Vanuatu cyclone sounds alarm over climate change

In this photo provided by China’s Xinhua news agency, locals walk past debris in Port Vila, Vanuatu, after Cyclone Pam ripped through the tiny South Pacific archipelago on Sunday. — AP

Despite ominous predictions of mass devastation in cyclone-wrecked Vanuatu, policymakers at a UN disaster meeting in Japan do not seem to understand the pressing need to tackle climate change, the World Bank warned Sunday.

A state of emergency has been declared in the impoverished Pacific nation, where dozens are feared dead after one of the most powerful storms ever recorded smashed through. Aid agencies have spoken of “grave fears” over the scale of the human tragedy.

But Rachel Kyte, World Bank vice-president and special envoy for climate change, said there appeared to be a disconnect between policy and the increasingly frequent weather-related disasters the world is suffering.

“I worry that a sense of urgency and a sense of shared ambition is not at the right level,” she told AFP in an interview on the sidelines of the UN Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction in Sendai, Japan.

“It’s hugely ironic that this storm should hit Vanuatu while we are all here. If we truly care for those people, we have to respond,” she said, referring to the need for environmental commitments.

“I think we have to hold ourselves accountable and at least voluntarily we should have targets” from the Sendai conference on disaster risk reduction, she said.

The official death toll from Super Cyclone Pam, a maximum category five storm that swept through Vanuatu, stood at six on Sunday, although the UN had unconfirmed reports of 44 people killed in just one province.

Aid agency Oxfam said up to 90 percent of houses in the capital Port Vila were damaged as winds of up to 320 kilometres (200 miles) an hour lashed the country on Friday night.

It said the scale of the disaster would not be known until reports filter in from outlying islands.

“This is likely to be one of the worst disasters ever seen in the Pacific, the scale of humanitarian need will be enormous... Entire communities have been blown away,” said Oxfam’s Vanuatu director Colin Collet van Rooyen.

Vanuatu’s President Baldwin Lonsdale used the Sendai conference to make an emotional appeal for help from the international community, telling representatives of 190 countries that his archipelago country needed “a lending hand”.