Aid to 45 small island states, home to the people most vulnerable to climate change and natural disasters, has fallen by more than half in eight years, a UN conference will be told today.
The islands are meeting in Mauritius this week to plead for the help they say they need to survive. Known as Sids, or small island developing states, the islands have a total population of 50-million; although they include some of the world’s top tourist destinations, such as the Seychelles and Caribbean islands, most are impoverished and isolated. The Maldives, stricken in the Indian tsunami disaster, are among them.
It is the first such meeting in 10 years, and will hear a series of reports produced by the United Nations environment programme. Some islands, including the Maldives, will disappear altogether by the end of this century because of rising seas, and many are being increasingly damaged by tropical storms such as those that hit the Caribbean last year.
Klaus Toepfer, executive director, speaking on the eve of the conference, said that, although small island states were widely distributed across the world, they were all vulnerable to natural and man-made disasters because of their size, and were all heavily dependent on a healthy environment and natural resources such as timber and fish for their survival — assets which were under threat.
”In the first 10 months of 2004, economic losses due to natural disasters in Sids had exceeded $100-billion. Only $35-billion of this had been insured. Many islands had lost valuable timber resources and agriculture had been damaged,” he said.
Jagdish Koonjul, a Mauritian who chairs the Association of Small Island States, said: ”People see small palm-fringed islands as paradise, but development that is not well managed is the other side of paradise.
”The percentage of foreign world aid going to Sids has dropped from 2,6% to 1% between 1996 and 2003, but without outside help we are struggling to survive.”
He said that for the last 35 years developed nations had been promising transfer of technology. Small islands needed modern methods of treating waste and generating electricity without the use of oil imports, and training for islanders to operate such technology.
Just as important, the islands needed early warning of disasters — tropical storms and storm surges, as well as tsunamis.
Among problems the reports highlight is shortage of fresh water. Cape Verde, the Comoros and the Maldives are already at or below the stress threshold.
Increasingly frequent droughts caused in part by climate change mean that some islands need to rely on desalination plants, and all need to carry out rainwater harvesting. Failure to treat sewage and misuse of fertilisers also contaminates scarce water. As a result, there have been cholera epidemics in the Comoros in 1998 and 2001, and in Madagascar up to one in four children can be affected in the rainy season.
The meeting is hoping to extend the Caribbean use of hurricane-resistant building codes to Atlantic and Indian Ocean members, and to improve on cyclone forecasting. Among the problems the islands already face is damage to coral reefs and beach erosion, and inundation of nearby agricultural land, due to increasing wave heights.
As more consumer goods are imported, waste is a problem. In Madagascar only 6% of rubbish is routinely collected, and more than half the population dispose of their rubbish ”anywhere convenient” — often on beaches and in mangrove swamps. Dumped containers then fill with rainwater and breed mosquitoes, increasing malaria.
Tourists, vital to the economy of many Sids, are part of the problem, particularly in the Caribbean, where 60% of the world’s cruise ships operate.
As the ships get larger they demand ever deeper harbours and often overwhelm the ability of islands to deal with rubbish, sewage and oil. – Guardian Unlimited Â