This week, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued a global SOS, Save Our Seas, on rising sea levels.
Visiting Tonga for the Pacific Islands Forum Leaders Meeting, Guterres said that small islands are on the front lines of the climate crisis, with the crisis soon to “swell to an almost unimaginable scale.”
In a speech at the meeting, Guterres noted that this crisis is entirely of humanity’s making due to greenhouse gases “overwhelmingly generated by burning fossil fuels.”
Coinciding with the meeting, two UN papers were published: State of the Climate in the South West Pacific, and Surging seas in a warming world.
The former outlines that sea level rise in the region is now above the global average, with sea surface temperatures rising three times faster than the global average since 1980.
Further, it notes that during that time, marine heatwaves have approximately doubled in frequency since 1980 and are now more intense and lasting longer.
This is all despite the Pacific islands accounting for just 0.02 per cent of global emissions.
The Surging Seas briefing document, meanwhile, outlines that, since the start of the 20th century, the global-mean sea level has risen faster than over any prior century in at least the last 3,000 years -the rate of increase is accelerating.
Looking ahead, projections are that sea level is committed to “rise for centuries to millennia” and “will remain elevated for thousands of years.”
“Without drastic cuts to emissions, the Pacific Islands can expect at least 15 centimetres of additional sea level rise by mid-century, and more than 30 days per year of coastal flooding in some places,” said Guterres.
Indeed, Pacific Islands’ average elevation is already just one to two metres above sea level, with around 90 per cent of people living within five kilometres of the coast, and half of all infrastructure within 500 metres of the shoreline.
Guterres also underlined the need for “massively” increasing finance and support for vulnerable countries, calling on the world’s “biggest emitters” to step up on finance.
“We need a surge in funds to deal with surging seas,” Guterres said.