Sinking islands and deltas A 1-metre rise in sea level could make 200 million people homeless. At particular risk are islands. Many of the people of Polynesia face a real threat of rising oceans because they are island nations with many low-lying coasts already ravaged by tropical cyclones. Global warming is likely to both raise the oceans and increase the severity of storms. Almost all the 1,196 islands of the Maldives are less than 3 meters high, and most people there live less than 2 meters above the waves.
Many more people are at risk from the flooding of deltas and other low-lying coastal areas.
Some areas are already subsiding, making them doubly vulnerable to the rising sea. The land is already sinking, partly because some 120,000 wells have been drilled to extract drinking water. But the effect of rising oceans is likely to be overshadowed by the impact of global warming on harvests. For, as the world heats up, the local patterns of rainfall and climate will both change and be subject to increased fluctuation, severely disrupting food production. Computer programs modelling the warmer world of around 2030 have come up with some tentative predictions.