Five Meters High And Rising

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Blue water, warm weather and an infinite oceanic horizon. These things might make the dream holiday getaway, but for people living in Small Island Developing States (SIDS) those same things are less a dream and more a nightmare. 

Climate change will affect every nation on earth, but not all in the same way. Addressing these varied challenges is all the more difficult for developing countries and even more so for SIDS, a special sub-set that faces the unique risk of their entire nations being obliterated or rendered uninhabitable. 

Though there is a host of varied threats associated with climate change, two in particular are especially harmful to SIDS: rising sea levels and extreme weather events. 

Water, water everywhere 

Kiribati has a maximum elevation of 81 meters, the Bahamas tops out at 63 m and the Maldives and Tuvalu each stand small at only 5 m. With numbers like these, it’s no wonder that sea level rise represents such an existential threat to SIDS. 

The amount of water on earth doesn’t change, though its distribution does. When temperatures are warmer a lot of that water stored as ice finds its way into the ocean, though that’s not the only way sea levels increase. Thermal expansion also plays a role, albeit a smaller one, alongside ice melt as to why ocean levels rise. Simply put, water expands as it gets warmer – and the water is always getting warmer. 

In July 2023, a buoy in the Florida Keys measured a temperature of 101.1°F (38.4°C). When the news broke, many of the headlines proclaimed Florida had hit “hot-tub levels.” According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which published the data, normal water temperatures for that area and time of year should have been between 23°C - 31°C, in other words, too cold for a comfortable hot tub. 

More recently, the Copernicus Climate Change Service announced that January 2024 was the warmest on their record books. Taking the previous 12-month period into account, the EU agency also recorded an average temperature of 1.52°C above the 1850-1900 preindustrial average. 

To get an idea of how ocean levels may rise in conjunction with warmer temperatures, NASA’s Sea Level Projection Tool offers a range of different scenarios. If temperatures are kept to the target of 1.5°C, sea levels are projected to increase about 0.44 m by the end of the century. Under the most extreme warming scenario (which is unlikely but possible), sea levels could rise by 1.6 m by 2100. 

If waters rise in places like Florida, residents can escape inland. For SIDS, there is no such escape route, a fact made all the more dire in another major climate-related danger. 

A Category 5 problem 

A more immediate, short-term problem facing SIDS are extreme weather events, such as tropical cyclones. 2017 was an especially illustrative year, when Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria and Nate hammered the Caribbean. The 2017 Atlantic hurricane season was the costliest on record, killing more than 3,000 people and causing hundreds of billions of US dollars in damage. 

Damage in places like Texas and Puerto Rico may have grabbed the headlines, but SIDS also bore the brunt of the storms. Maria was the first Category 5 storm to hit tiny Dominica. No corner of the island was unaffected; debris was strewn everywhere, all of the country’s medical centers were damaged, and lingering flooding complicated rescue and clean-up efforts. By one estimate, 98 percent of the island’s roofs were damaged. Making matters worse, Hurricane Maria knocked out Dominica’s intranet, cellular and radio services, cutting it off from the world. Eventually, 65 people were dead and damage surpassed US$1 billion, an especially high cost for a country of only 72,000 people. 

Warmer waters and moist air are fuel to hurricanes, and more powerful storms only add to their individual effects: such as flooding from increased rainfall, storm surges and sea rise. 

Of course, besides stronger hurricanes, SIDS face all the other types of climate-induced natural disasters that affect other places in the world including heatwaves and droughts. 

A game of dominoes 

The existential danger of sea level rise and the annual danger of hurricane season are hardly the only climate-related challenges small island nations have to deal with. They are sometimes the first dominoes that knock down subsequent dominoes. 

Flooding and coastal erosion are problems in and of themselves, but they also lead to infrastructure damage and changes in biodiversity. Fishing and tourism make up a good portion of the GDP of many SIDS, so damage to ports and other infrastructure risks toppling yet more dominoes. That is all the more likely if there is less money available to grow these industries because they are busy repairing damage just to get back to square one. 

Climate change disproportionally affects SIDS, which often have the smallest leverage when it comes to mobilizing international support to help them prepare for long-term climate adaptation instead of just addressing the issues of the day. 

Yet, there is hope in terms of changing how the rest of the world views the unique problems SIDS face. In November 2023, UN Development Programme (UNDP) – the Maldives published a report titled “Loss and Damage Climate Litigation” which lays out a path for SIDS to advocate for better climate action. “This duality can trigger a pivotal shift in global climate discourse, positioning countries like the Maldives not as victims but as nations at the forefront of change,” wrote Kanni Wignaraja, UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific and Enrico Gaveglia, UNDP Resident Representative in the Maldives in the report’s introduction. “Their struggles and resilience offer invaluable lessons and strategies, pushing for a world that listens, learns, and acts.” 

What causes the sea level to change? 

The average global sea level is influenced by three factors: 

Ice melt 

Warmer temperatures cause Earth’s frozen freshwater in the form of glaciers found all over the world and ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica to melt and flow into the ocean. The melting of land ice is the most significant contributor to rising ocean waters. 

Thermal expansion 

Water expands as it warms. A hotter ocean is a fuller ocean. 

Land water storage 

Groundwater pumped from non-recharging aquifers can eventually flow into the sea. On the opposite end, large dams prevent river water from finding its way into the ocean. 

Source: NASA Sea Level Change Team