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How To Lead a Nation That's About To Be Swallowed By the Sea
merbs writes: Anote Tong, the president of low-lying Kiribati, has spent nearly a decade trying to save his people from rising sea levels. There's a good chance he will not succeed. This is how he leads a nation that will likely not exist in 100 years. Motherboard reports: "Kiribati’s fate provides a rare glimpse of the future world under climate change. The tiny island nation is the canary in our global coal mine, and it will bear the brunt of climate change more intensely and much sooner than nearly anywhere else. 'We cannot keep doing what we are doing,' Tong said. 'Because we may be on the front line today, but other countries, other societies, other communities will be next.'"
Why can't they just build levies around the island an canals.
Because they are a tiny little nation, and they cannot muster the resources. The smaller the nation, the larger the ratio of coastline to area...
Other countries build entire islands so it shouldn't be impossible.
Very large countries build very small islands. Their whole nation is a very small island. Actually, it's way worse than that; their nation is a collection of small islands. They would have to build a whole lot of walls, and they don't have a whole lot of mass to build them with.
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Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level: Christmas Island I
Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level: Christmas Island II
Spot the clear blub blub trend, Try hard. ~1mm rise per year. Maybe.
Meanwhile a typhoon could arrive next year with a 8 foot storm surge that swamps the atolls completely.
DISCLAIMER: Grew up in the Caribbean, nailed doors shut from the inside and held on tight for Hugo and Marilyn. People died. '~1mm/yr climate refugees' on a coral atoll really sound like whiny scammers to me. In terms of threat level it's like that movie, Frogs.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Not only that. The Dutch system of coastal protection got built over centuries, and much of it in the 20th century, when the country, i.e. the state, finally came into some money. Even then, to build the system out to its current, world-class level, the state had to borrow enormous amounts of money, the last of which was only recently paid back. And this was a prosperous, fully industrialized country. Until the dawn of the 20th century BTW, and even during it, there were regular and major floods, with sometimes 1000s of casulties, in spite of the coastal protection already in place. The last of these floods took place after World War II. Disclaimer: I am Dutch.
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