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Tarateiti Uriam Timiti, our 20 year old member from Kiribati shares her story about how climate change has affected her life in Kiribati and why she decided to join Project Survival Pacific.

Having grown up and living in a place where one can see the lagoon and the ocean side from the same point is a very unique and enjoyable experience.  Life is all but the sea; people depend on the sea for food, income, medicine, artifacts and many more.  Because I lived all my life in this unique place, I find it very strange to hear stories that there are people in larger countries who have never seen the ocean before in their entire lives. Having heard these stories as a little girl, I often wonder how such people could survive without the sea. Then I looked at myself and realized how lucky I was to live in such a beautiful place with white beach to play on and calm seas to swim in with friends, enjoying the sea breeze and the saltiness of the ocean.

However, all the luxurious and peacefulness of this place would not last forever. A time will come when there is nothing but the deep blue ocean in place of my island. How sad it is to hear this prediction coming true especially for someone like me who is very adapted and in love with this place. How would you feel if your loved ones suddenly die or disappear?

It is time to believe and act on the famous two words – “Climate Change”.  If you have no idea or do not believe that the impact of Climate change is really happening, then let me tell you an interesting story from a real life experience.

Thirteen years ago, I used to walk back home from my Primary school which is about a mile away. I usually walked through a nearby school along the way. I remember there were classrooms which were very close to the beach. Now that I have all grown up, I can see no trace of these buildings and the shoreline has moved inward.Also at that time, there used to be an agricultural site which was about 50meters away from the sea. I remembered my mother taking me for a tour to this place and it intrigued me so much to see a place full of green. Seeing all the cucumbers, tomatoes, cabbages, flowers of different colours was like paradise as I had never seen a place full of life before.

Photo: Salt Water encroaches inland into peoples houses & schools in Kiribati

My family and I then moved to Fiji and only returned to Kiribati 5 years later. I desired to see this place again upon my return.  As I passed it I saw that the building was still there, but all the green had vanished and was replaced by brown.  This is all due to the increased sea-level which invaded this agricultural site during high tide increasing the soil salinity and making it difficult to grow crops there. In some places when it is high tide the sea surrounds the houses and for this reason people had to build homes on stands. With sea- level rise, water issue is getting worse. Since people highly depend on well for water, the freshness of the well-water is increasingly affected by the seawater seeping the soil inland & increasing its salinity. Life is indeed difficult and frustrating for Kiribati people.

What can be done about this? There is more YOU can do than WE can. The people in small island countries are only finding ways to adapt & minimize the impacts of Climate Change by planting more mangroves, building stronger seawalls and educating the youth but YOU can help us by lowering your emissions of Carbon dioxide from your large unsustainable factories. That is why I decided to join Project Survival Pacific with a hope to save my beloved country Kiribati before it is TOO LATE!!!!

Related Posts:

• Pacific Climate Impacts – Vanuatu

This entry was posted on Monday, August 29th, 2011 at 6:08 am and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.