THAT SINKING FEELING
MARSHALL: Hello, welcome to the program. I’m Steve Marshall in the Carteret islands off Bougainville. Now as beautiful as this place looks, you might struggle to find it on a map. This tiny atoll is a mere speck in the ocean, and sadly, it’s getting smaller. What’s happening here is frightening, and it has the population on the move.
It’s a pristine atoll ring that only just breaks through the surface of the South Pacific – an idyllic dot in Melanesia. The people of the Carterets live from the sea and what tiny land they have, two thousand islanders squeeze into just over a half a square kilometre.
The islands may have had little impact on the outside world, but they claim the outside world is destroying them. They say they are doomed and global warming is to blame.
SALINA NETOI: The islands are sinking. We do see with our own eyes that our islands are sinking. We love the place, we love the islands but it’s sad to see this island, gone, finished.
MARSHALL: The people of the Carterets are desperate - lacking in food, their livelihoods destroyed. Four hundred years of occupation is about to end.
While the best scientific minds in the world are arguing whether the sea is rising by millimetres or centimetres, out here predictions mean nothing. The damage has already been done. What’s happening in this place is astonishing. Since the 1950s, the sea has risen at a phenomenal rate and no one can explain it.
The Carteret people are at war with the sea. The biggest island, Han, is less than a kilometre long and ringed with broken sea walls. The islanders built rock and clam barriers in a futile effort to hold back the rising seas.
Island chairman, Andreas Rubin’s ancestors arrived here centuries ago but his own children will be the last of the family to be born here.
ANDREAS RUBIN: We are right where my grandfather’s house was - and the shoreline was out from my grandfather’s house… was out about eighteen metres.
MARSHALL: So the shoreline use to be another eighteen…
ANDREAS RUBIN: Another eighteen metres.
MARSHALL: Eighteen to twenty metres out there.
ANDREAS RUBIN: Yeah. And out there, there was coconut trees and some other food gardens.
MARSHALL: The people can live off the land no longer. Swamp taro, breadfruit and banana use to be part of a balanced diet for the islanders. Now the seawater that washes into the gardens at high tide has destroyed everything.
This is the garden of mother of three Teresa Hetsi. Fruit once flourished. Now all that’s left is coconut trees.
TERESA HETSI: It means that I will have no banana now to eat and I will eat the coconut only without banana because the sea spoils my garden.
MARSHALL: Fallen coconut trees litter the beaches everywhere, their roots eroded by the rising seas. At low tide, you can see where the gardens used to be, along with the stumps of coconut trees that grew here only twenty years ago.
At high tide, the trees are completely swamped.
TERESA HETSI: At the moment now, the sea rises and has washed away all the roots of the coconut trees. The coconut cannot be a big fruit only small ones.
MARSHALL: As day breaks in the Carterets Lagoon, a supply ship from Bougainville arrives at the outer reef. This battered ship has no anchor and has engine trouble but the islanders are only interested in what’s on board. The emergency rations of rice wont go far, but it’s all that can be unloaded from a drifting ship.
MINISTER TAEHU PAIS: If the ship doesn’t come the people just go hungry, as usually is the case.
MARSHALL: Bougainville’s Minister for Atolls is on board too. Taehu Pais is about the last person these people want to see because of what he’s come to tell them.
MINISTER TAEHU PAIS: As an islander myself, I feel very sorry for my people. I feel for them. Speaking from the bottom of my heart I am indeed very sorry that the situation has to turn out this way.
MARSHALL: The rice shipment has brought relief from a monotonous diet but Teresa knows it wont last with the extra hungry mouths of her extended family.
TERESA HETSI: If there’s no rice, we’ll just live on coconut only. We can just eat the coconut only with fish.
MARSHALL: Island Chairman, Andreas Rubin, takes me on a tour of the five other tiny islands in the chain. The destruction is striking.
If there’s any doubt that the sea levels are rising, you only have to look here at the Island of Huene. This use to be one island but as locals will tell you, about 15 years ago the rising seas began to slice right through the middle of it. The high tides never let up and now the island is completely divided. Huene 1 and Huene 2. Remarkably three families managed to survive on fish and coconuts on an island the size of a football field.
Salina Netoi has given birth to seven children on the island but fears her days of living here are numbered.
