Climate Change – Small
Island Developing States (SIDS)
World Environment Day is held each year on June
5. It is one of the principal vehicles through which the United Nations
(UN) stimulates worldwide awareness of the environment and enhances political
attention and action. The UN General Assembly declared 2014 as the
International Year of Small Island Developing States (SIDS). World Environment
Day (WED) 2014 will be celebrated under the theme of SIDS, with the goal of
raising awareness of their unique development challenges and successes
regarding a range of environmental problems, including climate change, waste
management, unsustainable consumption, degradation of natural resources, and
extreme natural disasters.
Climate change has different
meanings in different contexts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), defines climate change to be “any change in climate over time, whether
due to natural variability or as a result of human activity” (IPCC, 2007: 871).
In contrast, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN, 1992:
Article 1, Paragraph 2), defines climate change to be “a change of climate
which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the
composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural
climate variability observed over comparable time periods”
For SIDS, sea level rise is
arguably the most certain and potentially devastating climate change impact. According
to IPCC (2007), during the 21st century, sea level will rise at least 0.18 m
and perhaps as much as 0.59 m IPCC (2007), though, explicitly does not provide
an upper bound to the maximum possible sea level rise, stating that the final
maximum rise by 2100 might exceed these projections, partly because of inputs
from ice sheet break up in Greenland and Antarctica.
In the small likelihood that
the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses raising global mean sea level by
approximately five meters, the coastal zones of all SIDS would be entirely
flooded, covering many entire SIDS and a significant proportion of most SIDS capital
cities and ports. Even without that extreme scenario, under average IPCC (2007)
scenarios, several SIDS are expected to lose significant proportions of their
land due to sea level rise including Tuvalu, Tonga, Kiribati Marshall Islands ,Tokelau,
and the Maldives Even larger SIDS with much land area well above potential sea
level rise such as Fiji, Puerto Rico, and Samoa could have problems since most
settlements and infrastructure are in the coastal zone while the hilly, inland
regions would experience severe ecological changes in settling all the migrants.
Although Small Island
developing States are among the least responsible of all nations for climate
change, they are likely to suffer strongly from its adverse effects and could in
some cases even become uninhabitable. This is what makes them such a special
case requiring the help and attention of the international community. These
island nations are found throughout the world, although most of them are
located in the wider Caribbean and South Pacific regions. The land: sea ratios
for the SIDS are largely skewed. Their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) are
often larger than their land area. Nauru’s EEZ, for example, is nearly 15,000
times the size of its land area, whereas Samoa’s is eight. Many SIDS – the
Maldives, for example – have solely or mostly low-lying land areas; others,
such as Haiti, have a varied terrain, including mountainous areas.
References:
UNFCCC (2005) climate change, small island developing States
