Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
THREAT FROM CLIMATE CHANGE
Community to be wiped off map after 2054
home, which sits just below the sea wall. He says: “We had a village meeting just before Christmas and some people were sobbing their hearts out, particularly the older residents.
“They just want an end to it. They are worried that their families are going to be split up.
“Where are we going to go? Who is going to pay for it? 99% of people in this village don’t have the money to pay for another house. I can’t. I have worked all my life, but I can’t afford to buy another property.
“We have been left in limbo since February 2014. We have asked question after question, year after year, but we still have not had a single answer.
“Will the breach be next month, next year, next decade? Or is it 2054?
“How can you make plans without any answers? A lot of people think Fairbourne is being used as a bit of a guinea pig for the rest of the country.
When this all began I said no, but now I’m not so sure. I can’t pass my home on to my son, it will be worth nothing. What did I work for all my life?”
Mike, who has lived in Fairbourne for 40 years, says his pain will soon be felt by others living on Britain’s rapidly changing coastline.
He says: “We need to be looking at how this is not just going to impact us but 20 other communities on the
Welsh coast which will be affected, and, more to the point, everyone else living on the coast in the UK.”
A report from the government Committee on Climate Change in 2018 found almost 530,000 properties were at risk on the English coast.
By the 2080s, up to 1.5 million homes will be at risk of flooding, with another 100,000 in danger of coastal erosion. In Wales, 104,000 properties are at risk of coastal flooding. While Norfolk villages, such as Happisburgh, which has lost 35 homes to the sea, and Hemsby, which has lost 18, with 10 evacuated in 2018 alone, are on the front line of accelerated coastal erosion, they have not been threatened with “decommissioning”.
It is a word that enrages Stuart Eves, 70, Fairbourne community council chairman, who lives in a stone farmhouse on the outskirts of the village.
He says: “You don’t decommission a village. It is what you do to a factory. You don’t do it to people. We never expected to be the test case for the rest of the country.” He arrived here 40 years ago from Buckinghamshire to run a caravan park.
Stuart says: “It’s so sad. For many here, their homes are something to be handed down to their children after
FAIRBOURNE RESIDENT
a lifetime of hard work. Properties still sell, but only for cash. Few can move.”
Fairbourne residents have been dubbed the UK’S first “climate refugees”. Stuart rejects that notion, but says politicians need to find solutions.
He says: “One idea is that councils could buy up the large farms which come on the market in Wales. They could run them as campsites for 20 years, until coastal communities are evacuated, then plough the proceeds into building new villages.
“Wooden chalets will be better than nothing for people forced to flee.”
But, despite everything, Stuart has no regrets. He says: “Most of us are prepared to stick it out. We are very lucky to live in a place like this.”
Gwynedd Council failed to respond to our requests for comment.