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Many Pacific island representatives at the Pacific Islands Forum listed addressing climate change threats as their top priority. However, reducing shorelines is just one of many consequences of global warming, since it is already negatively impacting our habitability on this planet.

Rising temperatures are causing hundreds of thousands to die each year, increasing disease outbreaks, prolonging droughts, shifting rainfall patterns, disrupting ecosystems, worsening food and water shortages, allowing disease-spreading pests and pathogens to multiply, and displacing tens of millions of people, while damaging agriculture and health providers’ infrastructure and diminishing shorelines.

Those who have their heads in whatever sand remains may disagree that the warming Earth is a “grave and mounting threat to our wellbeing and a healthy planet,” as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chair Hoesung Lee put it, but the obvious signs are all around us.

Robert Griffon

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