Vanuatu Has Been Devastated by a Cyclone and Canada's Response Has Been Tepid

Pretty much no one has heard of Vanuatu. If you have, it's because of cargo cults—aka the ritualized worship of airplanes, American flags, and Prince Philip. Vanuatu's John Frum cargo cult was the theme of the 2013 Burning Man festival. And Vanuatu was the location of season nine of Survivor, subtitle: Islands of Fire. Only stoners and surfers know Vanuatu.

That is, until Saturday, when it was hit by what's being called "the most powerful cyclone to hit the South Pacific since records began." The words "total devastation" keep getting thrown around.

"It's becoming increasingly clear that we are now dealing with worse than the worst case scenario in Vanuatu," Oxfam Executive Director Helen Szoke said in a statement on Sunday. "We hold grave fears for the people on these outer and remote islands."

"Vanuatu islanders forced to drink seawater," said the BBC. And there are reports that nine of the 43 Canadians potentially affected by the cyclone have yet to be reached.

A group of Canadian doctors are recommending that the government fire up our Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) to help Vanuatu out.

"A DART deployment is a low-risk, low-cost… and do-able expression of Canada's commitment to our Pacific neighbours," they write. As of yet, DART has not been deployed.

Canada's failure to help Vanuatu should be, they write, "a controversy that would mire the government's reputation not only for the next election, but in the history books."

It seems like a strong statement. The Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development (DFAIT) initially pledged $20,000 to Red Cross to assist in Vanuatu relief, and on Wednesday this was increased to $160,000. While far behind the approximately $2.36 million of disaster relief from New Zealand, it is more than half the amount contributed by the International Cricket Council.

Hey, it's not like this cyclone is our fault. Right?

Let's start at the top. Vanuatu is a country in the South Pacific. It is west of Fiji, north of New Zealand, and home to about 270,000 people across about 83 islands. It is uniquely a former colony of both England and France, and the Ni-Vanuatu people often speak both French and English, along with their indigenous language and something called Bislama.

Mi save toktok Bislama frum we olgeta famili blong mi hemi ben stap long Vanuatu long taem mi ben stap wan pikinini. (Which translates to, "I speak Bislama, because my family lived there when I was a kid.") The usefulness of speaking Bislama is generally limited to first dates, where it ranks alongside the fact that I waited in line for 42 hours to see Star Wars: Episode 1. So now we know why I care about Vanuatu, but the question remains: should you?

Vanuatu is a rural country, one of the world's poorest. Most of the people live without power or running water, but that doesn't mean that the people are always starving. The Ni-Vanuatu are primarily subsistence farmers. They live in small villages and survive on the food that they grow in their gardens, and the little that they sell at local outdoor markets. Someone who has a lot of mangoes sells them for some yams, and then shares the hot gossip about a couple in the next village who've been sneaking out onto the coral reefs.

But Vanuatu isn't some modern Eden, where food just falls off the trees. I remember how scandalized the people there were when they saw me spit out my seeds after eating an orange. Even as they're walking along the road, the Ni-Vanuatu collect the seeds of the fruit in their hands so that they can plant them. So they can make more food, because that's how it's fucking supposed to work.

Flash forward to this past weekend. "Vanuatu's Tanna island residents are running out of food after Cyclone Pam," says the Sydney Morning Herald.

While immediate casualty rates have been lower than expected, aid agencies are becoming increasingly concerned with the long-term survival of people accustomed to big storms, but never as big as this.

Doctors from Canada have been going to Vanuatu since 1991. Through the Victoria-Vanuatu Physicans Project, they volunteered at the island's only hospital, a mostly open-air, cinder-block building with limited power supply. Patients were often accompanied by entire, concerned families, who remained there, sleeping, cooking and eating alongside them, until their release. In January of this year, the ViVa doctors were officially and happily made redundant, as local Ni-Vanuatu doctors took over the care of Lenakel Hospital and the island's 30,000 residents.

