“Sinking” Nations: Pacific Migration

While many island nations will undoubtedly suffer negative consequences from sea level rise, the lower-lying among these face the greatest potential loss. They may well be submerged in the coming century, or at least rendered unfit for human habitation.

The threat posed to these countries by rising sea levels is two-fold. First, there is the obvious threat of inundation by ocean water. Second, the local freshwater supplies on the islands are also endangered: the rising saltwater of the ocean increasingly penetrates the permeable freshwater tables under the islands. It is this salinization of the water supply which will likely render these islands uninhabitable long before they are completely submerged.

Either alone is sufficient to warrant relocation, and when added to the other ecological hardships facing Oceania, it seems almost an inevitable necessity. These island nations would be forced into wholesale relocation. It is these countries I would like to focus on first.

As many of the countries threatened with inundation are in the Pacific, including countries such as Kiribati, Tuvalu, and Tonga, this seems the logical area of the world in which to begin. These nations are composed mostly of small islands no more than a few meters above sea level, many of them coral islands or atolls.

For some of these nations, the negative effects of climate change are already contributing to a problematic socio-economic situation. In the neighboring nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu, for example, islanders have been migrating from rural outlying islands to settle on the capital islands. This has drastically increased the population density of each country’s core islands, and placed a heavier strain on the resources of the national governments. Accordingly, living conditions for many of these migrants are poor.

As Hau’ofa and others have pointed out, open movement and trade between islands is a traditional cultural dynamic for the peoples of Oceania (see “Our Sea of Islands”, cited in my last post). As such, migration has also, historically, been their primary means of adaptation to climatic and ecological shifts. In this case, though, migration trends seem to be maladaptive on a societal level.

There has also been emigration from some Pacific nations as a result of climatic disaster. The small New Zealand dependency of Tokelau, for example, lost much of its agricultural capacity to hurricanes; this forced much of its population to relocate to New Zealand. In anticipation of a similar move in the future, Kiribati has been looking to purchase land from the larger island nation of Fiji.

Given their traditional behavior and historic response to environmental difficulties, mass-emigration seems a likely model for the survival of societies living on these endangered islands. In cases where they relocate to larger nations, this raises a question of how they will be received in their new homes, whether they will become minority groups, or whether they will be permitted to retain a level of political autonomy. That discussion, however, will be reserved for a later post. Source (copy and paste link): <http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1475-4959.2008.00317.x/epdf>