Slow.
United Airlines Flight one five four starts to Honolulu. When it leaves, it carries not only a full load of passages, but also a mechanic and spare parts for the plane. On its journey, it stops in the Marshall Islands at Marjora and Quadulin before heading west to make three stops in Micronesia, and finally it stops in Guan. The next day, it turns around does the same route in a reverse landing in Majorro you can see the ocean on both
sides of the plane. In fact, you can see the ocean on both sides of the plane from a disturbingly low height, and despite this being one of the larger islands in the Marshall Islands, it almost looks like the plane won't fit on it without a wingtip overhanging the lagoon. The plane does fit, of course, and there's even room left at Major Airport for the best airport bar that
I've ever seen. But even after a couple of hours in the company of the island's finest whiskey collection, it's very clear that the Marshall Islands are in a great deal of danger when it comes to rising sea levels. The Marshall Islands don't have much land to begin with, and through no fault of their own, their island paradise is being gradually lost to the ocean. Start with, I want to let Kathy Gentle Kitchener, the poet who he heard from yesterday, outline the scale of the threat.
Climate change is a challenge that few want to take on, but the price of inaction is so high. Those of us from Oceania are already experiencing it firsthand. We've seen waves crashing into our homes and our bread fruit trees wither from the salt and drought. We look at our children and wonder how they will know themselves or their culture should we lose our islands. Climate change affects not only US islanders, it threatens the entire world. To tackle it,
we need a radical change. Of course, this isn't easy.
I know.
It means ending carbon pollution within my lifetime. It means supporting those of us most affected to prepare for unavoidable climate impacts, and it means taking responsibility for irreversible loss and damage caused by greenhouse gas emissions. The people who support this movement are indigenous mothers like me, families like mine and millions more standing up for the changes needed and working to make them happen. I ask world leaders
to take us all along on your ride. We won't slow you down, will help you win the most important race of all, the race to save humanity.
Currently, Pacific island nations are responsible for less than zero points zero three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, but the United Elations estimates that more than fifty thousand people in the Pacific displaced every year, many of them by climate change. Of course, people leave for other reasons. Perhaps they're looking for work, which can be hard to find on a small land, or perhaps they won the uptunities
at the United States life offers. Thanks to their Compact of Free Association, Marshalise people can live and work in the USA without a visa. Most Marshallyse people who do leave the islands move to Springdale, Arkansas. It's where the largest off island Marshallese community is gathered, and they tend to cluster around the reliable jobs offered by the Tyson
Chicken Factory. In twenty twenty, the Tyson Chicken Factory remained open during lockdowns, and people who had left the islands for a more steady income and a better chance for a stable future, suddenly face more great risks at work. Life is by no means easy for marshal Ease people, both in the US and at home, and the choices they face because of climate change constricting global economy and the United States refusing to pay its fair share of
compensation don't make that any easier. On my last night in the Marshall Islands, I was having a beer in a bar and chatting with a local journalist. I asked him what I should write. He said that I needed to tell you that people in the RMI aren't moving because they're afraid of waves. We're not afraid of the ocean, he said. We're ocean people. We go in the ocean every day. He was right, of course. The drivers of
migration are complicated, and they always have been. I always tell people who ask me what I cover that they cover climate and conflict and migration, because in fact they're largely the same things. There are many reasons for migrating from the Marshall Islands. If there are people who have left, and all of them are valid, But everyone I spoke to, whether they'd left or come back or stayed there their whole lives were pretty clear that nobody wants the community
to leave. The people of the Marshall Islands love their islands and they want to raise their children and grandchildren on their ancestral land. But the people making the choices that impact their ability to do that are a long way from the lagoon that's creeping closer and closer to the houses around Magro at all. Climate change making the islands uninhabitable doesn't necessarily mean they'll be swallowed entirely by the ocean long before the last scrap of land disappears.
The rising saltwater will kill bread fruit trees, and flooding will destroy homes. To get a center of that threat, we spoke to a meteorologist.
I'm regally white, Regional White, and I'm the meteorologist in church.
Here ready explained what climate change might do to make the islands less easy to live on and eventually perhaps impossible to live on. If something doesn't change, it's hard for people to see these kind of creeping changes. When we think about climate change rendering an island uninhabitable, we think about that island ceasing to exist, or the house is being swept away. By a storm searge or a massive king tide perhaps, but in fact the changes are more gradual, but no less destructive.
