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I'm an oceanographer,

my main interest at the moment is sea level rise,

how it effects coastal communities and how

sea level rise is going to effect

people during this century.

I'm a coral reef geomorphologist,

that means I actually study how reef islands

evolve and respond to sea level change,

both rises and falls.

John and I will be writing a report,

that we will get translated into the local language.

We'll be hoping to provide some simple,

easy to understand resources,

which will provide some advice to the community here

on what some of their options are.

At the moment the world is warming up

and it's warming up because of

other people in the world, it's certainly not you

it's other people in the world

who are burning things like diesel fuel in large amounts.

This is putting gases into the atmosphere,

which actually cause the world to warm.

One thing we know is going to happen

during this century, we're going to get some sea level rise.

But at the same time even if sea level didn't rise,

you'd see some changes to the island.

You might also find you get some problems with

erosion, with losing your shoreline.

If we do something

for one reason

it might actually make other changes,

and we have to know,

have some idea of what those other changes might be.

And we have to say,

are we happy about some of those other changes.

In 1991 people started to build sea walls?

- You can see there's a lot of water bubbling out there,

if I throw this on you can see if drift away.

It's very sulphurous.

- You can see that, the fine mud that's come up there?

See the calcium carbonate that's come up?

- Well yesterday, you know?

We levelled from the beach on the lagoon across to the sea.

The tide was at one and a half metres.

Your garden, which has the salt water coming into it,

is actually about 20 cm lower.

- That's right.

If the level of the high tides rises by 50 cm

or a metre over the next century or so,

then the water level is going to be coming up all the time.

So that's potentially going to be a little bit,

of a problem, especially for long-live crops,

like the giant taro, which take 15 years.

The water is still pretty high for a low tide isn't it?

At the moment these large waves are affecting

all the northern islands of Papua New Guinea.

So, this is a big scale event.

I'm a little worried that this afternoon

we will see waves like we did yesterday

and maybe a little worse even.

That's one reason we don't want to

keep you all here for very long today

because people might to go and move some of their possessions

out of the way of those waves.

They might not come, but they might.

John and I have been surveying around the island

we can see where some parts of the island have been eroded,

over the next few months some of those changes might come back.

And that's what happens on islands

but some of them may not

because this is a big event.

- And you have to

think that well those flooding events

50 years time they may be happening

3 to 10 times more often

just because of sea level rise.

I fully understand why people are worried and concerned

and there are thing that should

be important for your Government,

but

I don't want everybody to get very sad very soon

because there are things we need to worry about.

But we can worry and we can think

and we can get things happening

in the time.

We need to be

productive rather than panicking.

- You can alleviate that to a certain extent

simply by planning,

by moving to the areas of the island that are a bit higher.

And that's one way we can help, by telling

you which parts of the island are higher.

When you do live on an island like this and you realise

how very, very vulnerable the islands are from events,

which can suddenly change the way they are living.

These things can really be

handled quite easily if there is a regular

human communication with the outside world.

If the boat came every

two weeks or a month then this would make

life an awful lot easier for the islanders.

But as it is people don't actually know when

it's going to come, so they can't really plan.

I would be happy to live

on this island,

if I could be assured

that the resources

to reduce the vulnerability of the inhabitants

would be forthcoming.

With that in advice

we could improve

housing

and we could make it so they could get regular supplies

so that maintenance could be done

and these things weren't seen as

things that get done and then fall apart.

There's the issue of climate change here

but there's also simply an issue of money

and resources

and we're talking about a country that

simply doesn't have the money to do

the things that need to be done.

Thank you for looking after us.

Maybe when people do things

they need to consider more about

whether or not if the places that they hold dear,

they had to leave

or even if those places were

to be struck off the map

how would they feel about that.

And then they need to magnify that impact by 10 times

because this is all these people know,

their whole culture their life, everything is here.

It's not like they can just travel up the coast

or down Th coast or somewhere else this is it.

This is their world

and their world is being destroyed.

The climate signs I think will say

that the developed world has to start to really reduce

it's emissions in order to allow the

developing world to raise it's emissions

we can't expect the developing world to actually not

have any greenhouse gas emission increases,

otherwise they're just not going

to lift themselves out of poverty.