Pacific Ocean

When Winnie Kiap was a girl on Baluan, an island of 2,000 inhabitants some 300 kilometres north-east of mainland Papua New Guinea, she used to play in an abandoned building left behind by German colonisers on another small nearby island. “Now when I return, I am sad because that island is just not there anymore. It is completely submerged, all you can see is a dead palm tree trunk,” said Kiap, who is Papua New Guinea’s high commissioner to the UK. It is the same story for numerous beaches where she used to swim or collect birds eggs. “My childhood has been stolen from me. How can I define that I was young once, that I lived there, when everything has vanished? I am afraid to go back to where I grew up because so much is gone.” As climate change accelerates, melting glaciers and ice caps mean sea levels are rising at a record rate. Between 1901 and 1990, the average rise was 1.4 millimetres per year, says the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; between 1993 and 2015 it had more than doubled to 3.6mm. The rise in sea level does not simply have an emotional impact: it is threatening the very existence of countries like Tuvalu (highest point 4.6 metres), the Maldives (highest point 5.1m) and the Marshall Islands (highest point 10m). A global temperature rise of more than 1.5°C will force many islanders to abandon their homes. Tuvalu has already bought more than 5,000 acres of land from Fiji, while some 30,000 Marshallese have migrated to the US (compared with 50,000 that remain on the islands). Sea level rises can also lead to exceptionally high “king tides” that inundate strips of land, leave it full of salt and make it useless for farming. Meanwhile, fish stocks are threatened by global sea surface temperatures rising by an average of 0.72°C in a century. Kiap said fish are migrating from coastal waters by her island, and plans are now provisionally in place for people to move to the mainland. !function(){"use strict";window.addEventListener("message",(function(e){if(void 0!==e.data["datawrapper-height"]){var t=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var a in e.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r=0;r