Britain’s King Charles will be offered the title of High Chief in Samoa during a three-day visit starting on Wednesday and will be shown the impact of rising sea levels caused by climate change in the Pacific island nation.
Samoan premier and member of parliament Lenatai Victor Tamapua said he planned to bestow the title of ‘Tui Taumasina’ on the monarch during the traditional ceremonial welcome of Charles and Queen Camilla on Thursday.
He will later lead Charles through a walkway over a mangrove reserve highlighting the impact of climate change on the Pacific nation and its communities.
“Today the king tide is almost double what it was 20, 30 years ago, and it’s affecting our land, and it’s eating away at some areas that are very hard for us to control, and driving people inland. Have to go inland now,” Tamapua said.
Charles has spent his entire life campaigning on environmental issues and in 2020 called global warming and climate change the biggest threats facing humanity.
The offer of the high premiership to Charles comes after he was accused of “genocide” by an Indigenous Australian senator at Parliament House in Canberra during the monarch’s six-day visit to Australia that concluded on Wednesday.
The Australian royal tour was Charles’s first visit to an overseas territory as sovereign, his first major trip abroad since being diagnosed with cancer, and the first visit to Australia by a British monarch in 13 years.
Charles is the head of state in Australia, New Zealand and 12 other Commonwealth realms outside the United Kingdom, although the role is largely ceremonial.
He is also the symbolic head of the Commonwealth and is traveling to Samoa for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, his first visit to the island of about 200,000 people. He is expected to leave Samoa on Saturday morning.
More than half of the Commonwealth’s members are small states, many of them Pacific island nations facing the threat of rising sea levels due to climate change. Leaders are expected to make a declaration on protecting the oceans, with climate change a major topic of discussion.
Britain has said it will not bring the issue of compensation for historical transatlantic slavery sought by Caribbean countries to the CHOGM table, but is ready to engage with leaders who want to discuss it.
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