We have to go back to the imagion scenarios that IP is produced, and based on them, worst case scenario, if we look at it, I have to open up the computer and look at the table. But in one hundred years we may be not complete listening, and that's not what's important here. What is important is that lens.
Will be uninevitable way before they sink, because we will not be able to drive on the road. We will not be able to rely on our water lenses because they'll all have salt water into them. As more and more frequent salt water introgs and get on top and down into the water lens, they will be undrinkable.
So at what stage can we put that target. I'm not comfortable at this moment to point that out, but I think anyone of us can look at the numbers and decide, based on this emission scenario, this is the day. Based on that the mission scenario, that is the day. So there's not a set day or a what do you call it the hair that broke the camel's back? What was it. What was the American saying?
As Reggie explained, the impact of rising sea levels is already being seen, particularly in the case of flooding.
Oh, there are many but in a low lying at all, your most concerned is flooding, coastal flooding. So we've seen more frequent flooding during Landinia. Laninea is the face where in the Marshall Islands specifically, you get elevated sea levels about ten centimeters or so eight to twelve inches on top of the normal sea level at any given time. So when there is a storm search king tide, those things compound on one another to give us more frequent
coastal floodings in the low lying areas. If you go in the bag of Measuro, you will see people building up sea walls to protect their properties. With those sea walls the impact has been lessened a bit, but without those sea walls, nuisance flooding has been almost a monthly occurrence during Alminium phases.
In twenty twenty one, the World Bank and the Marshalleasee government produced a report which allowed visualization of the impact of climate change on each building in Marjuro in broad strokes. The report stated that quote, rising sea levels and the atoll nation of the Marshall Islands are projected to endanger forty percent of existing buildings in the capitol Marjoro, with ninety six percent of the city at risk for frequent
flooding introduced by climate change. According to a World Bank study, change seems to be very hard for the corporations and governments most responsible for it. Indeed, one could argue that seeing that change is hard because of those corporations and governments. Namia Rescuers, a Harvard historian of science, studies the propaganda that has allowed major corporations to deny the damage they do to the planet and generate massive profits by not
paying for the negative externalities of their actions. Negative externalities, if you're not familiar, are the costs that their business imposes on other people but they don't pay. In her book Merchants of Doubt, Arescus traces how nuclear testing did huge damage to the ozone layer. Indeed, much of the technology we used today to track global climate change was
developed using government money. Part of the reason why was to assess with the Soviet Union was doing nuclear testing by tracking the environmental damage that was done using some of the data these instruments created, scientists, among them Carl Sagan, began to discuss the possibility of a nuclear winter and the fact that any use of nuclear weapons, or even a nuclear accident, could put the future of all humanity
at risk. Unsurprisingly, as huge public relations effort spun up to dismiss the idea of nuclear winter and attack the concept of nuclear war being an unwinnable proposition. There was, after all, a huge amount of money at stick. In an excellent New York CARESSI on the subject, Jill Lapour, another Harvard historian, outlines a campaign to discredit those scientists
and their claims. In nineteen eighty four, in an effort to count to Carl Sagan and to defend what was called the Strategic Defense Initiative, the George C. Marshall Institute was founded by Robert Jastro, a NASA physicist, Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences, and William Nieremberg, a past director at Script's Institute of Oceanography
Right here where I live in San Diego. The Marshall Institute began trying to get PBS to not air documentaries opposing the strategic defense initiative, the so called star Wars program wouldn't be of any use of a single nuclear
incident could trigger devastating change in the global climate. Another Master Institute scientist, Seltz's cousin, Russell, who was a physicist at Harvard Center for International Affairs, published an essay in the National Interest in the fall of nineteen eighty six dismissing the idea of nuclear winter and saying it was nothing but a series of long conjectures. He described the nuclear winter theory as dead course of death, notorious lack
of scientific integrity. By nineteen eighty eight, the Institute of pivoty and It began publishing the first of many papers on climate change. Other scientists there, including Fred Singer, challenged the model that predicted a nuclear winter. They've gone on to do the same with climate change, claiming that in both cases it was far from certain that catastrophic consequences would occur. Singer incidentally was a consultant for Arco exon
shell oil and sol oil. He died in twenty twenty after serving for years as a director of Science and environment policy at the Heartland Institute, which was founded in nineteen eighty four. Its position on global warming at the time was quote, most scientists do not believe human greenhouse gas emissions are a proven threat to the environment or human well being, despite a barrage of propaganda insisting otherwise coming from the environmental movement and echoed by its sickophants
in the mainstream media. In the Marshall Islands, this kind of de nihilism, no matter how well funded and qualified, really isn't going to stick. Everyone here is personally seen the impacts of rising sea levels eroding away on their precious land. But it's the actions of people everywhere can impact people here, so they have to persuade the rest of the world to care about them.