SALINA NETOI: Our houses are getting closer and closer to the sea. The sea is coming closer to us. Maybe one day a tidal wave will come and just sweep every one of us out - our houses and everything, our kids... We never know when this will happen. Only God knows when this will happen.
MARSHALL: The Atolls Minister delivers the news these people don’t want to hear. Only a fraction of the population has turned out to listen to Taehu Pais’ prediction that by 2015, the Carterets will be under water.
MINISTER TAEHU PAIS: The majority of the population of the island now are willing to move especially when they experience the sort of situation they face on the island.
MARSHALL: These people are about to become environmental refugees. The plan is to shift ten families at a time to a new life in Bougainville, offering them small plots of land that they can cultivate.
But it’s not quite their home though is it?
MINISTER TAEHU PAIS: It wont be… not quite their home but it will be a new place that they will have to accept.
MARSHALL: The tribal chiefs of the Carterets are facing the most momentous decision of their lives. They’ve gathered to talk about the evacuation of their ancestral home.
TRANSLATOR: You are not afraid to stay on the island?
TRIBAL CHIEF: I am not frightened. If the island is lost, I’m lost too. I’ll get lost with the island.
MARSHALL: For this elder, the decision not to go will split his family. Maurice Rubin’s son, Andreas, is the young leader who’ll supervise the relocation.
ANDREAS RUBIN: Well, I feel a bit sorry because I do not want to leave without my father. I will have to force him to go with us so I can look after him there.
MARSHALL: The big island as they call it, is only one hundred kilometres away, but it’s a world away from the peace and quiet of the Carterets. A bitter civil war over mining and money claimed ten thousand lives. And while it’s quieter now, law and order is still a problem in the new autonomous region of Bougainville.
URSULA RAKOVA: I was used to an island life and all of a sudden I was thrown into having to adjust to living on the mainland.
MARSHALL: Ursula Rakova left the Carterets for the big smoke several years ago and now has the job of coordinating the move of her fellow islanders.
URSULA RAKOVA: If I had a miracle to perform, I wouldn’t bring my people here. Law and order is a big concern to us, especially when we are coming from a peaceful community and coming into an area that we have not lived before so law and order is a big concern to us.
MARSHALL: The islands are being squeezed not only by the oceans but by the people who live here. There are too many islanders to be sustained by its diminishing gardens. The relocation will thin the population before this place becomes completely uninhabitable in the next decade.
MINISTER TAEHU PAIS: There will still be people here on the island until the last tree from the island is down. The only time to evacuate everybody will be when the last tree goes down, meaning total wash down and only the reef remains.
MARSHALL: With what’s going on here you’d think this place would be swarming with scientists and experts, but the locals will tell you they haven’t had a visit from a study team from anywhere in the world. For all the questions there are no answers.
Without exception the people here blame global warming, especially those hardest hit on the tiny island of Puel.
Chief Bernard Tunim takes me through gardens ruined by seawater.
CHIEF BERNARD TUNIM: Pure salt water is bubbling from underneath and it has spoilt the area in which we’ve been planting swamp taro and other crops.
MARSHALL: Here at high tide the water doesn’t just breach the sea walls, it seeps up from beneath the ground. The pools left behind are a haven for malaria-carrying mosquitoes.
CHIEF BERNARD TUNIM: We get malaria and many of our children are affected by malaria and so this diarrhoea and other tummy aches and headache – all this comes up because of stagnant water.
MARSHALL: There is no electricity here, let alone television or the internet. But as isolated as these people are from the industrialised world, they know enough about its excesses.
CHIEF BERNARD TUNIM: The melting of the ice and the rise of the sea level - that’s why the island, maybe in a few years time will be covered with salt water, or maybe be submerged by the sea.
MARSHALL: For the second time in as many weeks another shipment of rice arrives. The islanders can hardly believe it but they know the ship will not return for many months. There are no regular aid drops by a financially stricken Bougainville government and these people are completely ignored by international aid agencies. They feel a forgotten people.
SALINA NETOI: I’ll really miss the place. I’ll miss the sea, the fish and the coconuts…the palm trees… It is a home to me. I do belong to the island. I feel sorry for my island.
MARSHALL: If sea levels rise as they have done over recent decades, the Carteret Islands will become the first inhabited atoll to be swallowed by the ocean. For many, it’s too late to worry about how or why this is happening. The islanders know this is unstoppable whatever the force that’s dragging them into the sea.