Environmental Refugees may be a reality in the near future.
Kiribati's President, Anote Tong, already has dismal predictions on the future of his country and has asked New Zealand and Australia to consider the idea of "environmental refugees" forced from their homes by global warming, the New Zealand Herald reported.
"Villages that have been there over the decades, maybe a century, and now they have to be relocated. Where they have been living over the past few decades is no longer there, it is being eroded," Mr. Tong said in a press conference, the New Zealand Herald reported.
A Kiribati couple moved to New Zealand six years ago and had three children in the "higher-ground" country, the Associated Press reported via the New York Times.
The 37-year-old man has been rejected twice by immigration authorities after arguing that Kiribati (one of the lowest-lying nations in the world) is too dangerous to return to. The family will appeal the case on Oct. 16, but the prospects look bleak for the Kiribati man.
In past hearings, the man described dangerous ocean tides in Kiribati known as "king tides." The water has destroyed countless crops and homes, and sickened a number of residents.
The man said the phenomenon started to occur more regularly in the late 1990s. Since the area has no sewage system the residents would throw up from the drinking water, and would have nowhere to escape the knee-deep tides since higher ground does not exist there.
"There's no future for us when we go back to Kiribati," he told the tribunal, the AP reported.. "Especially for my children. There's nothing for us there."
"We may already be at the point of no return, where the emissions in the atmosphere will carry on contributing to climate change, so in time our small low-lying islands will be submerged," Mr Tong said, the New Zealand Herald reported.
