Climate change isn't a distant threat -- it's our reality | Selina Neirok Leem

TED Talks Daily

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2022

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Every year, ocean levels rise and high tides flood the low-lying Marshall Islands in the Pacific, destroying homes, salinating water supplies and disrupting livelihoods. In a stirring poem and talk, youth climate warrior Selina Neirok Leem explains why adaptation using Indigenous solutions is the only choice for people on the front lines of climate change. "These islands are our ancestors, our predecessors, our homes," Leem says. "We are at the risk of losing all of that for something we contributed very little to."

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Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. We keep saying the climate crisis is urgent, but it's most urgent for Pacific Islanders, like today's speaker, Selena Nehrock-Lean. Places like her home of the Marshall Islands are most immediately imperiled by the rising sea levels
0:21.3	threatening their livelihoods and their lives. At the Countdown Summit in 2021, she paints a compelling
0:27.2	picture of her reality as part of a plea for all of us to take notice and act faster.
0:36.7	Who got what are you? turn the tithes. We must give back chance my ancestors.
0:47.6	The thunder strikes as the sea demon is swept through the lands of the fiery likeness of Landau's fire, tearing apart livelihood, the mounting waves and erosions leave my island gaping like the mouth of a dead fish.
1:09.0	Tens muscles of uncles and aunties that hauled cement for the seawall, cooked meals for the hungry bellies.
1:17.6	Release and release.
1:21.2	The tides have gone out.
1:25.4	I look to my grandparents' graves, intimate with limp seaweeds.
1:34.4	The disrespect.
1:37.8	My name is Selena Lam.
1:42.8	At 18, at the COP 21, alongside late ambassador for climate change, Tony de Broome, I introduced
1:50.4	myself as a small island girl with big dreams.
1:55.2	Five years later, I reintroduce myself as a climate warrior from Island Gainar, the Marshall Islands.
2:04.3	Situated between Hawaii and Australia, our chain of islands decorate the Pacific Ocean like seashells,
2:11.6	and they are home to about 60,000 people.
2:15.8	Our islands average above two meters above sea level,
2:20.1	and it is not uncommon to see both the ocean and lagoon side
2:24.3	from wherever you stand.
2:27.5	We say our highest point is the bridge
2:30.2	which curves about seven meters above the sea.
2:34.8	The massive body of water is our reality and our livelihood.
	...

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