UN environmental body hails relocation of islanders threatened by climate change

As part of the effort to combat the impact of global warming on vulnerable areas from the Arctic to the Himalayas to low lying islands, the United Nations environmental agency today heralded what may be the first case of a small island community to be formally moved out of harms way in the face of climate change.

Details of the scheme, in which 100 villagers were relocated to the interior of Tegua in the South Pacfic island chain of Vanuatu after their coastal homes were repeatedly swamped by storm surges and waves linked to climate change, were unveiled at a meeting organized by the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) polar centre during the 11th Conference of the Parties to the UN climate convention in Montreal, Canada.

UNEP said the relocation - one of, if not the first such formal action - under a project entitled Capacity Building for the Development of Adaptation in Pacific Island Countries, underlined the increasingly drastic measures now underway to conserve low lying communities as a result of the rise in human-made emissions to the atmosphere.

“The peoples of the Arctic and the small islands of this world face many of the same threats as a result of climbing global temperatures, the most acute of which is the devastation of their entire ways of life,” UNEP Executive Director Klaus Toepfer said.

“The melting and receding of sea ice and the rising of sea levels, storms surges and the like are the first manifestations of big changes underway which eventually will touch everyone on the planet. The plight of these vulnerable peoples should be a clear signal to governments meeting here in Montreal that we must hurry up if we are to avert a climate-led catastrophe for current and future generations,” he added.

UNEP, in collaboration with others and with funding from the Global Environment Facility, an independent financial organization that provides grants to developing countries for projects that benefit the global environment, is developing National Adaptation Programmes for Action (Napes) in more than a dozen countries including Haiti, Liberia and Tanzania.

Other areas vulnerable to climate change are mountain regions where the melting of glaciers is creating huge lakes whose mud, soil and stone banks could burst sending huge quantities of water down gulleys and valleys.

The threat is underlined in the Himalayas where studies by UNEP in collaboration with the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), have found some 50 glacial lakes that are of concern in Nepal and Bhutan.

The research, in collaboration with the Asia-Pacific Network for Global Change Research, is now being expanded into other areas of the Himalayas including Pakistan, India and China. UNEP is looking to secure further funding for this initiative through the GEF to help to pinpoint more newly formed glacial lakes at risk of triggering so called GLOFs or Glacial Lake Outburst Floods and to develop early warning systems for such potentially life and infrastructure threatening events.