Shows Kiribati on the brink
didn’t want to make just another climate change movie following politicians or celebrities at summits around the world.
Instead he weaves Tong’s campaign into the wider story of the people of Kiribati, and we meet Sermery Tiare, a young mother of six who decides to relocate to New Zealand with her family.
Tong, 65, has developed a string of attention-grabbing schemes designed to help his people cope when their homeland is swamped.
Among those strategies is the construction of floating islands, anchored to the sea, that could sustain up to 30,000 people for a century.
‘Huge disaster’
In reality, the project – complete with skyscrapers and resort facilities – would cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and Tong understands they will not become reality anytime soon, if at all.
Other options include constructing sea walls, as well as “land reclamation” and the building of artificial islands using sand dredged from the seabed.
During his tenure, Tong bought 2,000 hectares (5,000 acres) of farmland in Fiji, a bigger Pacific Island nation, partly as an investment but also as a possible new home.
He has also pioneered the concept of “migration with dignity” – training islanders mostly used to a fishing lifestyle to give them useful skills in their lives as climate change refugees.
“The science is pretty categorical. It doesn’t take a lot of intelligence to know that based on the projections put forward by the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] we have a huge disaster coming up,” Tong said.
“We cannot wish it away. And even if the possibility of that coming up is 5 percent, we cannot remain complacent.”
He describes US President Donald Trump’s announcement that he intended to withdraw the US from the 2015 Paris climate accord on limiting global warming as initially “extremely disappointing”.
He added, however, that he was heartened by reaffirmations of commitment to the agreement at the state, industry and civil society level.
“Governments have a limited ability to address this because governments are led by politicians,” he said. “Politicians are more concerned about the next election than the next generation.”