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258 18 Climate Change, Sea Level Rise, and Development in Small Island States and Territories of the Indian Ocean christian bouchard Introduction Small island states and territories (SISTs) are of limited size, possess small populations and vulnerable economies, rely on limited local resource bases, and are environmentally fragile. Cumulating smallness (small land mass, small population, and small economy) and insularity (which implies geographical isolation and even spatial fragmentation in the case of archipelagos), SISTs are widely recognized as singular cases both in terms of environment and development.1 However, even if all these islands share many common development constraints deriving from their small size and insularity, they all possess their own identities in regard to human and physical environments. In the Indian Ocean, seven small island developing states (SIDS) and eight small inhabited island territories qualify as SISTs (see map 18.1). This chapter focuses on the cases of the Union of Comoros, Maldives, Mauritius , and Seychelles, as well as on the French islands territories of Mayotte (part of the Comoros Archipelago) and Réunion (part of the Mascarene Archipelago), which together cover a wide range of specific small island situations. In the global context of SISTs, climate change and sea level rise are classically pinpointed as one of the most serious challenges that these island systems will be facing in the 21st century. It is commonly said that SISTs stand to be very negatively impacted by coastal erosion and land loss, flooding, soil salinization, intrusion of saltwater in groundwater aquifers, lower coral resilience, and more severe weather events. In addition, the gravity of these impacts may well be enhanced by their cumulative interactions as well as by human factors. Thus, even given the lowest climate change and sea level rise projections, it is highly probable that their outcome will be quite significant in small islands. Collectively, climate change impacts are expected to particularly affect human health and well-being, coastal environments , agriculture, fisheries, and tourism, and thus the general sustainability of the island communities. As the climate change phenomenon emerges as a reality, the main concern becomes how the small islands will cope with its predicted manifestations and impacts. Even though the fears in the 1980s of a 2 to 3 meter rise in sea level for the 21st century have been discarded, the issue remains of great significance, as we now know that even a rise of twenty or more centimeters will have drastic effects on some coastal environments as well as on vulnerable coastal infrastructures and communities. Overall, the final outcome of climate change and sea level rise on the small island systems will depend on the nature of the climate change itself (what will really happen?), the feedback mechanisms (interactions between humans and the environment), the human adaptive capacity, and the resilience of biophysical and human systems (IPCC 2001, 868). Given the great variability of the local geographical settings; including environmental, socio-cultural, economical, and political aspects, the overall outcome of climate change is likely to vary considerably from one SIST to another and even between islands of the same SIST. Thus, the specific impacts of climate change on each of the Indian Ocean small islands have to be addressed by giving strong attention to their individual human and physical attributes. The Indian Ocean Small Island States and Territories Small island states and territories can be defined as island entities that are less than 30,000 square kilometers (with no individual island being more than 17,000 square kilometers), that have a permanent population (and thus a real native island society ), and that, in the case of territories, are at a distance exceeding several hundred kilometers from the continental state to which they belong (Bouchard 2006). There are formally seven small island states and eight small island territories2 in the Indian Ocean Region (see map 18.1). East Timor, Bahrain, and Singapore represent atypical small island states cases that will not be addressed here;3 neither will the cases of the small island territories of Andaman and Nicobar (India), British Indian Ocean Territory (UK), Christmas Island and Cocos Islands (Australia), Lakshadweep (India), and Socotra (Yemen) be discussed. Out of the six studied Indian Ocean SISTs, the Maldives are the most vulnerable to climate change and sea level rise. The Maldivian archipelago is made up of 1,192 low-lying small coralline islands grouped into 26 atolls situated on top of a volcanic ridge 960 kilometers in length (orientated north-south). About...

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