By Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson for Huffington Post
When you grow up on a tropical island, the development history of your country is marked by disasters. We remember what we were doing in 1990 and 1991 because those were two of the strongest cyclones to hit our islands in living memory, we then also remember 2012, by the inland floods that Cyclone Evan unleashed upon in our land. In between those major cyclones we had a smattering of one day or half day cyclones or the edges or major cyclones, enough to disrupt our daily lives for weeks on end.
Every year there is some sort of an event whether it be prolonged dry season which throws all our crops out of whack, a cyclone that we could only prepare for for 24 hours, increased rainfall and flooding that surprises us in the night, killing our children and robbing us of our homes.
This is our normal, you are watching our normal in the news, the things you see in America, from Cyclone Irma and Cyclone Harvey, that’s our way of life. And when it is over we pick up the pieces, we make a huge dent in our national budget, recover our services and brace ourselves for the next one.
There is a somberness that hangs over our nation after surviving a cyclone – while we bury the dead, pick up the pieces and throw thatch over the skeletons of our once complete homes – we don’t argue over the merits of science or the latest report by developed countries, we merely try our best to prepare ourselves for the next disaster that hits our homes.
I, like many in my generation in Samoa, Fiji, Vanuatu, Tonga and other islands of the Pacific have survived through countless Cyclones in our lifetimes.
The first Cyclone I remember was Cyclone Ofa – it hit our village very sudden on an afternoon. I remember – we only had half a day to prepare. By the second day our house – a traditional open house with only tarps and corrugated roofing nailed to the sides to keep it from blowing away – could no longer withstand the strong winds. So like all in our village, we moved to the Church, the strongest building in the village. We had just settled in when the Cyclone ripped the roof off our Church. We then moved to the Ministers house, and when I say “we”, I mean over 200 people, men, women, children, babies, people with disabilities and the elderly who had to be carried. As an 8 year old of ten children in our extended family, we were to fend for ourselves as the adults tried to carry the elderly and help the injured. We all made it safely. That’s just one story of many in our region of islands affected by Cyclones on an annual basis. There’s no escaping when you get hit by a Cyclone, you find shelter, and when that shelter fails, you become creative, when all else fails, you do what the people of Falealupo in Savaii did, they move into the cemeteries with the freshly buried, to survive even a mere hour of the Cyclone.
Climate change is real, it happens in the lives of every Pacific islander in one way or another, the experience is so raw and so direct that one doesn’t have a choice but to understand its causes and why it is becoming so frequent. Unlike our learned counterparts in developed countries, we don’t have the luxury of denial, because we don’t have the means or energy to divest the truth, to discredit what is real or contribute to a multitude of studies that end up telling us that indeed what we are experiencing is attributed to climate change.
You can then understand why I was severely disappointed and disheartened when I recently asked an official from the US State Department about her views on climate change, and she refused to even utter the words.
Climate change is not political here – it’s not a liberal issue or an academic topic, it’s a life thing, one that touches at the very core of our existence as islands. Speak to our brothers and sisters in Fiji, talk to them about Cyclone Winston and how it wiped off entire communities overnight, how it ripped children from their mothers and took away life from the land. By all means, speak to our friends in Vanuatu, ask them about Cyclone Pam, how it drowned communities, ripped up infrastructure and isolated people for months.
We are not here to argue about the merits of established scientific facts as we are too busy trying to survive the impacts caused by factors outside of our control. Have your academic conferences, write your papers – but let us know how to best prepare and be ready for the next cyclone. Keep this in mind, when you suffer in a developed country, you have money, resources, man power and support to save you, we have some support, but for many, we just have our bare hands and wits about us in order to survive. We don’t have helicopters to airlift the injured, we don’t have mass scale rescue operations, we just have us, all handful of us to save ourselves. This experience has been real since the day we were born. My daughter was born in between Cyclone Evan and Cyclone Gary – thus, her name Bella Storm – her life will be no different from the countless children of these islands who will suffer through the same.
Studies have shown that flooding and mega-storms were by far the leading cause of disaster from 2000-2010. About 80% of the 3,496 disasters of the last decade were due to flooding and storms. Seas are rising because of climate change. So are extreme rain storms. There is growing evidence that warming temperatures are increasing the destructive force of hurricanes.
According to disaster relief agencies, in 2016, more than 31 million people fled disasters in 125 countries and territories. Disasters displace three to ten times more people than conflict and war worldwide.
As climate change continues, it will likely lead to more frequent and severe natural hazards. The impact will be heavy. Climate change causes poverty and food shortages, and forces even higher numbers of men, women and children to flee their homes.
On average, 26 million people are displaced by disasters such as floods and storms every year. That’s one person forced to flee every second.