Coconut crops threatened by sea level rise

Transcript

Coconut crops in the Pacific might be moving more inland as sea level rise starts to impact soil. 

Australian National University agriculture specialist Mike Bourke says climate change and eroding coastlines are causing palm trees to fall over. 

Doctor Bourke told Lucy Smith that it will be a case of compromising to ensure crops can grow, and in some places that's already happening. 
 

MIKE BOURKE: There is a possibility of adjusting to plant palms further inland, except perhaps once it's in the tiniest of islands, and that's why people in places like Tuvalu and Kiribati but also in tiny islands in Milne Bay in PNG or the Solomons, are becoming so concerned you have more options on a bigger island. On a tiny island, or atolls if the sea level rises half a metre, or a further half metre people start to run out of options and that's why the concern is so great for those communities. I've seen the evidence myself the sea level is rising beyond a doubt. So what you're getting on the little atolls - I have seen this on the little atolls of Bougainville east of Papua New Guinea. But we are getting the same reports coming atolls elsewhere in the region, the Polynesiann countries and atolls in Solomon Islands etc. The reports that I'm seeing at the moment about coconuts being impacted by sea level rise is erosion, coastal erosion. And again we're seeing the root ball of the coconut is undermined by the rising sea level and higher storm activity and then the palms fall over. Everywhere I go in PNG, people are moving villages, many coastal locations people are moving villages and cemeteries.  When you work on these very tiny islands as I do sometimes, you know people are very aware of rising sea levels, and this is still fairly early days of climate change I mean the climate's been changing for several hundred years, 150 - 200 years. But it's accelerated since the 1970s and the sea level rise has started to accelerate since the 90s. This is what the most of the data shows. We've got decades and decades of this to run, even hundreds of years. So what we're seen so far is only the start of it. That's the bigger issue I think so far the damage to coconuts, moving villages is relatively small but you give this another 50 or 100 years and as this continues the damage is going to keep increasing.

LUCY SMITH: What do you think the effect of that would be on communities in the Pacific ?

MB: They won't die out, and second people can adjust, so for example if you have coconut palms bang on the beach you can plant them 100 - 150 metres back from the beach. People can adjust so that won't happen. It will have an impact on peoples diet. Coconuts are a useful source of the income in some of the regions but the bigger impact will be the diet. The limiting factor for a lot of people in the Pacific is protein and nutritionists call concentrated forms of energy, oils and fats. The major source of oil for Pacific Islanders in their diets is coconut,  so that's where the biggest impact is. As you know many meals in the Pacific have coconut in them in one form or another, and that's particularly important to children because a child's stomach is not big enough to eat large quantities of bulky food sweet potato, cassava, taro, bananas, yams etc, so that's why the oil is so important in the diet of a child as well as adults.