Ade Adepitan travels to the Pacific to see how the climate emergency is shrinking the land and killing the future – and to ask what, if anything, can be done to halt the destruction
Ade Adepitan addresses what he calls “the elephant in the room” fairly early on in his new three-part series, Climate Change: Ade on the Frontline (BBC Two). For the purposes of this show, Adepitan travels first to the Solomon Islands, then to Australia, ending this first stage of his trip in Tasmania. He is, he says, aware that flying to these places is not ideal, but he believes it is important to “see and meet the people being impacted by climate change every day”.
One of the most successful points made by the series is that the people being severely impacted by climate change are rarely the people who have contributed much to its increasingly rapid and destructive march. In the Solomon Islands, he meets a woman who would hop across the water to visit the small island where her grandparents had a home. It used to be dense forest. She shows Adepitan a photograph from 10 years ago, and it looks like paradise. She takes him out to its location on a boat, where dead or dying branches of trees now poke out of the water where paradise once stood. The island is gone. Others nearby are becoming smaller by the year.
