Start planning for Pacific warming refugees: scientist

MAJURO (AFP) - Many Pacific islands in danger of being obliterated by rising sea levels should seek relocation aid at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen, a Fiji-based scientist said.

"By 2100, I don't see how many islands will be habitable," professor Patrick Nunn, a climate change researcher at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji said at the weekend.

Nunn is chairing the Pacific Climate Change Roundtable meeting in the Marshall Islands capital Majuro opening Monday where 14 Pacific countries and territories are devising their strategy for the December conference.

New scientific projections show the pace of sea level is faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected in its 2007 report, Nunn said.

"We're now looking at a more than one metre (three feet) sea level rise by the end of the century," he said.

For low-lying coral atoll nations such as the Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Tuvalu habitation will become impossible.

"The biggest challenge is getting policy makers to understand the need for a profound change in the way Pacific people live," he said.

"Relocation is one of the most difficult things to talk about and to convince people that the home they've lived in for centuries is no longer a viable option," said Nunn, who has researched climate change for 24 years from his Fiji base.

Mitigation and adaptation projects were being proposed for low-lying areas to withstand sea level rise, but Nunn said "there are no real options in Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands and other atolls other than to move people."

He added the problem was not restricted to atolls.

"In most larger islands in the Pacific, there is much less concern for sea level rise because they have a hinterland to move to. It's not as easy as it sounds."

There were three times the Tuvalu population of around 12,000 living in the low-lying Rewa Delta region on Fiji's main island of Viti Levu who would also be affected by sea level rise, he said.

The professor said it was urgent that political leaders of countries with low-lying areas start planning for relocation.

"If relocation is to happen by 2050, then by 2020 a plan must be in place," he said.