Recently, the UN Paris Climate Agreement was ratified with much fanfare; it took effect by November 4, 2016. What went fairly unnoticed is that of the first 55 nations to sign on to the UN Paris Agreement, thereby, along with a combined commitment to a 55% reduction in CO2 emission, ratifying it, half or 27 are small island nations located mostly in the Pacific Ocean. Why were they the first signatories?
Low lying islands are already experiencing the effects of climate change and have been reporting on them for decades. Often, their statements fall on deaf ears or go underreported by the press, which prefers to focus on the US-China face off.
The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), a coalition of 44 small and low-lying island nations, has consistently been at the forefront of trying to make so-called developed nations aware of their situations. About half of AOSIS member nations or 19 lie in the Atlantic Ocean and about half or 16 in the Pacific Ocean, with the remaining being located in the Indian Ocean. At the annual UN climate talks, AOSIS, along with the Least Developed Countries (LDCs), which consists of 48 nations in sub-Saharan Africa and in the Pacific, brings attention to the already ongoing impacts of climate change on their nations.
What James Hansen—widely credited with being one of the first scientists to bring climate change to the attention of the U.S. government through his Congressional testimony about it in 1988—referred to in his 2009 book as Storms of My Grandchildren, Pacific Islanders could redub Storms of My Children or even Storms of My Generation.
Why does this matter? In the estimation of some, climate change exists in some far off place or in some far off future time. But its impacts are taking place now and having severe impacts, on island nations and on coastal regions - worldwide and on coastal regions of the U.S. and elsewhere.
In "Let Them Drown," the 2016 London Edward W. Said lecture, Naomi Klein called attention, as Rob Nixon's Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor had done, to the nexus of climate change, (colonial) racism and poverty. But she shifted the spotlight onto the oft-overlooked low-lying island states. And the situation of low lying islands is dire. On May 6, 2016, scientists announced that five Solomon Islands have disappeared due to rising sea levels. And just yesterday, in an article published in The Nation, Klein rightly argued that Pacific Island nations like Kiribati will disappear, if Trump goes through with his energy plans.
Island nations and sub-Saharan Africa have been hardest hit by the twin effects of poverty and climate change. A 2012 World Bank report revealed that of the twenty nations with the highest average annual losses in Gross Domestic Product resulting from climate change related storms, eight are Pacific Islands. Climate change impacts the world's poor the most and, according to Oxfam, half of the Pacific Island population lives in poverty.
Very different institutions share these views, including the aforementioned World Bank and Oxfam, as well as the United Nations and the Alliance of Small Island States (or AOSIS), which represents low-lying and small islands at the United Nations (UN) climate negotiations, as do, of course, the individual nation states themselves. Islands, predominantly in the Pacific but also elsewhere, are already experiencing the devastating impacts of climate change, and they are only projected to increase. And yet aside from occasional flare-ups in international and national media, typically in relationship to the storm season—consisting of typhoons, tropical cyclones, tropical storms, and hurricanes—little attention is paid to the ongoing struggles and solutions of island nations related to climate change.
Recognizing the original signatories of the Paris Agreement means seeing the oft overlooked Pacific Islands and the already existing impacts on them. Pacific Island nations, historically, are among the nations that have contributed the least to CO2 emissions and global warming; they are, however, suffering its impacts already and severely. Entire nations, their histories, cultures, flora and fauna (biodiversity) are at risk of being lost. What happens to them is also a harbinger of the future that awaits the residents of coastal cities and shorelines, from Amsterdam in the Netherlands to Shanghai in China; from New York City in the US to Mumbia, India. The difference? Residents on continents can retreat from these cities in-land. For many Pacific Islands, sea level rise spells the end of their nation's very existence.
It also means recognizing that climate change is here now, impacting regions around the globe. And it means recognizing that we, as a planet, are in this together: The actions of one nation impact those of another; the actions in one region impact another region; inversely, the solutions of one region can assist another region. We are in this together.