I will bet that every Marshal Marshalise understand impacts because every Marshalise has been a victim of some coastal inandvision has been you know, has been impacted by those, so they understand.
Uh.
The youngest ones maybe they experienced there first, but the older ones they've been around during those days when the you know, coastal flooding wasn't an issue.
One of the things I like to do in my free time is to freedom Sometimes I can collect sea urchins or cools, but lots of the time I just like to be underwater. I've never done scuba diving. All the gear and equipment kind of scares me, but holding my breath and swimming around the reef is probably the
closest thing I'll ever feel to flying. To be able to hold your breath for a minute or two underwater, you need to get your heart rate very low, and this means being very calm, letting tension and stress float away. It's a magical feeling, and one that I've tapped into even outside the water. In stressful situations. Sometimes that ability to calm yourself could be a bit too effective. I remember once starting to walk off a broken pelvis and
passing out from blood loss later. Sometimes that calm focus, though, can be exactly what you need, like when you're holding your breath on the bottom of the ocean and you realize that you got your fins tangled and an abandoned fishing line and you need to cut it so you
can get back to the surface and breathe. I saw that same ability to remain calm and even happy despite what seems like another impending crisis every time I spoke to Marshally's people about climate change between their nuclear past and their perilous future. The Marshallese people have every right to be angry, and maybe they are angry when they're not told them to British journalists. But whenever I ask people, they still seem hopeful, upbeat and excited about the future
of their country. As we're going to see tomorrow, marshal Lease, people are still very much investing in their shared future. I think that's something we can all learn from. Resilience to the Marshallese community, even in the face of what seems like a second apocalyptic threat. He's Reggie discussing how climate change makes him feel well.
I try not to dwell on what could happen. I could try to think of what we could do now to change people's heart, to change how we behave how we treat the world. I mean, it's our only home. You go out in space and look back. It's one lonely place in an entire galaxy of stars and whatever. You But when you look at it that way, you begin to realize I must respect my police. Who else will respect? The divide.
It's worth noting that some people we talk to are less concerned about climate change.
My name is Juliet Maranda from Mussel Island. I live on Takhan.
Juliet's an older resident of wrong Rum, one of the outer islands on madro At all her life there is in many senses adyllic. Her cook house is built around a large bread fruit tree. The tree also serves as a work service. It's like a solar punk vision of the future where we live in harmony with nature. But for her it's just a place she makes lunch along
with the other wrong Wrung islanders. She served a visiting group that I was part of, a delicious lunch of coconut breadfruit, pandanas, crabs and rice, where we talked about what brought her back to the Marshall Islands after thirty years living in the United States.
Well, so though you always are own sick when I'm in USA, I miss my you know, war around freedom like USA, not go to next door, be goes, you know, trust passing, But around here you do everything. Yes, it's it's different, lots different. So I love a the USA. Tell liber is good and a lot of different things you as do then modules so I love it here. I do all my old thing I usually do, breaking and make my home chicken and chewing in and on pigeon.
Shanna Barbara, you have to get a guy to go to the peach over year recruiting Peachie.
She clearly loves her little piece of paradise, and it's easy to see why she was happy to share it with us, as were all the islands on Wrong Room, I short walk away from her house. Her neighbor's children played in the sand with their pigs, chickens and dogs, and it's certainly a very different place from Santa Barbara. Well, she spent much of her time in States, but it's no less special. Like many Marshal Leaves, she has a very strong faith, and that faith is helping her explain
why climate change is happening. Do you think it's because their sea levels rising? You think it's gonna make it harder for people to.
Live in Some people do that, but I don't believe it.
Only God will do it. I believe in God. When they do the weather and said it's going to rain tomorrow, and tomorrow is not going to be rain, God's going to make it rain. The nost no, you know it, you're for others.
