This is the second in a series of "Road Sign" commentaries designed to bring under-noticed events that may turn out to be of global significance to public attention.

Road Signs: Climate change

Kiss your coastline goodbye

Climate scientists have predicted for many years that rising sea levels caused by melting ice and warming oceans will threaten and eventually inundate low-lying islands and coastlines—including parts of Florida, the Eastern and Western seaboards of the U.S., and the Gulf coast. 

Worldwide, large coastal cities, home to hundreds of millions of people, are at risk.

Residents of Pacific islands such as Kiribati have already seen the ocean erode beaches and kill crops, and have understandably been among the most vocal advocates for global action to slow human-caused climate change.

Now, however, the Carteret Islands off the coast of Papua New Guinea have become the unfortunate poster child for climate change. As reported in The Guardian/UK, the Carteret’s 2600 inhabitants are in the process of abandoning the island, their ancestral home, to the encroaching Pacific. They are being moved, five or ten families at a time, to Bougainville, also part of Papua New Guinea.

Given that millions of people have been displaced over the centuries because of floods, droughts and famines, the inhabitants of the Carterets are not the first climate-change refugees, nor even the first to be displaced by human activities—human-caused deforestation and desertification have been taking place for centuries.

They are, however, the first community who, as a whole, are being uprooted due to one of the predicted impacts of modern, man-made climate change.

Since atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising more rapidly than ever, ice in Antarctica and elsewhere is melting even faster than predicted, and atmospheric and oceanic warming are expected to create stronger and more destructive hurricanes and storm surges, the residents of the Carterets will definitely not be the last climate change refugees this century.

We ignore their plight at our peril. 

Robert Adler

for the institute