Enlarge Brian Reed/NPR
The airport at South Tarawa, Kiribati's capital.
Brian
Reed/NPR
The airport at South Tarawa, Kiribati's capital. Today on Morning Edition, I reported on one
of the ways the island nation of Kiribati is preparing for the possibility
that sea level rise could render large parts of the country uninhabitable: A
program that's training i-Kiribati people as nurses to help them move
comfortably to Australia.
Anote Tong, Kiribati's president, calls the strategy "migrating with
dignity."
Various estimates have been floated — all rough at best — of the number of
people who will move in coming years, either domestically or across borders,
because of climate change. A report from the International Organization of
Migration and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said it could be
between 50 and 200 million people by mid-century.
So one thing people often wonder is: Could people from Kiribati, and others
like them who have to move because of severe weather, drought, or coastal
erosion, be considered "climate change refugees?" Read
More
Monday, November 22, 2010
The most frustrating thing about South Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati, is
its lagoon.
Brian
Reed
Lagoon in South Tarawa,
Kiribati. Looks like paradise, doesn’t it? My colleagues are probably cursing under
their breath right now, wondering how on earth I managed to snag a month-long
assignment on this beautiful Pacific island. Trust me, when it’s noon here, and
the equatorial sun’s beating down, and the temperature’s pushing 90 degrees,
that water seems the most glorious, inviting place imaginable.
And then you remember what it looks like at low tide:
Brian
Reed
The lagoon at low tide.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
07:37 pm
November 18, 2010
Kiribati has gotten a lot of praise the last couple of years for efforts to
protect its massive expanse of ocean.
In 2008, the country officially delineated the Phoenix Islands Protected Area, or PIPA — more than 150,000 square
miles of ocean protected from fishing and development. This year it was named a
World Heritage Site by UNESCO — the largest such site in the world. It is, by
all accounts, one of the most pristine spots of ocean on the earth.
It’s a big deal for Kiribati to prohibit fishing in a swath of ocean that
large. One of the country’s primary sources of revenue comes from selling
licenses to the international commercial vessels that fish its waters, because
it doesn’t have the capacity to harvest and export the fish itself. In this new
video from the TED Talks series, marine scientist Greg Stone explains how the
idea for PIPA came to be, and particularly how he helped make it economically
viable for Kiribati. It’s a really interesting story, with an ingenious
invention called a ‘reverse fishing license.’
Unfortunately, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get
out to the Phoenix Islands. They are extremely remote — about 5 days from
anywhere by boat — and largely uninhabited, which means there wouldn’t be too
many people to interview. But if you’re interested in reading more from that
part of the ocean, another marine biologist, Stuart Sandin, is in Kiribati’s
Line Islands right now studying untouched coral reefs, and he’s keeping a blog about it at NYTimes.com. In his last post,
Sandin talks about Kiribati fishermen biting fish raw, right in the boat. I
witnessed this too, on a recent spear fishing trip of my own:
I should say that this guy became really ill shortly after I shot this
photo. Not sure if it was seasickness or if the fish was a little too
fresh.
Brian Reed is NPR’s
first Above
the Fray Fellow. He's reporting in the Pacific nation of Kiribati and will
be filing some dispatches while he's off in one of the most remote countries on
earth. Click here for his other dispatches.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
02:26 pm
November 17, 2010
Brian
Reed
A young girl prays at a church on Abaiang, one of Kiribati's outer
islands. During international negotiations, Kiribati’s delegates portray their country
as being on the front lines of climate change, saying that within the century,
the atolls could be contending with dangerously high seas. But there’s actually
some disagreement about that within Kiribati itself. Take, for example, these
two statements:
We know climate change is happening. We know what causes climate change. We
know its impacts. We know what is required to address it. What is left now is
for us to commit to action required to solve it before it is too
late.
And:
Climate change is an all natural phenomenon. You can’t really do much about
that, unless you can talk to God and negotiate with God….He made a promise to
Noah that he will never again destroy this earth with flood.
