Dan Box - The Carteret Islands

Dan Box reports from a community in its death throes, as the Carteret islanders pack up their homes and prepare to become the world’s first climate change refugees

I slept in my clothes last night, on the bare wooden floor of one of the houses the first boatload of people to be evacuated from the Carteret Islands are building for their families. It was a jet-black night in the small clearing hacked out amid the jungle, the dark broken only by our two candles and the lights of Fireflies jigging in the trees.

Dan Box is on-site to witness the world's first climate refugees being evacuated due to rising sea levels

'You have camera?' The taxi driver makes a tube out of his forefingers and thumb and holds it to his eye.

In Dan Box's final write-up before he heads for the Carteret Islands, he contemplates his journey and how prepared he really is.

Dan Box makes a detour to the G20 climate protests in London, but leaves disappointed. Later, a lecture by Nicholas Stern, author of the Stern review, lifts his spirits.

Dan Box teaches a class about climate change and its effects on the Carteret Islands, which are sinking due to rising sea levels, and how children can help stop climate change.

Where the wild things are... Planning his trip to the Carterets Islands, Dan Box wonders what he'll encounter while in transit on Papua New Guinea

Working up to his departure for the Carteret Islands to report on the world's first officially recognised climate change refugees, Dan Box considers how travel insurance takes on a whole new meaning...

An inhospitable planet? As climate change forces increasingly large numbers of people to flee their homes, Ecologist blogger Dan Box considers what 'climate change refugees' actually means

Something is starting to bother me about this trip. It’s not the travelling (though when I picked up my flight tickets yesterday, the travel agent warned me that people in Papua New Guinea still wear bones through their noses. I promised to keep an eye out).

So, the Carteret Islands are sinking, but why should you care? It’s a question well worth trying to answer; after all, the islands are a long, long way away, you are unlikely to meet the people who are about to loose their homes and when they do, it won’t change your daily life.

Lying off the coast of Papua New Guinea, the Carteret Islands are slowly being engulfed by a rising sea. Follow Dan Box's weekly blog as he journeys to meet the Carteret Islanders - the first people to be officially labelled as climate change refugees.