MAJURO ATOLL, Marshall Islands — Valentino Keimbar hides from the intense heat in the shade of a breadfruit tree, waiting for his basketball game to begin. It was supposed to start a couple of hours ago, maybe three, but time matters little here on the Marshall Islands.
Keimbar would love to stay on this tiny string of atolls in the vast Pacific Ocean, which he considers a precious gift from his ancestors. But he fears hotter weather and rising seas may soon force everyone to go, and that many will choose an unlikely place 6,000 miles away: Springdale, Arkansas.
For more than three decades, Marshallese have moved in the thousands to the landlocked Ozark Mountains for better education, jobs and health care, thanks to an agreement that lets them live and work in the U.S. This historical connection makes it an obvious destination for those facing a new threat: global warming.
Keimbar, 29, last year traveled to Springdale seeking medical treatment for his 6-year-old son. Now he’s considering moving permanently to secure a solid future for his children.
“Probably in 10 to 20 years from now, we’re all going to move,” he said.
Climate change poses an existential threat to places like the Marshall Islands, which protrude only 6 feet above sea level in most places. King tides, when the alignment of the Earth, moon and sun combine to produce the most extreme tidal effects, and storm surges are getting worse, resident say, causing floods that contaminate fresh water, kill crops, and erode land. As a result, some Marshallese think an exodus as inevitable, while others are planning to stay and fight.
Foreign Minister Tony de Brum is a vocal advocate for keeping global warming to a minimum, a position he’ll be pushing when world leaders meet in Paris next week seeking a way to limit fossil fuel emissions.
Growing up on the lagoon, de Brum said, he loved catching rabbitfish off Enebok Island, which was lush with coconut and breadfruit trees. But in recent years, the small, uninhabited island has slipped beneath the water. At low tide, all that remains is an exposed pile of rocks that snags flotsam: a black sandal, some frayed green rope, a coconut sprouting a green shoot.
And in July, he recounted, lagoon waves whipped up by unusual winds swept a large yacht within a few feet of his bedroom window, and then beached it nearby.
De Brum said even a small rise in global temperatures would spell the demise of his country of 70,000. While many world leaders in Paris want to curb emissions enough to cap Earth’s warming at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, de Brum is pushing for a target that’s 25 percent lower.
“The thought of evacuation is repulsive to us,” he said. “We think that the more reasonable thing to do is to seek to end this madness, this climate madness, where people think that smaller, vulnerable countries are expendable and therefore they can continue to do business as usual.”