TO SOME, it will smack of deserting a sinking ship. Young people are leaving their island homes in the Pacific and Caribbean in search of jobs and higher education. Without youthful citizens, small islands will struggle to cope with the effects of rising sea levels.
So says a report from the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). "The lack of opportunity pushes the best and brightest to look elsewhere," says the report.
The exodus from islands including Samoa, Granada, Antigua and Dominica accounts for half the resident population, sometimes even exceeding it. Those left behind are mostly older people and children. "There's a lot of migration away from small island, developing states, creating a brain drain," says Melissa Gorelick, who is a UNEP information officer.
The impact of the exodus was on the agenda this week in Apia, Samoa, where delegates from dozens of Pacific and Caribbean islands met at the Small Island Developing States conference to discuss the effects of climate change on small islands. Denied the energy and ingenuity of young people to help mitigate climate change, individual islands could struggle logistically to manage the impacts of storms, hurricanes and tidal surges.
"It's something of an ongoing concern," says Ria Voorhaar of Climate Action Network International in Beirut, Lebanon. She says that incentive schemes to attract young doctors, researchers and teachers back to rural regions in Australia have worked well, so similar schemes might work on the islands.
Delegates at the meeting also set up a new consortium, called the Pacific Ocean Alliance, to provide the island states with a united front in their efforts to persuade bigger countries to do more in the fight against global warming.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Island brain drain"
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