Kiribati faces its future, and a rising ocean
Recently, a curious case appeared before New Zealand's High Court. The plaintiff, Ioane Teitiota, a resident of the island-nation of Kiribati, was seeking refugee status in New Zealand. His reasoning? Climate change and rising sea levels were making Kiribati uninhabitable. "There's no future for us when we go back to Kiribati," Teitiota argued.
I used to live in Kiribati, a remote nation of 33 atolls in the equatorial Pacific scattered over an area nearly two-thirds as large as the continental United States. When I lived there, in the late 1990s, the island elders were beginning to notice a strange new phenomenon.… Seguir leyendo »