The Hungry Tide

[This is playing at the DocNZ festival, but I saw the shorter SBS documentary version.]

The islands of Kiribati are slowly being swallowed up by the ocean. To help stop this, a group, involving Maria Tiimon, go to the Copenhagen conference to try to get countries to agree to policies to restrict carbon emission and keep temperature rise down.

Well... I could have told them how that was going to work out. And I think you can too. The conference did agree to setting up lots of money to help the islands combat the oncoming tide. Go on, guess how effective that is being...

While this is terrible, it does not surprise me in the least that big countries (they mention China and India, but, yeah, like the USA cares more) isn't interested in what is happening out in the ocean. On the other hand, when we get a meter rise in the water and lots of countries are adversely effected, then we might see some movement. (And New Zealand is going to get screwed too, most of Wellington and Petone is on reclaimed land, and a meter rise will wipe that out.)

This is a story of a culture in danger of extinction, but it's not going to be the only one.


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