Since the mid to late 1800’s sea levels have been very slowly rising…about 1 cm a year which is so small who would notice? It’s now been about a century and some change and the rate of rising is starting to accelerate to about 2 cm a year. The tiny changes over the years are becoming noticeable. Sea levels are rising and we are learning that in the last decade alone the rate is up to about 3cm a year.The threat of rising sea levels to our coastal cities is being felt around the world such as the magnificent historical city of Venice, Italy…a place on my “bucket list” [the list of things you want to see and do before you die or "kick the bucket" in American slang]. Poor Venice has a double whammy of both slowly sinking as a result of its own weight on the barrier islands it was constructed upon and a rising Adriatic Sea. Venice is not alone..more than half of the world’s population lives within 60 Kilometers [36 miles] of the coast and the effects of a rising sea and retreating coastline is a serious issue for all of us. I’m not going to be focusing on coastal effects here, instead this post is the warm up to the issue of freshwater and island nations. As you’ve hopefully read in my previous posts I believe that islands hold lessons for the rest of us on the mainlands. Islands are the “Miner’s Canary” for us and when island nations start running into issues, in this case sea levels and freshwater, we need to pay attention.
You may have seen articles in magazines such as National Geographic on small island nations suffering from sea level rise. Island nations like Tuvalu, The Maldives, Kiribati, Vanuatu are all feeling the effects of rising sea levels. It may seem like a marginally interesting or somewhat important issue when something is so far away, it can be hard to feel it and understand its importance to your own world. But these islands are the harbingers of what’s to come for all of us and we ignore their plight at our own peril. An organization of these small islands nations called Islands First has an excellent website and is a treasure trove of information on the issues facing these islands: http://www.islandsfirst.org/
One of my favorite authors is Sir Laurens van der Post and he writes hauntingly beautiful and insightful novels about his life in South Africa. In his book, “A Story Like the Wind” he writes about geo-political events that effect his characters on the edges of the remote Kalahari desert. He says of these events, “they are like the wind, they come from a far off place but we feel them here”. Here is another story like the wind…Kiribati:
From: http://shipbright.wordpress.com/
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