Last night, I went to listen to a guy called Dan Box talk about his journey to the Carteret Islands. Before arriving, I had no idea where these islands were or how he could possibly fill an hour chatting about them. By the time he’d finished talking, I was left with a complex cocktail of thoughts – one of those cocktails that tastes exotic, a bit strange, but hits your taste buds with sparklingly delicious sensations. Because he gave me lots to think about - and I like thinking.
Dan went to the Carteret Islands because he’d heard that was the first place on Earth to be evacuated due to the impacts of climate change. Combination of factors – the flat islands themselves are slowly sinking due to plate tectonics; the sea level is inching upwards due to increased inputs of meltwater and thermal expansion, and increased storminess is eroding the coastline so the sea creeps in. Sometimes it gushes in – and over the top, leaving the soil salty and killing off the islanders’ food plants. It leaves pools of stagnant water, too, where mosquitoes breed: in the two weeks Dan spent there, two children died of malaria. That’s pretty significant for a population of 1000 or so.
Before he embarked on his journey, he discovered that Captain Carteret, the first white man to arrive at the Carterets, got there in 1767, killed a few of the islanders, stole their coconuts, and left. Dan realised that what he was planning on doing could be a 21st century version of that – arrive, watch the evacuation take place, get a good story to sell, and leave, without doing anything to help the people he’d come to spectate. There’s an extent to which you can’t avoid doing that – but on the whole, he approached the trip with a large dose of humility that the old Captain seemed to have lacked.
It occurred to me that humility is also lacking in the rich countries’ approach to the Copenhagen talks. What this climate deal must not be, is the rich white people arriving on the island, killing some locals and stealing their coconuts. It is an unfortunate part of my identity as a Brit that many of my ancestors were probably involved in a good deal of that sort of thing. To skate over an incredibly complicated and diverse set of histories: the sorry story of colonialism means that “developed” countries like Britain have done pretty well out of the countries that we today label as “developing”.
I asked Dan whether the islanders felt a sense of injustice in having to leave their home, their buried dead, their history, because of changes to the world’s climate system brought about largely by the fossil-fuel-burning and deforestation carried out by countries such as Britain. “Yes”, he answered simply. It’s not just a matter of who is responsible for causing these changes. It’s also a matter of who can afford to pay for adapting to these changes. The Carteret islanders are mainly subsistence farmers; they don’t have the money to build sea walls that withstand ever-larger Pacific waves. They told Dan that his country should be providing compensation.
You can see why the African bloc walked out of the negotiations yesterday, citing rich countries’ reluctance to commit to binding emissions reductions. They know that the planet - atmospheric physics, ecosystem functioning, ocean chemistry - does not listen to protestations about what is “politically realistic” in the USA or Poland or wherever. They know that unless serious cuts in emissions are made, the impacts of climate change will be severe, and the first countries to feel those impacts will be those with the least resources to cope. If a deal is signed at Copenhagen that isn’t in line with what the science suggests is needed, there’s not much point in signing it. The deal must be adequate and it must be just.
P.S. If you want to help to build public pressure for a “real deal”, you can join 10 million other people and sign a petition here. It will be delivered to world leaders as they arrive at the conference this week.
