Pacific Atlantis: First Climate Change Refugees

For more than 30 years the 980 people living on the six minute horseshoe-shaped Carteret atolls have battled the Pacific to stop salt water destroying their coconut palms and waves crashing over their houses. They failed.

Yesterday a decision was made that will make their group of low-lying islands literally go down in history. In the week before 150 countries meet in Montreal to discuss how to combat global warming and rising sea levels, the Carterets' people became the first to be officially evacuated because of climate change.

Starting as soon as money is available to the Papuan New Guinean regional government, 10 families at a time will be moved by the authorities to Bougainville, a larger island 62 miles away. Within two years the six Carterets, roughly the size of 80 football pitches and just 1.5 metres high, will be uninhabited and undefended. By 2015 they are likely to be completely submerged.

The evacuation of the islands, named after the British navigator Philip Carteret who discovered them in the sloop Swallow in 1767, has been inevitable for more than 20 years. According to the Indonesian authorities, storm surges and erosion have worsened considerably in that time and the atolls have been losing bits regularly. In 1995 a wave washed away most of the shorelines of Piul and Huene islands. Han island was completely inundated in 1995 and another was cut in half by the sea.

Life on the Carterets, in fact, has been far from the western imagination of delightful coconut palm-fringed south sea islands. Academics who have turned up there have reported that many people have nearly starved because salt water intrusion has destroyed their trees and stopped them growing greens and breadfruit. For some years the islanders, who have almost no cash, have depended on emergency aid. There is no air service and the government boat only drops in a few times a year.

"It's a pretty hard life out there on the islands. Some of the homes have been washed away. The only action is to resettle them," Joe Kaipu, the district co-ordinator of Bougainville told Reuters.

Voluntary evacuation has been tried before in the the 1980s, when hundreds of islanders left for Bougainville but were caught up in a secessionist revolution and returned.

The Carterets will join many other Pacific islands that are on the point of being swallowed by the sea. Much of Kiribati, the Marshalls and other low-lying island groups might only be visible through a glass-bottomed boat in decades to come.

Two uninhabited Kiribati islands, Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea, disappeared underwater in 1999, according to the South Pacific regional environment programme.

In 2003 the government of Tuvalu said it would start evacuating its citizens in the face of climate change and rising sea levels, but plans have been tied up in red tape.

According to the Red Cross, the number of people in the Oceania region affected by weather-related disasters has soared by 65 times during the past 30 years. Increased numbers of cyclones, droughts and floods, all predicted by climate change scientists, are said to be making life unviable on many islands. Rising sea levels entirely swamping the islands is the last act of a long, perhaps unstoppable process.