Pacific nations need major aid
APIA: Climate change will hit the South Pacific harder than anywhere else on Earth and the region’s tiny island nations need major international aid to deal with the challenge, the World Bank said yesterday.
A World Bank report, “Pacific Possible”, draws on research to back the long-held view of regional leaders that they are on the frontline of global warming.
“[It] could have more dire impacts on the Pacific islands than any other country in the world,” warned the report, released yesterday at the Pacific Islands Forum in Samoa.
The study said that even under a bestcase scenario, with oceans rising 40cm by 2100, island nations would face huge costs building seawalls to protect their coastlines.
The worst-case outcome — waters up 126cm by 2100 — would swamp large areas of habitable land in low-lying nations such as Nauru, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu.
“There is little prospect the high costs of building sea walls could be financed by the countries themselves,” the report said.
“Accordingly, the international community will have to assess the trade-off between large initial expenditures on construction ... versus emergency relief and recovery programmes when disasters occur.”
It said climate change’s impact was already being seen through coastal erosion, saltwater contamination of farmland and drinking water, as well as unpredictable rainfall causing more droughts and floods.
The SouthPacific has always been lashed by cyclones but the report said the most destructive category 5 storms were set to become more frequent, straining the region’s already scarce economic resources.
It said Cyclone Pam, which hit Vanuatu in 2015, wiped out the equivalent of 64% of the country’s GDP.
The report said Kiribati and Tuvalu, which are both only a few metres above sea level, may need to consider wholesale migration and that Australia and New Zealand, the region’s richest and most developed nations, could help by giving islanders open access to their labour markets.