Kiribati

Kiribati

1. What is climate change?

   • Climate change is the process of greenhouse gases being emitted and then filling up the atmosphere, trapping heat from the sun. Every year as more gases fill the atmosphere the earth slowly gets warmer and it is causing oceans to overflow and drown islands, drier countries to spend longer times in droughts and more frequent and bigger natural disasters.

2. About Kiribati

   • Kiribati is an island nation in the pacific ocean. The avergae height above sea level is 2 metres and because of climate change the people that live there are constantly getting flooded and the island is slowly disappearing due to rising sea levels and coastal erosion. Kiribati also faces food and clean water shortages due to these events and they have a bad pollution problem because of water constantly washing everything out of homes etc.

3. Climate change and food supplies

   • With all the land going underwater this means most of the food supplies that people on Kiribati require to live off will often be destroyed either while growing or while trying to be kept safe somewhere on the island away from the water.

4. Climate change and water supplies

5. Coastal erosion because of climate change

   • As global warming continues to heat the earth and melt the ice caps, the oceans begin to fill up more and more. Causing low-lying islands to slowly start drowning. This is what is happening in Kiribati and as it happens the beaches and rest of the landscape is being dragged back with the tides. This means coastlines are completely disappearing.

6. Lagoon pollution

   • With villages on Kiribati getting constantly flooded and water going throughout all the houses, a lot of rubbish and other things such as petrol and plastic ect could get taken out to sea or pulled into the lagoon and polluting it.

7. Possible solutions

   • Some possible solutions that could be done to try solve Kiribati's problem would be to find a way of building a special wall designed to stop overflowing the island, instead of making large concrete or coral/stone walls that ruin the environment and landscape. As well as that there are designers and architects in japan working on plans to somehow create floating islands to move with the tides that are tethered to ground, stopping water from destroying the island.

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