We heard it from Al Gore in “An Inconvenient Truth,” and we’re hearing it again — this time from the World Ocean Conference 2009 that is in its third of a five-day conference, taking place in Manado, Indonesia: rising sea levels will likely displace millions of island dwellers in the next twenty years. According to two recent articles in the Conde Nast Portfolio and AFP, the the polar ice caps are melting, causing ocean levels to rise, thereby shrinking some very populated and travel-worthy islands.
Places like the Maldives, Kiribati, and Tuvalu are literally shrinking and could be completely submerged by 2050. Mount Kilimanjaro and the Swiss Alps could lose over 40% of their snow within 20 years. Perhaps most importantly, an estimated 150 million people could be displaced from their lowland homes because of significant sea level rises.
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So, what does this mean for travelers? Well, the implications are quite clear. Those of us interested in visiting the polar destinations like Greenland and Antarctica or even glacial regions threatened by shrinking glaciers should enjoy them while they’re still cold. The same goes for the shrinking islands, such as the Phillipines, and the warming waters of the Great Barrier Reef, which could lose over 90% of its live coral within 50 years.
The five-day World Ocean Conference has drawn hundreds of officials and ocean experts from 80 countries and is the prelude to December talks on a successor to the expiring Kyoto Protocol, whose aim was to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5.2%, compared to data drawn in 1990. It has been twenty years since this Protocol and other climate initiatives have been evaluated, so it’s about time we think about being as green as possible.
The Alliance of Small Island States, the European Union, and the U.S. are all proposing greenhouse gas emission cuts of over 80% by 2050, but important developing nations such as China (who faces a very real threat to sea level rises in its overpopulated urban cities of Beijing and Shanghai) have yet to determine how much they can do in this global effort.