave before it happens ... Those who want to go, can go. I'm staying here," said Evangelina, 60, who would not give her last name because she hasn't told local leadership she's opposed to moving. Sea levels rose about 17 cm (about 7 inches) over the last century and experts say the rate is accelerating. In 2007, the United Nations predicted a rise of 18 to 59 cm (7-23 inches) by 2100 but that did not include the accelerated melting of ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has warned that seas could rise 2 meters (6.5 feet) by the end of the century, threatening millions of people in cities from Tokyo and Shanghai to New Orleans. "It's something you're going to be seeing more and more," said Albert Binger, the scientific adviser to the 42-member Alliance of Small Island States, referring to potential victims as "climate change refugees." Binger said the Kuna's coral extraction is a portent for what climate change has in store for other low-lying islands protected by reefs. The greenhouse gas carbon dioxide makes oceans more acidic, killing coral struggling to survive in warmer seas. SLOW MOVE While Kuna leaders say their move from cool breezy islands to stuffy forests is imminent, progress has been slow so far and the government does not have a support plan in place. Carti Sugdub's islanders have used machetes to carve out a patch of tropical forest but lack machinery to clear the land. Leaders at nearby Carti Mulatupu are working on an environmental impact study for their move. They reckon setting up a mainland community for 600 people could cost $5 million. The Panamanian government, which supports the islanders financially by paying for health clinics, schools and poverty programs, has done little to support the relocation plans but officials back the idea. "Sometimes the community is flooded up to the knees," said Helen Perez, the schoolmaster at Carti Mulatupu, as his 120 students ran around a sandy school yard by an eroded concrete pier. "The community has taken the decision to move to land." Chani Morris, an 82-year-old fisherman, is ready to abandon the islet of Coibita he helped build out of coral 33 years ago. He said he doesn't sleep well since a flood engulfed the island, destroyed huts and carried away dugout canoes. "The sea is very bothersome, sometimes it scares me at night," said Morris, as he fashioned fish traps out of chicken wire. "I'm just waiting for the others to decide when we can move and I'm going to go with them."  |
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ISLANDS OFFER SUN, SAND AND CLIMATE CHANGE LESSONS – IS ANYONE LISTENING? The palm-fringed islands of the South Pacific offer vacationers an alternative to sunbathing and swimming -- grim lessons on the effects of global warming, delegates at a conference in Belize said.
The 22 low-lying Oceania island states depend on the nearly $2 billion a year they earn from hundreds of thousands of tourists who flock to their crystal blue waters and vivid coral reefs. Yet the islands, including Fiji, Samoa and the Cook Islands, are among the most vulnerable places on earth to climate change and they want to educate visitors about their plight. The tiny island nation of Tuvalu, for example, hopes that spreading awareness of its rising tides could put off the day when it gets swallowed by the sea. "The biggest tourist numbers in Tuvalu in the past few years have come from people wanting to observe those king tides," said Pacific Island tourism expert Simon Milne. "It's one thing to sit in your living room and watch a program about Tuvalu disappearing under the waves but another to actually see it," said Milne, who works at the Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand. New Zealand has agreed to take around half of Tuvalu's 10,000 people and give them jobs on farms if the island becomes swamped into extinction. But participants in a May 27-30 climate change meeting in the tiny Central American nation of Belize are not giving up the fight yet. "There is an opportunity to talk to tourists about what we are experiencing," said Jyotishma Rajan Naicker, a Fijian who works with the World Wildlife Fund, or WWF. "Tourists come from all over the world and when they go back home they take our message with them." The Belize meeting brought together Arctic peoples and tropical islanders suffering the worst effects of global temperature rises, which are widely blamed on human use of fossil fuels. Palm oil is one of the world's most traded and versatile agricultural commodities. It can be used as edible vegetable oil, industrial lubricant, raw material in cosmetic and skincare products and feedstock for biofuel production. Growing global demand for palm oil and the ensuing cropland expansion has been blamed for a wide range of environmental ills, including tropical deforestation, peatland degradation, biodiversity loss and CO2 emissions.
