'Climate change is here ..... now' - The Age

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he Sunday Age today publishes a report from climate change's front line. Our deputy editor, and former Age environment editor, Adam Morton, went to the Solomon Islands to interview residents, collect evidence and observe how the very existence of the islands is being affected by changes to the climate.

Morton's report puts flesh and bones on the arguments and proves incontrovertibly that the threat is real, that indeed lives hang in the balance.

Taro Island (pop. 600) is the capital of Choiseul, one of several provinces that make up the Solomon Islands. The atoll is a dot in the ocean, and less than that in the wider world geographically and politically. But in its fate lies a measure and a marker of how rising sea levels, brought about by climate change, can have costly consequences.

Read the Editorial in today’s Melbourne Age - “Climate change is here ... and now".

Taro Island - disappearing under the rising seas

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he 16-seater shudders on the breeze. Below, a small grid of unsealed roads runs through a village of fibro buildings ringed by palm and jungle trees. A contracting grass airstrip dips at each end into the blue of the Pacific.

The beautiful Taro Island - soon
to disappear under the rising seas.

 It could be the setting for a film about the end of the world. And for the people who live here - and will be forced to leave - it is.

Taro Island: a sometimes picturesque coral atoll adrift in the ocean at the north-western tip of the Solomon Islands.

 Barely a kilometre long and less across and almost none of it more than two metres above sea level, it is barely a smudge on a map. Yet this smudge - with its nearly 600 permanent residents, its hospital, churches (four), school, police station and courthouse - is set to take an unwanted place in history. Though tiny, it is the capital of the province of Choiseul. Soon it may be the first provincial capital in the world to be abandoned due to climate change.

Read the Age story - “The vanishing island”.