Highlighting seas that are rising at an accelerating rate, especially in Pacific island nations, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has issued another climate SOS to the world. This time he said those initials stand for "save our seas." The United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization on Monday issued reports on worsening sea level rise, turbocharged by a warming Earth and melting ice sheets and glaciers, the AP reports. They highlight how the Southwestern Pacific is not only hurt by the rising oceans, but by other climate change effects of ocean acidification and marine heat waves.
Guterres toured Samoa and Tonga and made his climate plea from Tonga's capital of Nuku'alofa on Tuesday at a meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum, whose member countries are among those most imperiled by climate change. Next month, the UN General Assembly holds a special session to discuss rising seas. "This is a crazy situation," Guterres said, adding: "A worldwide catastrophe is putting this Pacific paradise in peril. The ocean is overflowing." A report that Guterres' office commissioned found that sea level lapping against Nuku'alofa had risen 8.3 inches between 1990 and 2020, twice the global average. Apia, Samoa, has seen a foot of rising seas, while Suva-B, Fiji, has had 11.4 inches.
While Guterres met in Nuku'alofa on Tuesday with Pacific nations on the environment, a hundred local high school students and activists from across the Pacific marched for climate justice a few blocks away. One marcher was Itinterunga Rae of the Barnaban Human Rights Defenders Network, whose people had to relocate generations ago to Fiji from their Kiribati island home due to environmental degradation. Rae said abandoning Pacific islands should not be seen as a solution to rising seas. "We promote climate mobility as a solution to be safe from your island that's been destroyed by climate change, but it's not the safest option," he said. Barnabans have been cut off from the source of their culture and heritage, he said. An American expert agreed about the seriousness of the threat. "The alarm is justified," said S. Jeffress Williams, a retired US Geological Survey sea level scientist.
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