EcoChic Campaigns for Ursula & her Climate Refugees

 

by Alice C Doyle

At EcoChic we are fond of many things, but campaigning on issues close to our hearts is a particular passion.

Our latest Campaign HERE is of great interest to our valuable team member Alice C Doyle, EcoChic PR and Environmental writer. In this latest feature Alice describes for us the current situation of the disappearing Carteret Islands in Papua New Guinea. Ursula Rakova, a Carteret Elder has brought the plight of the islands to the international stage and we are supporting Ursula’s campaign for funds to relocate her people to safe shores. These people are the first in a global wave of climate refugees, please support them HERE.

How must it feel to wake up and find sharks in your back garden or fish swimming in your vegetable patch? This is becoming a regular occurance for the small community living on the Cartaret Islands and is showing how climate change is already causing massive social, economic and environmental upheaval. The people of the Carteret Islands and Tulela Peisa are calling for urgent international support, before the islands disappear from our oceans charts.

Climate change is submerging islands, leaving thousands stranded.

Due to climate change, the Carteret Islands in north east Papua New Guinea are being slowly submerged by the sea. As the world continues negotiations to decrease carbon emissions the Islanders that live on these tiny atoll islands have unwillingly found themselves on the front line of climate change.

In recent years, the islanders have experienced stronger and stronger ocean currents and freakish high tides, which have overwhelmed even their highest ground. The intrusion of their vegetable gardens by salt, and occasionally sharks, has also forced them to stop growing staple food crops, such as taro, and made their spring water undrinkable.

Rising Sea Levels

For 20 years, the Carteret’s islanders have tried to resist the effects of rising sea levels by building seawalls and planting mangroves. Since 1994, the Carterets have suffered a 60% loss of land cover and the islanders now live in fear of being drowned in their sleep. Even worse, by 2015 the islanders expect their homes to be completely submerged. The Islanders watch helplessly as the tides wash away their shores and cultural heritage, just as the sea relentlessly wipes out their food gardens.

The pressures of sea level rise are now forcing many of the 3000 people that live on the Carterets to evacuate their home islands as climate refugees. They are in the process of forging a new life on culturally distinct mainland Bougainville, which is dominated by farming rather than fishing.

A simple way of life

These Pacific islanders have no electricity or cars, yet the lifestyle choices of the rich world are resulting in life and death choices for this remote community, which has lived in peaceful isolation for hundreds of years.

The residents of these islands urgently need practical help and financial support in order to evacuate their ancestral islands, before they disappear under the sea and their homes cease to exist. The Islands that no more than 1.2 metres above sea level, demonstrate that climate change is already causing massive social, economic and environmental upheaval. The evacuation also highlights the vulnerability of small island communities to sea level rise and the complexities of integrating in neighbouring yet culturally distinct host communities.

 The international community is extremely poorly prepared to provide with any urgency the help the Islanders need in order to maintain independent and dignified lives. 

Ursula Rakova, campaigner on this vital issue, uses this brief summary of the talk she gave at the Isles of Scilly Earth Summit to point out that our lifestyle choices, result in life and death choices for her. Read more HERE.

An urgent problem

One problem making the plight of Tulele Peisa all the more pressing is the fact the 1951 Geneva Convention, does not protect environmental refugees, such as those displaced by climate change, as this category of refugee had not even been dreamt of in the 1950s. Sadly, this technicality means that communities such as the Carteret’s cannot, as yet, be granted refugee status under the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and are excluded from welfare, protection and asylum systems.

The Carteret elders are taking the lead

Please support the Carteret Campaign for Climate Refugees  HERE.

 Having been disappointed by the help available from the Bougainville authorities and the Papua New Guinea government, the Carteret Council of Elders decided to help themselves by forming their own non-for-profit association, Tulele Peisa, ‘sailing the waves on our own’ in 2006. This initiative is now led by an immensely impressive lady called Ursula Rakova who received the Pride of Papua New Guinea award in 2008, for her outstanding contribution to the environment.

The Tulele Peisa vision is to maintain their cultural identity and to live sustainably. The voluntarily relocation plan will relocate 1,700 islanders to three locations on Bougainville (Tinputz, Tearouki and Mabiri) over the next 10 years.

An immediate need for funding

 Their immediate need is for funding to help foster successful integration of the Carteret evacuees with their host community on mainland Bougainville. The islanders do not want to become victims and have developed their own evacuation programme and plans for the future. These efforts to evacuate their own community will be used as a blueprint for other Pacific communities under threat from sea level rise and so are of global significance. However these subsistence islanders urgently need financial help and practical support, from the rich world, if their hopes for the future are to materialise rather than disappear along with their islands.

 Adequate and timely funding will enable the relocation and help provide economic opportunities and vital infrastructure such as schools and health centres. Basic priorities include buying adequate land for evacuees, community development training programmes for relocated families, the setting up of sustainable environmental projects, as well as increased international awareness of the plight facing low-lying islands all over the world.

With many millions predicted to be displaced by climate change, the world needs to establish fair, realistic and funded policies which recognise that many of those most affected by climate change include those least able to fund adaptation and/or those least responsible for humanity’s production of greenhouse gases. Tulele Peisa should not need to sail the waves alone.

For you it is a matter of lifestyle, but for us it is a matter of life and death. If we do not move we are going to drown.

 To provide support and funding to Tulele Peisa please contact  Ursula Rakova. 

Press & media enquiries contact (UK): Dr Matt Prescott: matt.prescott@gmail.com and Alice C Doyle: alicecdoyle@gmail.com.

Links

 · Ursula Rakova uses this brief summary of the talk she gave at the Isles of Scilly Earth Summit to point out that our lifestyle choices, result in life and death choices for her. Read More HERE.

· Ursula impassioned interview on Outlook, the World Service. Read More HERE.  

· Journey to the Sinking Lands

A witness to the world’s first evacuation of an entire people due to climate change, read more HERE.

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