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Opinion: Climate change is undeniably among humanity’s biggest challenges for this century. A warming climate, increasing weather extremes, and rising sea levels will have increasingly bigger and more severe impacts on human livelihoods and the environment worldwide.
To broadly communicate these issues, climate science advocates and media campaigns have created powerful symbols for the existential threats of climate change. These include the polar bear on an iceberg – a symbol for melting polar caps and a warming climate.
Similarly, the low-lying coral atoll islands of the Indo-Pacific, such as Tuvalu, Tokelau, or the Maldives, have become the symbol for rising sea levels. However, over the years, this symbol has evolved and consolidated into a narrative of a sealed fate of atolls to inevitably drown and disappear in the next decades.
Problematically, this narrative of inevitable drowning disempowers local atoll communities. It locks the search for climate justice and climate solutions for atoll nations into extreme measures of nation-wide emigration programs and translocations to continents. Place-based solutions and local adaptation opportunities are becoming overlooked, despite the desire of atoll islanders to stay and fight for their lands.
Instead, atoll islanders have become passive observers to the geopolitical actions of industrial nations and their mercy to cut emissions or their will to integrate them as climate refugees in continental societies and economies.
Communicating the inevitable drowning of atolls is also overlooking a growing scientific body of studies in atoll geoscience, ecology, and conservation, which demonstrate a far greater local resilience and adaptation potential to rising sea levels than widely perceived.
Unlike volcanic islands that are built of inanimate static rock, atoll islands are made up entirely of biological material that comes from the surrounding coral reefs. Therefore, they are dynamic, and actively and continuously growing and adjusting their size and position. Global studies show that 88 percent of atoll islands across the Indo-Pacific have continued growing over the past century despite sea-level rise of up to 5mm per year. The general nature of atoll islands is one of growing, not eroding.
This means that the existential threat to atoll islands is not rising sea levels per se, but a loss in their natural capacity to grow and adjust with rising sea levels. Within this nuanced difference might lie the key to protecting atolls and finding local, place- and nature-based solutions for atoll island resilience building.
On the one hand, coral reefs, the sediment factories for atoll island growth, can only be preserved long term when we mitigate ocean warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions globally. On the other hand, many local-scale impacts and restoration actions are also related to atoll island growth.
For example, studies on cyclone impacts show that atoll islands with a healthy, natural, stratified coastal vegetation fringe grew bigger after the storm had thrown up fresh sediments from the reef. Only those atoll islands that were deforested or turned into monoculture plantations by Western agricultural copra (coconut) production had eroded.
From a biological perspective, establishing marine-protected areas, stopping destructive fishing practices, managing invasive species, or diversifying the coastal vegetation, are all local actions known to benefit reef and island health.
The next critical step is to understand how these actions translate to island growth. Rather than surrendering to the narrative of drowning atolls and passively treating them as the ‘canary birds’ of climate change models, we must acknowledge their inherent dynamism, and identify how we can actively restore and maximise natural atoll island growth capacities through local island-led actions.
* Article adapted from: Rethinking atoll future: local resilience for global challenges, Trends in Ecology and Evolution.
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