Climate refugees on wobbly bridge

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 11, and Nell, 8, spent three happy months during summer 2007 travelling around Britain. Now we're home but the travel bug is still there. Join us for the occasional sightseeing plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint.

Friends arrive during half term for city sightseeing so we take them on London's best visitor route, the number 4 bus down to St Paul's Cathedral. Nearby the wobbly bridge over the Thames has sprouted mini tents. It's an idea by the German artist Hermann Josef Hack for Oxfam's Here & Now campaign timed to coincide with two-day EU heads of state and . The art installation is in seven cities including Amsterdam and Brussels.

Lola, Nell and Xander (now 10 and born in land-locked Zimbabwe) stretch out amongst the tents and get snapped while I calculate that the tents are 20cm high - just about the height the sea's already risen since 1900. You can find out more about what sea level rise means in the excellent new book for kids Gaia Warriors, by Nicola Davies which is published by Walker Books, £9.99, buy from Amazon.

20cm doesn't look much, but for countries like Tuvalu, or the Maldives where land is barely 1m above sea level this is serious stuff. No surprise that the big London march timed for the Copenhagen COP on Saturday December 5 is to be called The Wave. Find out more here.

Not everyone is impressed by story campaigns. I overhear an irritated woman on the bridge complaining that someone will break their ankle on the cardboard tents. She doesn't lack imagination, but is clearly having trouble with empathy. Does she know that The Maldives has a dynamo head of state, who has already conducted a cabinet meeting underwater to alert the world to his country's sinking future (lots more about the Maldives plight here). To date Tuvalu is less good at climate change PR but the funniest book I've ever read, Tales of the Tikongs, is by Epeli Hau'ofa from Tuvalu so clearly there are skilled wits on the islands who could if they wanted to do so.


What a loss it will be to have either of these countries turned Atlantis.

Pacific pleasures

Pete, Nicola, Lola, 9, and Nell, 6, spent three happy months during summer 2007 traveling around Britain. Now we’re home but the travel bug is still there. Join us for the occasional sightseeing plus tips on how to shrink your carbon footprint. This post is from Nicola (with pic of Lola and Nell strictly come dancing the Pacific way)

Aloha! It’s not all dancing in the Pacific, but at this year’s Pacific Island Society we were treated to a taste of Oceania with dancing from Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Cook Islands. There was a particularly energetic and expert show from Kiribati which has set up the Beats of the Pacific group to delight the UK. It’s a big group which has drummers, MC, mothers, single women and children as young as three swirling their grass skirts and lavalavas (hips left to right and round and round) in the most astonishing displays of dexterity. There were three blokes dancing who stole the show with their warrior poses, paddle action and proud Polynesian energy. They tried to get some of the crowd to join in, but with the average age of the audience at over 60 I think some people’s hips may need replacing sooner than anticipated. Not mine though as I was too chicken (and coldy) to go for it. In contrast Lola and Nell took to the dance floor happily.

Despite such a happy event it is not easy to forget that the people of Tuvalu – 11,000 of them – are facing enormous change in the next few years thanks to climate change which is causing sea levels to rise. Because their homeland islands just don’t have hills the Tuvaluans are likely to be the first climate change environmental refugees of an anticipated 1-3 million. New Zealand has agreed to take 75 per cent of all Tuvaluan migrants each year, which may be generous but switching from island life to Kiwi consumerism is hardly to be looked forward to – unless there’s no other alternative.