Sinking without trace: Australia’s climate change victims

Like Kiribati and Tuvalu, the islands of the Torres Strait are slowly being submerged. But unlike their Pacific neighbours, the plight of their inhabitants is being overlooked.

The low-lying islands that dot the sparkling waters of this region are facing similar challenges to South Pacific nations such as Kiribati and Tuvalu. But while the plight of those countries is well known and is regularly discussed in the international arena, few people outside Australia have even heard of the Torres Strait. Even Australians would have difficulty locating it on the map, and the remote islands – accessible only by light plane – receive few visitors.
Donna Green is one exception. A scientist at the University of New South Wales, English-born Dr Green is educating the islanders about the possible impacts of climate change and ways in which they can adapt. She embarked on the project after discovering that no one else was doing it. In fact, although the Torres Strait is considered the most vulnerable area of Australia, it is barely on the radar, either as a subject of scientific research or a focus of government policy.

There is no action plan for the region, and the newly formed Department of Climate Change was unable to cite any studies relating to these northerly islands. A search for the words “Torres Strait” on the department’s website yields no results.

Until the end of the last Ice Age, the strait was a land bridge connecting northern Australia with New Guinea. Some islands lie only a few miles off the Papua New Guinea coast, and the locals have more in common, ethnically, with the Melanesians of Papua New Guinea than the Aborigines of the Australian mainland. But they consider themselves proud Australians, and feel mildly aggrieved that it is not widely known that Australia has not one, but two indigenous races.

Six of the inhabited Torres islands are low-lying coral cays or swampy mud islands, with little or no elevation. As you fly over them, they look like smudges of green in a shimmering expanse of blue. Others are granite or volcanic, with some higher land. Even there, though, people are accustomed to living by the beach, their days revolving around fishing and collecting shells.

Independent