In response to these concerns, a group of stakeholders—including activists, investors, producers and retailers—formed the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) to develop a certification scheme for palm oil produced through environmentally- and socially-responsible ways. It is widely anticipated that the creation of a premium market for RSPO-certified sustainable palm oil (CSPO) would incentivize palm oil producers to improve their management practices. The first shipment of palm oil certified under sustainability criteria have arrived in the United States, according to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). AAK, a vegetable oils and fats manufacturer based in Malmo, Sweden, announced the arrival of the first shipment of segregated RSPO-certified palm oil to its refinery in Port Newark, New Jersey. Segregated RSPO-certified palm oil has been kept separate from conventional palm oil throughout the supply chain. Most "sustainable" palm oil users don't actually use segregated certified sustainable palm oil (CSPO), Instead they offset conventional palm oil buy purchasing the equivalent amount of GreenPalm certificates, which represent real CSPO sold elsewhere as conventional palm oil. Sales of palm oil certified under the green criteria set by the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) reached a record high in March, climbing nearly 8 percent over February 2010 to 136,000 metric tons, reports the RSPO in its monthly bulletin. The RSPO also announced that daily production of CSPO has now surpassed 5,000 metric tons per day. Since late 2008 more than 2.2 million tons of certified palm oil and 600,000 tons of certified palm kernals have been produced. About 600,000 tons of CSPO and kernals has been sold—mostly in Europe—so far in 2010. Global palm oil consumption stands at nearly 50 million tons per year, about half of which is traded internationally. It is used widely in processed foods, cosmetics, and soaps — WWF estimates that palm oil is found in roughly half of packaged supermarket products. It is also increasingly used as a biofuel. But while palm oil is a highly efficient crop, surging production over the past 20 years has spurred strong backlash from environmentalists who not that expansion has consumed vast areas of rainforest in Malaysia and Indonesia, triggering massive greenhouse gas emissions and putting endangered wildlife—including orangutans, pygmy elephants, Sumatran rhinos and tigers—at risk. Oil palm plantation development has also exacerbated social conflict in some areas. The RSPO emerged as a response to these concerns. The body—which includes industry stakeholders as well as environmentalists and other groups—sets sustainability criteria for palm oil production. Nevertheless the initiative has been battered over the past year with revelations that some members have continued to destroy ecologically sensitive habitats. Prominent members, including Unilever and Nestle, have had to act outside the RSPO process to address misconduct by RSPO-member suppliers. Some critics say the scheme lacks oversight, sets a low bar for compliance, and is underfunded. Supporters argue that RSPO is still a relatively new initiative that needs more time to prove itself. In May, 2010 Brazilian President Lula da Silva on Thursday laid out plans to expand palm oil production in the Amazon while minimizing risk to Earth's largest rainforest. The plan, called the Program for Sustainable Production of Palm Oil (O Programa de Produção Sustentável de Óleo de Palma), will provide $60 million to promote cultivation of oil palm in abandoned and degraded agricultural areas, including long-ago deforested lands used for sugar cane and pasture. Brazilian officials claim up to 50 million hectares of such land exist in the country. Ending Amazon deforestation could boost the fortunes of the Brazilian agricultural sector by $145-306 billion, estimates a new analysis issued by Avoided Deforestation Partners, a group pushing for U.S. climate legislation that includes a strong role for forest conservation. The analysis, which follows on the heels of a report that forecast large gains for U.S. farmers from progress in gradually stopping overseas deforestation by 2030, estimates that existing Brazilian farmers could see around $100 billion from higher commodity prices and improved access to markets. Meanwhile landholders in the Brazilian Amazon—including ranchers and farmers—could see $50-202 billion from carbon payments for forest protection. The assessment does not account for gains from payments for other ecosystem services, agroforestry, or expansion of oil palm plantations on degraded lands in the region. "Tropical forest protection can spur better use of existing agricultural lands – such as adoption of superior breeding stock and improved grazing plans in the cattle sector – while also making Brazilian beef more attractive to global consumers looking to ensure the products they consume aren’t tied to deforestation," states the analysis, which notes that the earlier report looked only at the U.S. impact of ending tropical deforestation. "That report was not an economic analysis of the impact of tropical forest protection on tropical countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, and should not be interpreted as such," says the new analysis. "A review of the data compiled for this report and other published research shows that Brazilian agriculture, and agriculture in tropical countries more generally, can benefit significantly from protecting tropical forests. Indeed, it's important to note that gains to the United States do not mean losses to Brazil. Instead, protecting tropical forests will benefit both countries." Brazil is in the midst of an ambitious plan to reduce deforestation 70 percent from 1996-2005 levels by 2018. The plan, which would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 5 billion tons, calls for raising roughly $20 billion in finance to establish and maintain protected areas, compensate farmers for sparing forests, improve governance and law enforcement, and build sustainable industries in the region. |
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