20151201_R4

Source: BBC Radio 4: Today

URL: N/A

Date: 01/12/2015

Event: Britt Basel: "it's our emissions that have created this situation"

Credit: BBC Radio 4

People:

• Britt Basel: Climate Change Adaptation and Sustainable Resource Management Consultant
• Matthew Price: Chief Correspondent, BBC Radio 4 Today programme

Matthew Price: Vanuatu's a country spread out over hundreds of miles of this part of the Pacific Ocean - there are more than 80 islands that make up the nation, and I'm travelling between two of them at the moment, on a small launch painted bright orange. This was already an impoverished and isolated country, even before the problems associated with climate change started to hit.

Britt Basel: What they're suffering, right now, is what the Western world in our age [or "our days"?] is doing - it's our emissions that have created this situation for them.

Matthew Price: Britt Basel is a climate change advisor, working in Vanuatu. The big threat, she says, is not the rising sea levels - it's the increase in extreme weather events that scientists believe global warming is causing, and their impact on resources.

Britt Basel: If the rains don't come, and they can't get a big enough crop, they're not going to eat. Or if they have to fish too much, to be able to sell those fish to be able to buy rice because they're not producing enough crops, it destroys the entire system.