Pacific Islands: Existential Threat
Bruce Stiftel, FAICP
bruce.stiftel@gatech.edu
Florida Planning Conference 2023
Jacksonville, 8 September
Climate and Sustainability Working Group
•Foster discussion related to international dimensions of climate action, resilience, and sustainability within APA and abroad
•Bring overseas innovations in resilience and climate action planning to American planners and communities
•Better understand the US’s achievement of the SDGs especially related to planning
•Increase US planner visibility in international SDG and climate processes
•Facilitate International Division planners to help the world meet the SDGs and the 1.5 degrees Paris Agreement target.
Planners4climateaction.org
• Marshall Islands
• Poplution: 53,000 (78% urban)
• Land area: 182 mi sq (over 77,000 mi
• Majuro: 28,000 pop.
• Delap-Uliga-Djarrit
• Kwajalein: 11,000 pop.
• Ebeye
• World Bank, Global Practice for Urban Disaster Risk Management, Resilience, and Land (GPURL)
• with: GeoAdaptive, Cadmus, Deltares, Tonkin & Taylor
• WB has $2 B in 87 projects in Pacific
Raise
• Begins to be viable at 0.25m SLR
• Longer term tool
• Expensive and complex
• Long lead times for relocation, demolition, and reconstruction
• Challenges of ownership, tenure, customary land rights, and livelihoods
Relocate
• Retreat
• Combined with land raising and/or reclaimation
• Sentimental costs
• Cultural impacts
• Can offer viable livelihoods for future generations
Migrate
• Internal: outer atolls to urban atolls
• Outmigration: international
• Collective loss of way of life and community
• Adaptation option of last resort
“Over the next hundred years, Marshall Islands will have to embark upon ambitious initiatives and make tough decisions that require enormous political will, significant climate financing, and community cooperation.”
--World Bank, Global Practice for Urban Disaster Risk Management, Resilience, and Land
“If we manage to save my country, we’ll manage to save the world.”
--Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony DeBrum