MONTREAL (Reuters) - Rising seas have forced 100 people on a Pacific island to move to higher ground in what may be the first example of a village formally displaced because of modern global warming, a U.N. report said on Monday.
With coconut palms on the coast already standing in water, inhabitants in the Lateu settlement on Tegua island in Vanuatu started dismantling their wooden homes in August and moved about 600 yards (meters) inland.
"They could no longer live on the coast," Taito Nakalevu, a climate change expert at the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme, told Reuters during a 189-nation conference in Montreal on ways to fight climate change.
.....The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a statement that the Lateu settlement "has become one of, if not the first, to be formally moved out of harm's way as a result of climate change."
After the last ice age, sea levels rose dramatically, and quickly. Entire human settlements and coastal civilizations were covered in water.
Now we're fretting over some coconut palms with soaking root systems. Which, I concede, does not bode well for the coconut palms. Sandbags may become necessary before too long.
Compare that to the flooding over what are now the Bosporous Straits into the Black Sea. That's serious global warming causing massive displacement of population. Would anyone prefer the last ice age back?
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