On the frontline of Sea Level Rise

So the blog is going to have a bit of a change of direction… Having covered all of the major physical processes that affect SLC I now feel able to spend some time investigating case studies across the world of the places and people directly at risk of SLR.

Low Lying tropical islands are most at risk of SLR, indeed the inhabitants of these islands may become some of the first Climate Change refugees. Despite the recent COP21 Paris agreement on emissions reductions, the Prime Minister of Kiribati suggests it will not be enough to prevent these islands slipping into the sea. 

Welcome to the Maldives, a paradise archipelago of atolls and islands in the Indian Ocean. The Maldives hit the headlines a few years ago when their government held a cabinet meeting under the sea in order to highlight the potential effects of SLR. The Maldives will be at the forefront of SLC, its highest point lies just 2 m above sea level. 

The Maldives

Although this is by no mean a laughing matter, I came across a cartoon that rather accurately depicts the potential plight of these small island nations.

Cartoon about potential SLR. Source

In the Solomon Islands, for some it is already too late. 5 islands have been reclaimed by the sea (see below) as it experiences above GMSL average rise. This created headlines worldwide, with most major news outlets picking up on this issue. The global SLR rise of approximately 3 mm/yr, is dwarfed in this area with estimates of an acceleration up to 7mm/yr (Albert et al., 2016). Although SLR is clearly the dominant cause of threat to these low-lying islands, studies have indicated that human activities have also accelerated the degradation of the land. Inappropriate development choices, including the building of sea walls has accelerated erosion and led to the abandonment of islands as it became entirely unsustainable to live there. It is however not all doom and gloom; Webb & Kench, 2010 suggest that many islands are dynamic in their response to SLC and used quantitative analysis to reveal that 86% of low-lying islands in their study were either stable or growing in area despite SLR. This is because islands respond to a variety of factors, of which SLC is just one of them. Although this may indicate a positive trend for now, with SL rising continually and the rate of rise likely to increase a threshold will be passed by which many of these islands will become inundated. 

One of the Solomon Islands that has been lost to SLR. Source

Even if SLR doesn’t leave islands uninhabitable there have been suggestions that SLR will cause a slightly different effect that will still leave inhabitants in serious trouble. As sea level rises, the level of groundwater rises as well (Gulley et al., 2016). Therefore as this paper suggests the important freshwater can leak into lakes or create new ones which results in increased evaporation. As my last post indicated, groundwater depletion can have a significant effect on SLR but the effect here would be twofold: water is a precious resource in these areas, and the land use change could also be significant.