MS. JOSELOW: Good afternoon. How’s everyone doing? For those of you just joining, and who didn’t catch the last panel I moderated, I’m Maxine Joselow, a climate policy and politics reporter here at The Washington Post, and I’m delighted to be joined by Tina Stege, the Climate Envoy for the Marshall Islands. Tina, thank you so much for joining us. MS. STEGE: Thank you, Maxine. Thanks for having me, and thank you to all of you for being here. It’s wonderful to see a packed house. MS. JOSELOW: It is. We just talked about Antarctica and we’re now shifting around the world to the Marshall Islands to talk about your fight for a livable future in the face of sea level rise and extreme climate change. The Marshall Islands are highly, highly vulnerable to climate change. The territory may cease to exist if we see 2 degrees Celsius of global warming above pre-industrial levels. Help the audience understand why you’ve said that climate change is something that the Marshall Islands are really, truly on the front lines of? MS. STEGE: Well, I think you all saw that video. I wasn’t expecting the video. It showed you a bit of what Majuro, which is actually the atoll that I grew up on, is like. You can see, if you fly into the Marshall Islands, as you’re landing in our airport, you don’t actually see much runway. Pretty much what you see is blue. So the picture you saw just now, that’s all of the country. It’s all coast. There is no area for us that isn’t coastline. We’re two meters above sea level, which is between six and seven feet. So even in the last panel you were hearing about sea level rise. It makes climate change an existential threat […]
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