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@TaotaoTasi
Please allow me to quickly introduce where I am from. I am from the island of Saipan in Micronesian, part of the Northern Mariana Islands.
The Native people are called Chamorro – there’s also a second indigenous group who call themselves Refaluwasch. That’s my dad holding the guitar. I’ll let you guess which one I am.
I grew up doing all the things island boys do, from farming, hunting, playing the ukulele, and fishing.
Lots and lots of fishing. But I'm not going to lie, I also played my fair share of Super Mario Brothers.
Alright, I am going to start my talk by listing off some of the findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate.
This report, which can be referred to as the “IPCC report” in the shorthand, was released just last month, and outlines climate-related risks and challenges that people around the world are exposed to today and that future generations will face. It was approved by the 195 IPCC member governments.
Notably:
- Global warming has already reached 1°C above the pre-industrial level, due to past and current greenhouse gas emissions.
- Sea level will continue to rise for centuries. It could reach around 30-60 cm by 2100 even if greenhouse gas emissions are sharply reduced and global warming is limited to well below 2°C.
Nearly 50% of coastal wetlands have been lost over the last 100 years.
- Marine heatwaves have already resulted in large-scale coral bleaching events at increasing frequency.
- Almost all warm-water coral reefs are projected to suffer significant losses of area and local extinctions.
- Shifts in the distribution of fish populations have reduced the global catch potential. In the future, some regions, notably tropical oceans, will see further decreases.
- The decline in warm water coral reefs is projected to greatly compromise the services they provide to society, such as food provision, coastal protection, and tourism.
- Communities that depend highly on seafood may face risks to nutritional health and food security.
- People with highest exposure and vulnerability to current and future hazards from changes are often also those with lowest adaptive capacity, particularly in low-lying islands.
- These Small Island Developing States are home to 65 million people.
All of these facts combined point towards an obvious conclusion: The ocean today is warmer, more acidic, and less productive. And island people will be hit the hardest.
In this changing world, we cannot simply rely on the old way of doing things. The survival of our cultures and our values require us to face these new realities. But I posit that we can use the best of who we are, looking to our ancestors for wisdom, to develop strategies for dealing with climate change.
Let me explain.
In the time of the ancestors, unlike today, the world must have seemed static and stable.
That consistency, over centuries, allowed my people to develop systems using the stars, the winds, and the living Creation to navigate their world.
From father to son, mother to daughter, chants and songs were passed down that told us how to provide for our families on a small island, and how to cross an ocean in an outrigger canoe.
The world of the voyagers of old was very different from the world we live in nowadays. There were more fish, more birds, more whales, more of everything that swims in the ocean, crawls on land, and flies through the sky.
A Palauan chief famously once said, “Fish is Culture.” This simple phrase perfectly describes how it was in crossing this blue Eden that we evolved into Pacific Islanders.
Ever since our identity has been strongly influenced by the natural world. All aspects of our unique way of life are derived from the ocean and our islands, including songs, dances, myths, stories, economies, world views, and governing systems.
But today we must navigate a modern world that is constantly changing – socially, economically, physically, and biologically – and confusing for everyone.
The world that existed in which we became Pacific Islanders is disappearing, affecting our islands and our people. The traditional structures that kept our families, communities, and cultures tied together are coming apart.
In an uncanny parallel, the same thing is happening to the integrity of our natural world, as warming oceans become increasing devoid of fish, yet full of plastic.
Seas teaming with seemingly inexhaustible populations of large fish now have fewer, smaller fish. At the same time, people stopped speaking their native languages.
Many species of whales, sharks, seabirds, and turtles are on the brink of extinction. And as karaoke replaced our local music, voyaging died out across Polynesia.
And this change has come fast.
I have dedicated my entire adult life to protecting the ocean, yet this loss has continued unabated. Young people scarcely believe stories of the abundance of life I remember so clearly from as recently as my childhood in Saipan. It seems at times as if our efforts to protect the ocean are always three steps behind our technological capacity to harm it.
But hope is not lost.
Pacific people are learning to read the signs in our modern world just as the ancestors did in their time. But where their navigation markers were the waves and the stars; our lodestar must be scientific knowledge informed by the values we hold as Pacific Islanders. A great start would be to follow the scientific advice to protect 30% of every ocean habitat.
The IPCC recommendations to reduce the impacts of climate change are crystal clear. The report finds that ONE strongly reducing greenhouse gas emissions, TWO protecting and restoring ecosystems, and THREE carefully managing the use of natural resources would make it possible to preserve the ocean.
But for the purposes of this talk, I want to hone in on protecting and restoring ecosystems, because I believe this is an area where the Pacific has led the world.
Marine protected areas, as a concept, are not new to Pacific Islanders. For millennia, we have recognized when reefs have been fished too heavily and set them aside as no-fishing zones until they returned to their former richness.
Across Micronesia, this concept has a few different names: mo in the Marshalls, for instance, bul in Palau, sil and meshung in the Federated States. It has a couple of different names in Polynesia, including Rahui. In Fiji they call it TAMBOO, which is where the English word TABOO comes from.
The modern western science which demonstrates the effectiveness of protected areas is also clear. Well designed and managed protected areas result in more fish, bigger fish, and higher levels of biodiversity.
And the most effective areas are large, isolated from human activity, fully protected, and well-enforced over long time periods.
The Pacific has led the globe in setting up networks of marine protected areas. As an example, I will bring attention to the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument here in Hawaii, it serves as the world’s greatest example of what can happen when communities, scientists, cultural leaders, and elected officials can accomplish when they work together. This is an area about half the size of all of India, that gives equal protection to nature and culture.
Today nearly five percent of the global ocean is safeguarded within the confines of a marine protected area. This may not seem like much, but it represents a five-fold increase over the last decade. This is an excellent start, but we need to do more, and we need to do it better, and we need to do it faster if we are going to protect thirty percent of every ocean habitat by 2030.
While there is a long journey in front of us and much work needs to be done, a nascent renaissance wherein culture and conservation are intertwined is taking place in the Pacific.
As our people lead global efforts to end nuclear proliferation, reverse the effects of climate change, and make new and larger marine protected areas, there is an equal and parallel effort to bring traditional voyaging back to Polynesia, breathe new life into the arts, and promote the practice of speaking in indigenous languages. Our futures as the Taotao Tasi – the people of the ocean – depend on this movement growing.
It is also important to remember that while we are trying to protect thirty percent of the ocean, we must also address sustainable fishing in the remaining seventy percent. And, we need to prioritize the reduction of the carbon warming our atmosphere and the plastic polluting our oceans, all of which add pressure on marine ecosystems, pushing them toward their breaking points.
Future generations of Pacific Islanders deserve a resilient and healthy ocean. Protecting the ocean is a reclamation of our cultures and our identifies and is one of the most important things we, as island people, can do for our survival and our legacy. My great hope is that the ocean my generation passes down to our children looks less like the ocean as it was handed to us, and more like the ocean as it was known to our ancestors.
Thank you!!
