Name: How do we stop islands sinking? - BBC Learning English
Uploaded: 2021-10-19T16:45:07.000Z
Duration: 10 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Rising sea levels, coupled with an increase in severe storms,

You'll learn what lawmakers are doing to deal with this threat.

and increasingly severe and unpredictable storms?

Why those most affected are often least to blame...

40% of people live within 100km of the coast

and one in ten of us live in coastal areas

recent rises are the fastest in nearly 3,000 years.

Rising seas and storms wash away the land, flood homes,

It's driven by rising temperatures melting polar ice

and even expanding the water that is already there.

Smaller island countries will be hardest hit,

but they often create very little pollution.

Francesco Sindico, from the University of Strathclyde

and the Climate Change Litigation Initiative,

explained why this issue would take a long time to solve internationally.

It will be very difficult for international law

to operate at the same speed of national law,

where you have laws created by a parliament,

enforced by – for example – the police,

on such a very complex matters, often there is a compromise,

which means that things will be dealt with slowly.

international law doesn't have just one country making rules;

which means they take time to come to a compromise agreement.

So, how easy is it to find out who's responsible?

for an island that may... or is already sinking.

The emissions are coming from all over the world.

Having said that, in the last five to ten years,

that some countries and some private actors

The nature of climate change makes it very hard to identify

who is responsible for something like a sinking island.

Five or ten years ago, a study called the Carbon Majors study

highlighted that the overwhelming majority

really comes from a handful of companies.

to go in front of a judge and tell him or her:

'Look. Now, we know that there's a connection

between the problem – climate change –

More research is being done into climate change.

going after the governments of the countries where they live.

At the same time, you also have elderly people

who are seeing their livelihood suffering because of climate change

human rights – they're using international law

and they're using a number of very interesting,

Children and the elderly are getting involved,

using human rights and international laws in creative ways.

So, that shows how hard it can be for the law

who are trying to live on these vanishing islands.

just 0.03% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

Seventeen-year-old Hereiti lives on Rarotonga,

one of the Cook Islands in the Pacific Ocean.

As a Polynesian person, I have a connection to it.

Since we first started voyaging across it,

it's been the lifeblood of our islands and our culture.

But with rising sea levels and pollution, I feel like that...

that history that we've had for thousands of years

Rising sea levels result in strong wave action and coastal flooding,

We're seeing a lot of coastal erosion happening

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How do we stop islands sinking? - BBC Learning English

entire

essentially

overwhelming

majority