The threat is already here. Here's one conversation with Monique and Francine from Core and Akarmi, a local NGO who you'll hear a lot about tomorrow. They're doing incredible work investing in the future of the Marshall Islands by installing water filters and smokeless stoves and homes across the nation.
You might never have had to worry about clean water or never been concerned that cooking your food might hurt your lungs, but both of those things are massive public health issues if we don't have access to electricity, gas and clean water from a pipe that comes into your home. One night before dinner, we talked to them about climate change.
The scientists are saying that you've got so many years until all eyes melts and affects us. We don't have mountains to run to. In some places they can just runt of the mountains.
We don't.
Yeah, so it's Marshall Islands too.
Well, we're at the front clives. So you're also blessed that you get to see the Marshall Islands. Yeah, and really well, really see firsthand what the plastic.
The impact goes beyond the individual though. When we heard from the Ministry of Health and the impact the climate change is already having on the well being of Marshallys people. They reminded us of both the physical and mental health of residents has been affected.
So we are well uh, as active secretary said, my name is Nathan Carbon Climate Change and amn.
Uh. Well, first of all, we'll come to our very wonderful here to visit us. I think Michael and Jackson said I best. Do you want to see change in the world, you have to look in the mirror. And so this is our climate Change of Health.
To frontment uh uh.
Climate impacts on health and well being.
Nathan went on to explain what that means both in terms of mental health and in physical health as mosquitoes and other disease vectors adapt to the changing climate and rising sea levels.
I communicable diseases and x CDs, reducing vulnerabilities with the vector borne diseases and then improving mental health resilience.
So the mental health resilience is a really key thing.
We have our seminar that's ongoing right now partnership with.
Jojibu, which lets the youth express how climate change based their field.
And also.
In h involving the community and getting their feedback. You know, the climate issue is not just at a national level, it's mostly at the community level.
All of these changes are hard to predict, but it's easy to see the impact climate change has already had. We spoke to the island's Environmental Protection Agency to get a sense of what that meant.
My name is Marianna Phillip and I'm the general manager here. As you can see, we're a very small organization with a very broad mandate anything environmental related. We are accountable too, and we're supposed to provide advice to the government and the Marshal Lease people about new issues that are coming up.
And so.
You know, we're easily overwhelmed and outmatched. And then you know, you throwing climate change into the mix, and suddenly I can't even imagine what the change is going to be like in the next five years or ten years. It's hard for me to imagine. When I was a child, I used to go to the school over across the street is a DS is a public school, and we would cross the road and swim from here all the way to develop and then cross the road and go home.
This was all white Sandy Beach you know, obviously that's not the case anymore.
One way that the Marshal Lease community has responded to climate change is to take a position of leadership on mitigating carbon emissions. We heard about this all over the island, with solutions ranging from electric canoes to sailboats to a grid that runs on renewable energy. They've also taken leadership and how aid money is spent, rather than just accepting the projects has fund to suggest him. The RMI has been vocal in making sure that unique challenges that they
face are reflected with unique solutions that they propose. For example, they simply don't have the space for larger solar farms, even though they do have the funding.
My name is Angeline Heini Rammers. Other than being part of PO, I'm also the director for the National Energy Office. And then i'd like to introduce you to Ben. He's the deputy director. So we're a very small office. It's newly created. It was developed in twenty eighteen, so we're trying to be creative and we partnered with our local
government in exchange building them basketball courts. The reason why there's so many basketball courts is that we'll be installing rooftop and on the rooftop thats we're going to be housing the solar connecting it to the grid. And it's with this project we had. It took us I think more than a year, Ben right, so went back and forth with our partner because they just wanted to go ahead and put on solver.
Sometimes the scared of the programs larger countries use simply isn't a good fit for the Marshalis.
We get funding to go on trips to places like Korea, Japan, Okinawa to see all these systems that in the eyes of big countries that you see as islands like Jju Island and Korea, but they're like so advanced compared to here. You go there and they have ocean thermal and to us, where like, okay, what about our corals that's where our reefish lives in. Do we have to get rid of our corals? Maybe we should rethink of that or.
They also make sure to incorporate traditional methods and their culture along with mboderant solutions. More about the electric canoes that they had it, they're very pretty cool and I'm interested to know, like a well, Jeremy, I really liked that you were incorporating in the traditional ways. Why it's ignoring the trying because that's something that the electric canoe is, that's something that.