The first is from a speech last week by Kiribati President Anote Tong. The
second was said to me by Harry Tong, the president’s older brother.
Besides his religious beliefs, Harry Tong – who’s a doctor – also has
political motivations to disagree with his brother. When the two ran against
each other for president in 2003, Anote Tong won.
Still, these famous rivals represent both sides of an interesting and
emotional debate here, one that often takes place within families. The vast
majority of I-Kiribati are practicing Christians (of the more than 90,000 people
counted in the last census, only 23 said they did not belong to any religious
group), and a number of them hold fast to the belief that God won’t let any
great harm come to the earth.
Last night, I visited a married couple that fervently believes this, despite
the fact that their daughter, who’s studying in Australia, constantly tries to
convince them otherwise. She calls home twice a month, and every time they talk
she brings up the threat of climate change and sea level rise.
“We still don’t believe in it,” her father said. “It’s God’s promise to Noah
that there’s no more flooding to the world.”
Of course there are many Christians here who do believe in climate change,
and a number of church leaders are working to fine-tune this idea of the
so-called rainbow promise: that in the Bible, after the great flood, God assures
Noah that he will not send another. They argue that in the case of climate
change, it wouldn’t be God sending the second flood, but man.
And while I have spoken with people who seem to be changing their minds, the
convictions persist.
“I believe that creation can be upset by man up to a point. And while man is
upsetting the planet, we can be affected,” said former president Teburoro Tito,
now a member of Parliament. “But I’m sure there must be some other forces making
sure the people are safe, because people belong to God, and God is not so silly
to allow people to perish just like that.”
Brian Reed is NPR’s
first Above
the Fray Fellow. He's reporting in the Pacific nation of Kiribati and will
be filing some dispatches while he's off in one of the most remote countries on
earth. Click here for his other dispatches.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
01:02 pm
November 10, 2010
Brian
Reed/NPR
The people of Kiribati showed off some of their traditions, including
dancing, to impress upon delegates their hope for action on climate
change. Fifteen countries signed a declaration today in
Tarawa, the capital of the tiny island nation of Kiribati, recognizing the
increasingly dire situation faced by small island countries due to climate
change. The Ambo Declaration, named for the village where Kiribati's Parliament
House is located, is the final product of the Tarawa Climate Change
Conference — a gathering that Kiribati President Anote Tong hopes will
spotlight how vulnerable his nation is to any rise in sea levels and severe
weather.
Brian
Reed/NPR
Kiribati President Anote
Tong. A main goal of the conference was to put a human face on climate change
before much larger United Nations climate talks in Mexico later this month. The
people of Kiribati showcased their traditions, gathered for speeches and had
pre-school children do a climate change poetry slam.
In his opening remarks, Tong called climate change the greatest moral
challenge facing humanity today. He talked about villages in Kiribati that have
been forced to move because of coastal erosion.
"We face unending claims for assistance to rebuild homes and to repair
damages by unusually high tides, which we, of course, do not have the resources
to do," he said. Read
More
Tags: climate
change
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
06:54 pm
November 9, 2010
Editor's Note:
Brian Reed is NPR’s first Above the Fray
Fellow. He’s reporting in the Pacific nation of Kiribati and will be filing
some dispatches while he’s off in one of the most remote countries on earth.
A group of local volunteers gathered this week to install a new sign on South
Tarawa, the capital of Kiribati.
The marker is meant to catch the attention of
delegates from more than a dozen countries, including the U.S., who arrived in
Kiribati today for the Tarawa
Climate Change Conference, a minor prelude to the full-scale climate talks
in Cancun at the end of the month.
If you haven’t heard of Kiribati — which is pronounced KEER-ih-biss, by the
way — don’t feel bad. One woman told me her I-Kiribati friend was detained at a
German airport because the customs agent didn’t believe her passport was from a
real country.
But I can testify that Kiribati is indeed a real country, because I’m in it:
sitting on a sliver of land roughly halfway between Australia and Hawaii.
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