Leo Falcam: GLOBAL WARMING 'SLOW DEATH' FOR PACIFIC ISLAND NATIONS

Date: 08-07-2001

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GLOBAL WARMING 'SLOW DEATH' FOR PACIFIC ISLAND NATIONS

HONOLULU (Aug. 7) -- Global warming "is nothing less than a form of slow death" for Pacific islanders, a Western Pacific leader said today at the East-West Center.

"Global warming is far more than a challenge, it is a doomsday threat," Leo A. Falcam, president of the Federated States of Micronesia, told senior policymakers, defense officials and academic experts from the United States and the Asia-Pacific region. "Sea-level rise and other related consequences of climate change are grave security threats to our very existence as homelands and nation-states."

Falcam, participating in the East-West Center's Senior Policy Seminar 2001, said climate change has also caused intensified storms, freshwater destruction, land erosion and deadly saltwater intrusion on crops.

Tuvalu, a small Pacific island nation of nine rapidly disappearing atolls, has asked Australia and New Zealand to accept its entire 10,000 population as environmental refugees. Falcam said the same thing is happening in varying degrees to islands worldwide.

He compared the devastation to the "canary in the coal mine -- providing an early warning to the global community of its own impending doom. However, this warning will have been for naught if significant steps are not taken now primarily by all industrialized nations to cut back emissions of greenhouse gases."

The United States refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol requiring industrialized countries to reduce emission of greenhouse gases, calling the protocol a flawed agreement that would harm the U.S. economy. But Falcam called upon the United States to take a leading role in climate change problems as it did when it declared AIDS a global security threat. He called climate change the "greatest global threat in human history."

Falcam joined close to 30 others at the three-day seminar, including U.S. Congressman Doug Bereuter, House of Representatives, Nebraska; Ambassador Stephen W. Bosworth, Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and former U.S. Ambassador to South Korea, Tunisia and the Philippines; Gu Ziping, Deputy Director-General, Department of Arms Control and Disarmament, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, China; Han Sung-Joo, professor of political science at Korea University and former Foreign Minister of South Korea; James A. Kelly, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs; Ambassador Le Van Bang, Vietnam Assistant Minister of Foreign Affairs; Surin Pitsuwan, member of Parliament and former Thai Foreign Minister; Krishnamurthi Santhanam, incoming Director, Institute for Defense Studies and Analyses, India; Yukio Satoh, Permanent Representative of Japan to the United Nations; and Hugh J. White, Deputy Secretary, Department of Defense, Australia.