My home country is one of those island nations. My Mum found one of those water level prediction models online and it scares me how high the water is gonna be here by 2050.

I’m already seeing our native plants, which don’t grow anywhere else, dying because it’s too warm, and this is the mildest winter I’ve ever experienced at home, which is really alarming because we’re quite far down south so you’d expect snow all season. When I came home a few years ago the sea froze in some places, but it doesn’t do that anymore.

Around Christmas last year, several of our pond/lakes completely dried up too (the only other time that happened, according to a lady my Grandparents know, she’s about 80, was one time during her early childhood). There’s a group who goes out litter picking around our shores and almost all of the rubbish they pick up has arrived here by the ocean currents from other countries. One of my friends from school is doing her PHD and she’s researching micro plastics in our country and her preliminary results are terrifying - she’s found them everywhere.

We heavily rely on our environment to fund our country too, like our main industries are fishing (we’re already over exploring half our fish stocks), tourism (we have some rare wildlife which only breeds here) and agriculture. My government is adamant that we have oil too but if we do, I just want them to leave it in the fucking ground where it belongs. There’s only so much we can do here as well though (which I’m trying to get our gov to do because we can’t just sit here twiddling our thumbs hoping the rest of the world gets their shit together, we still can contribute to finding a solution), but we are still a small, insignificant country without any power on the global stage, and while we aren’t poor, we aren’t rich either.

I can’t see countries in the northern hemisphere welcoming us with open arms when those of us from the global south have to start fleeing our homes, whether that’s because our farmers can’t grow things anymore because of the impact on agriculture from rising temperatures changing the climate so crops won’t be able to grow in certain areas anymore, or because of rising sea levels reclaiming the land we’ve built on, or whatever else climate change will bring to us.

Sorry, this ended up being way longer than I meant it to be, I’m just very upset about it all lol. Someone else posted about how “entertaining” this whole situation unfolding will be earlier in the DD today, and I saw red because it’s probably not going to affect them anywhere near as much as it will affect the rest of us down south, and it’s not a fucking joke.