Was framed up here at the wham And can.
You talk about how surface convention, how much.
Fun it might save.
Then do you want to start with that? We came up with the idea for the and and then where we are at.
Yeah, So WOM started the initiative of the boat building and they wanted to it strictly started with wamb We We had no idea about the project. But initially they got a project from a donor for boat building where they would modernize these traditional canoes just to make modifications to make the hull bigger for catching fish or just whynot. And then out of the blue, the director for WHOM said, hey, what if we put solar on this boat.
I think there's something in the market.
So we just out of the blue just wanted to test it. Unfortunately, when we purchased the motor and they're going to start the testing, wound burned down and the motor burned down with it. But they did a few runs in the lagoon with it and it was really awesome. I wrote on it at one point they started using wind in the wind died down, turned on the motor and they started using the motor, and then one pick up they turned.
Off the motor.
It was really awesome, but we Anio the director, wanted to procure another one, so we procured another one with our own funds. So it's on its way and should be here very shortly do some real testing, but we wanted we also partnered with Wanem because of that just pilot project, we saw the need to build more of the similar kind canoe, so we asked another donor if we can use their funding to fund the second phase
of that project. So right now they've been approved and they're building an additional eighteen more canoes for each each island. And so the process is they're bringing these boat builders from the outer islands, they train them how they build these new style canoes with modern technology, and then they
ship it back out. One success story without the motor is in the atoll of likyp They completely stop using their motorized boat because they're one hundred percent using the canoe and the canoe can carry up to a ton, So they've been carrying copra from one island to another back and forth with the canoe and they said they save so much money that they decided to do a fishing tournament at their outer island from the.
Money they save.
You.
He's ready talking about how he sees his role in combating climate change.
Oh, I don't enjoy being helpless. I don't believe that the impacts of others, should you know, impact me. I make the changes where I can. I try to behave in a manner that is not detrimental to the earth. And I preached that to my kids and hopefully the compounding effect or you know it will grow exponentially from them to other ambassadors to spread the word that, you know,
we need to do something. It's not about politics, and it's about you know, the your overhead or how much profit you gain at the end of the days, about how you gained those by you know, being a good ambageltor to preserving the earth and the climate, you know, all the all the other inhabitants, not just humans.
Wherever we went in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, it was hard to find dooming gloom with regards to climate change. What we found everywhere was people adapting and making changes, both the kind of changes that reduce their carbon emissions and the kind that made their homes more defensible because the rest of the world is not making that first kind of changes. Resilience doesn't just mean sea walls and houses on stilts that can withstand flood are
those those are important. It also means making hard choices and forming strong communities. Here's Mariana again.
There's a lot of attention on us as like frontline countries, you know, in the face of climate change, and we get all the reporters come in asking us questions. We get a lot of consultants that come in and out and collect data.
You know.
Of course we're seen as sort of the sad countries that will eventually face the reality of having no land to live on.
Right so.
Forced relocation, displacement. I don't want to say migration, because that's not exactly a migration. If you have to leave, you're you're being you're being displaced. Our concern is that.
We're not we don't have all the capabilities in the science at our fingertip to help inform the government or you know, everyone.
Interested donors about how much is changing, how much is going to change, and especially how that change is going to change us, you know. We it's it's overwhelming. We we have a national adaptation plan. I hope that you will get into that when you get the chance to h that's the survival plan. In that survival plan, there is you know, there is very scary reality that we may need to take down some islands to elevate some islands, you know, and every island have their land owners and
what happens to those people. Marshals are connected to their land so much culturally, and so how do we adapt to that change when it comes so quickly? That's scary.
Everywhere you go in the Marshal isings you see the impact of climate change and rising sea levels, but you also see the community responding and supporting itself through the existential threat. The RMI isn't a sad place, quite the opposite. It's a tremendously happy and beautiful place. And I had one of the most enjoyable weeks I can remember there. I'd go back in a heartbeat. But the joy with which people approach every day doesn't mean they aren't concerned,
and it certainly doesn't mean they're not worthy of our concern. Tomorrow, we're going to discuss how the people of the Republic of Marshal Lions, and in particular the women of the Republic of Marshall Lions, and making sure that Marshali's people have a safe and healthy future.
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Thanks for listening.