Islands Bear the Brunt of Climate Change
MANOA — In the grand scheme of things, Hawaii and other islands throughout the Pacific contribute relatively little to the largely man-made problem of climate change.
But those same islands are being hit hardest, and it’s only going to get worse.
For that reason — and also to give residents of Hawaii access to the process without having to travel to the mainland — players from a slew of federal agencies gathered at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Keoni Auditorium Friday afternoon to discuss the local effects of global warming.
“We bear the worst consequences of global warming and climate change,” said Togiola Tulafono, governor of American Samoa.
His country of low-lying islands continues to lose food and land to rising ocean waters and unstable precipitation patterns. Reefs, and the ocean species that rely on them, are dying as the ocean becomes increasingly acidic. And though Samoa has taken steps to try to mitigate global warming — Tulafono uses a Toyota Prius for personal transportation — “Our islands will still be sinking into deeper oceans. … Our fate is in the hands of others,” he says.
Some of those others were in attendance Friday. The meeting of the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force — titled “Island Resiliency in the Face of Climate Change” — is one of just a handful of its kind scheduled across the country, and information gleaned will be used in a report expected in October that was requested last year by President Barack Obama.
The report will focus on adaptation, as opposed to mitigation. The difference between them was summed up by Dr. Larry Robinson, assistant secretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere and deputy administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in a brief press conference before the public meeting began: mitigation is avoiding the unmanageable, while adaptation is managing the unavoidable.
So instead of talking just about carbon emissions, fossil fuel and electric cars — efforts to avoid or slow climate change — the discussion Friday focused on what we should do to avoid the impacts of climate change as they arrive and increase. For example, simply moving civilization away from the shoreline.
Few definitive answers came; those in attendance touted collaboration as part of the information-gathering stage. Representing Hawaii were Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, cultural practitioner Kalani Souza and Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument Superintendent Aulani Wilhelm. Joining them were representatives of an unwieldy maze of federal agencies; some of the speakers, like Robinson, had titles with more than a dozen words.
Eileen Shea, chief of the Climate Services Division of the NOAA National Climate Data Center and director of the , said it boiled down to four things: Climate change is real, it has human fingerprints on it, we are already feeling impacts today, and the future is in our hands.
She said more concrete ideas will be forthcoming in the October report. In March, the task force released a [pdf] that showed where the conversation is headed.
“Climate change may be a global issue,” said Dr. Thomas R. Armstrong, senior advisor for climate change in the U.S. Department of the Interior, appearing via teleconference from Washington, D.C., “but the climate impacts and effects that we feel are local community-based issues.”
