THE RISING TIDE ON CLIMATE CHANGE, RACISM AND HUMAN RIGHTS

Living in fear is something Claire Anterea, 42, knows a great deal about. 

Her first memory of feeling the effects of climate change was in 2005 when storms and strong winds tore down homes, trees and ate away at roads.  

“The sea came during the night, people slept and all this wind and waves just started breaking their houses. A lot of trees and roads were eaten away. It was so sad to see and it made us so scared to see all these things that we had never seen before and now it is constant, it has become more frequent than before,” Mrs Anterea said. 

She and her family live on the island of South Tarawa in Kiribati, where rain hasn’t fallen in nearly a year and ocean levels are rising everyday. 

Mrs Anterea’s biggest worry is that Kiribati won’t exist for her children and grandchildren to live and call home. 

“Scientists have said that our islands will be submerged, will be under the sea and that our islands will no longer be on the map. Where will we go then? We don’t have a place to go if that happens. I still can’t get my head around it because if the sea keeps rising our islands will disappear…So that’s the fear I carry with me,” she said. “We really love our country, it is the most peaceful place that I’ve known and so I don’t want that to happen.”

Wendy Flannery, Friends of the Earth Brisbane’s Pacific and Torres Strait Island Climate Justice coordinator, says people in the mainstream in Australia don’t take stories from the Pacific seriously when it comes to climate change. 

“It’s almost as if they have this tawdry image of the Pacific as a paradise. They still use the language of ‘spoiling paradise’, as if people who live in the Pacific live in a paradise anyway and to get through those stereotypes is quite difficult,” she said. 

“[Our main goal is] to try and get the Australian population on board with climate justice, recognising that whatever happens in Australia is having a huge impact on the Pacific.”

Mrs Anterea knows the feeling of not being heard by Australian politicians, having travelled to Canberra two years ago to meet with the government. 

She said politicians were very confident that people from the Pacific, herself included, were just making up stories about the problem and the issues they were facing. 

“I think Australia says proudly that they give a lot of money to the Pacific but they give us money to build a seawall but the water keeps rising. How long are they going to give us money to build these and it’s not working? Building a seawall is not the answer to the problem because if you build a seawall in Kiribati, it may be, ‘Can I afford a seawall? How about the next door neighbour? They will get the effects of my seawall, they will get even more force on their land and they will lose their land but I will keep building up my seawall.’ For me, it is not about money because I know Australia says, ‘I know but I give you money, I always give you money’ but I think money can’t buy our survival.”

Both Mrs Flannery and Cam Walker, Climate Justice coordinator for Friends of the Earth Melbourne, say framing Australia’s inaction as racist has merit but it is not the best way to look at it. 

“The ‘small island states’, even that language, tends to separate the big and the small and the big and the small of course does have touches of racism in it because Australia is a predominately colonised country.”

“So of course [Australia is] potentially racist because we’re virtually exporting our emissions to countries that are not causing any of them,” Mrs Flannery said. 

Mr Walker says the Australian government has not done enough to challenge climate deniers and fossil fuel companies. 

“You have to argue at the very least, Australian’s are blind to this concept of carbon debt, that is we owe a debt to the rest of the planet for our very high individual consumption of resources and production of greenhouse gases,” he said. 

Mrs Flannery prefers the term nvironmental crimes” to address Australia’s blindness to climate change. “The fact that we’re not prepared to make a significant contribution to lowering greenhouse gases when we know that we’ve got one of the highest per capita emissions on the planet means that we’re not serious about our neighbours.”  

Living in this reality is something Mrs Anterea has come to understand with her 10 years of work with the Kiribati Climate Action Network.

Every day she experiences the effects of climate change. 

King tides and natural disasters are more frequent; warmer temperatures and longer lasting drought; and rising sea levels and ocean acidification are taking away fundamental rights that the UN sees as universal.

Research conducted by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO and the Kiribati Meteorology Service, shows sea levels have risen by one to four millimetres each year since 1993 in the Kiribati region.

Rising sea levels increase the possibility of natural disasters like storm surges, king tides and flooding, caused by weather patterns of El Nino and La Nina.

The right to clean water is something Mrs Anterea’s family struggles with every day. Their 10,000 litre water tank has run dry. 

“The only source of water we have now is to drink from the well water, which is not so good because the place is so over populated but it’s the only water we can drink and we have to boil it and we’re not sure if we kill every creature in the water,” she said. 

As tides topple over seawalls, freshwater wells are contaminated with salty water and oceans continue to acidify, absorbing 25 to 33 per cent of carbon dioxide from the air, harming reefs and marine life.