Cancun Wet Wild

Climate sceptics are driven to distraction by the media constantly reporting that climate change is already drowning these pacific atolls. They point out sea level rises over recent decades are quite modest (around 3 millimetres a year) and that the current problems of the Kiribati atolls are a combination of over-population, erosion due to cyclones, storm surges and salt infiltration of water supplies.

The film quickly puts those arguments to rest. The threat is long term but the environmental damage is real and happening right now. Graphic pictures show the ease with which spring tides are already breaking through the primitive sea walls, flooding homes and killing off coconut trees and kumara plantations through salination.

In the short term, Kiribati could protect itself with better sea walls but the resources are not there at the scale required to prevent disaster. The recent spring tides, driven by ENSO are a bitter taste of things to come.

The film focuses on the efforts of a young Kiribati woman living in Sydney to spread awareness of the problem and follows her to Copenhagen and Cancun as a spokesperson for her nation. On paper the results are good – a $30 billion adaptation fund was committed at Copenhagen to help countries like Kiribati take protective action.

However none of this money has yet been delivered on the ground and the film shows one village desperately trying to keep the "hungry tide" from their homes and fields as gaping holes appear in the piles of cement bags used to hold back the sea.

The current problem is actually fixable if the west provided the aid needed to improve the sea defences - putting extra layers on a sea wall to protect a village is said to cost as little as $50,000. However the long term prospects are grim as most predictions suggest a long term sea level rise of a metre. If this occurs the atolls will become uninhabitable.

The impressive President of Kiribati, Anote Tong puts the case very effectively in the film. The future of the islands will not be determined for a few decades - but the immediate problems are real. Action is needed now to both protect the islands and also preparing for a future partial or complete evacuation.