Communities on the Front Lines of an Unstable Climate

by Emily Gertz

Published October 05, 2008 @ 04:52PM PST

The Dutch: Letting Water Back In

Low-lying Holland has been holding water back from the land for a thousand years. But looking to the future, the Dutch government has decided to step aside and let some water back in.

Over the next 50 to 100 years, global warming is predicted to cause more winter rain in Europe, causing high water along the Rhine and Meuse rivers, which flow through Holland on their way to the North Sea. The government could try and raise all the dikes. But it would likely be setting itself up for many decades of repairing and rebuilding in response the higher river levels, with the risk of losing a huge swath of the nation to a catastrophic flood.

So Dutch government has decided instead to lower over three dozen dikes, and relocate those who live alongside them, in a program called "Room for the River." Releasing water back onto these floodplains will take the pressure off the dikes further downriver. It's a tough decision for a nation that has bent nature to its will for so long. But climate change isn't giving the Dutch a choice.

Learn more about "Room for the River":

In A Strategic Reversal, Dutch Embrace Floods, National Public Radio

Officials in low-lying Netherlands look at New Orleans tragedy and wonder, MSNBC.com

The Native Arcticans: Losing a Traditional Way of Life

Inupiat have lived in the village of Shishmaref, on the North Alaska island of Sarichef, for four centuries. In the 1990s, village hunters noticed changes in the ice: it started to form later in the fall, and break up earlier in the spring. This made it too dangerous for them to hunt using snowmobiles, which might plummet through weak ice; they switched to boats. With the sea ice forming later, the village was newly vulnerable to storm surges from the Chuckchi Sea.

"A storm in October 1997 scoured away a hundred-and-twenty-five-foot-wide strip from the town's northern edge; several houses were destroyed, and more than a dozen had to be relocated. During another storm, in October 2001, the village was threatened by twelve-foot waves," wrote Elizabeth Kolbert in her book Field Notes from a Catastrophe. "In the summer of 2002, residents of Shishmaref [pop. around 600] voted, a hundred and sixty-one to twenty, to move the entire village to the mainland."

The Arctic is already experiencing "some of the most rapid and severe climate change on earth," according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment. Temperatures are rising faster in the Arctic than in other parts of the world, forcing changes upon the indigenous peoples of the Arctic that undermine a way of life and oral traditions that have existed that goes back thousands of years. The later, weaker sea ice endangers hunters, and changes long-used routes over sea and land. Melting permafrost is wrecking infrastructure. Animals that they've relied upon for centuries are changing their breeding and migration patterns. It's all stress on communities that, often, have also been coping with years with high rates of poverty, drug abuse, depression, and health crises.

When a group of Inuit made a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, charging the U.S. with violating their human right to their traditional way of life, their people became the first human face of climate change. Since then, indigenous Arctic peoples continued to increase their involvement in international climate change policy.

Read more about global warming and indigenous peoples of the Arctic:

Alaska Natives Left Out in Cold, BBC News

Inuit Fight Climate Change With Human-Rights Claim Against U.S., Grist

Indigenous Communities and Climate Change: A New Challenge for Adaptation, International Polar Foundation

The Pacific Islanders: Citizens of Drowning Nations

Fijians say they've seen signs of global warming for years: storms seem stronger, in some areas rainfall levels are falling, and land is eroding on some of the , 300-odd islands that make up their archipelago nation, leaving the roots of coconut trees exposed. In Papua New Guinea, 2,000 people have abandoned their homes on the Carteret Islands, which are vanishing beneath more intense storm surges and tides.

These are just two places where global warming is already being felt among the island nations of the Pacific. More intense storms and tides are soaking coastal villages; salt water is percolating up through the ground to contaminate crop fields and orchards. And increases in ocean temperatures -- however seemingly slight -- are making coral reefs vulnerable to disease and eventually erosion; as these protective barriers weaken, Pacific coastlines are hit even harder by waves and storm surges.

The fates of these "drowning nations," which are by and large part of the developing world, cannot be ignored by near neighbors Australia and New Zealand, which are being pressured by non-governmental organizations to promise both aid and refuge for Pacific Islanders as global warming progresses. Although these two nations combined are responsible for only 1.3 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, they are among those with the highest rates per person, while Pacific Islanders are responsible for next to none. So far, New Zealand and Australia have resisted.

This South Pacific tension is emblematic of one of the greatest ethical challenges of global warming: the nations least responsible for disrupting the climate, and least able to cope with the consequences, are largely the ones that will be affected the most.

Pacific Island Cultures Brace for Climate Change, National Public Radio

Climate Change Creating Havoc in Pacific Islands, International Herald Tribune

Industrial Countries Have Moral Responsibility to Lead, The Independent (UK)