On Sunday, CNN reported from Lenakel Hospital and the images were hard to take. Cyclone Pam hit the island dead on. It destroyed the hospital, along with all the incubators, X-ray machines, and medical supplies painstakingly gathered over 25 years of humanitarian work. There is now a crowdfunding campaign to rebuild Lenakel Hospital.

Dr. Jeffrey Unger just returned to Canada from Tanna. In an open letter to MP Kellie Leitch, he describes the complete loss of the national food supply, and compromised water sources on the island. "Epidemic infectious diseases are imminent," he said. "Without immediate action, this will mean many, many preventable deaths."

While tragic on its own, the situation in Vanuatu has a significant link to climate change in general and Canada in particular. Speaking from a UN conference on disaster and risk in Japan, the president of Vanuatu directly attributed this storm to climate change. "We see the level of sea rise… The cyclone seasons, the warm, the rain, all this is affected," he told the Guardian. "This year we have more than in any year."

Canada consistently ranks among the top greenhouse gas-emitting countries in the world. Thanks to those blossoming oil development projects, we use more energy per-capita than almost any other country. When it comes to climate change policy, we're number one—as in, the worst. "Canada still shows no intention of moving forward with climate policy and therefore remains the worst performer of all industrialized countries," reads the 2013 annual report from Climate Action Network Europe.

Professor Kerry Emanuel is an atmospheric scientist and meteorologist at MIT. In a careful analysis of Cyclone Pam, he points to the growing consensus that a warming planet means more high-intensity storms, more often.

"Basic theory and a variety of numerical simulations support this," he writes, "as well as the projection that tropical cyclones should produce substantially more rain, owing to the increased moisture content of the tropical atmosphere."

According to Emanuel, author of Divine Wind: The History and Science of Hurricanes, "while Pam and Haiyan, as well as other recent tropical cyclone disasters, cannot be uniquely pinned on global warming, they have no doubt been influenced by natural and anthropogenic climate change."

The South Pacific is often referred to as the "canary in the coalmine" when it comes to climate change. The islands of Vanuatu are low-lying, many only a few feet above sea level, so those inches of rising sea levels mean a lot. "When a 100-year event becomes a 50-year event, it may take a few destructive hits before we adapt to the new reality," says Prof. Emanuel.

Adapting to this "new reality" in the North means you have to buy a pair of long-johns that are 100 percent wool instead of the cute pink cotton ones. In the Global South, it means you're starving. It means the garden your family has cultivated for 1,000 years through storms and summers has been turned to mud.

It might seem like we're all barreling headlong towards catastrophe, with nothing but accelerationists and health goths to welcome us in their clammy embrace. But the reality is that a lot of people are being chucked ahead of us. The canary doesn't just fly down into the coal mine to see what's up. It's carried down there in a cage, by someone who figures they'll have enough time to get out once it's dead.

Vanuatu is no Nauru—it hasn't been strip-mined or over-forested, and they haven't destroyed their fisheries. They live sustainably, like they always have, but right now they're paying for our garbage habits. As the president of the similarly tiny island country of Seychelles put it, "Today it is the South Pacific, tomorrow it could be us."

What is Vanuatu to us? Even if climate change has caused this super storm, it's not like me and my bike caused climate change. We shouldn't help Vanuatu because this cyclone is necessarily, individually our fault. We should help Vanuatu because they need it, and we can.

So far our government has yet to step up to the plate. Inquiries regarding DART were redirected to a statement about the Red Cross donation. Defence analyst Stewart Webb sees this as a missed opportunity. "DART has the specialization to assist in these conditions," he said. "They're just awaiting orders."

For his part, Dr. Unger is disappointed. "The UK, I heard today, is sending a special forestry team, to Tanna specifically, that helps to clear up the aftermath of this kind of debris," he said. "The Canadian government has issued a travel advisory."

Wan samting ia i makem haet blong mi i hevi tumas. (Translation: That makes me sad.)

You can contribute to the Vanuatu Relief through Oxfam or Canadian Red Cross, or donate directly to the rebuilding of Tanna's Lenakel Hospital.

Follow Mayana C. Slobodian on Twitter.