Following the tried and true format, everything must be linked to globull warming, which must take primacy
I was born in Rabi, but I now live in South Tarawa, which is home to 50,000 people – about half the total population of Kiribati. It wasn’t always like this – in the last 20 years, the population of Tarawa has grown from about 11,000 people.
Many people have come in from the outer islands in search of education, employment and for hospital visits. This has put a lot of pressure on our environment and infrastructure. Many of our people live in poverty because we lack the basic infrastructure to support such a large population in such a small space. We cannot go swimming along most of the coast because it is too polluted from people using it as a toilet. So for these reasons, our people are very vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
Uh huh. How’s that working out?
Water is our biggest problem, and is a major barrier to development. There are three sources of water – from boreholes, rain and water purified at the government plant. But no one wants to drink the water from the borehole because it is contaminated from people burying their dead all over the island, and from our waste. We’re also seeing the gradual salinisation of the bore water with sea-level rise. At the moment it is only affected by the king tides, but in the coming years it will get worse. Rainwater supply is not very widespread because most people don’t have an iron roof or cannot afford a storage tank.
Oh, so, the sea level hasn’t really gone up, you’re just concerned it might? Goodness! Me thinks you should focus on the crappy water conditions, rather than natural changes that have occurred throughout the life of the Earth.
That is why I’ve been working with the climate change campaigning organisation, 350.org, and other NGOs to run a youth and community climate leadership workshop over the last few days. The workshop will end with a support march of hundreds of locals to the TCCC, where we will urge the government to continue to stand strong and call for an international climate treaty that will limit warming to 1.5C, and sets a target concentration of carbon emissions to 350parts per million, because that is what is safe for our people.
How about teaching them to not treat the water as a toilet first? That would make more sense, dealing with a reality of unsanitary conditions, but, hey, with alarmists, globull warming always comes first.
