He is an activist social scientist with a strong dose of climate anxiety, and now the leading German research institute IfW in Kiel is threatening to fire him for not returning in time from his fieldwork in the Solomon Islands archipelago. Cause? Gianluca Grimalda refuses to take the plane and opts for a return journey by sea and land, which takes an estimated two months. He has already been denied his salary for September, he tells us on Wednesday through a faltering telephone connection NRC.
He does the interview in a village on Bougainville, 22 thousand kilometers away from Kiel. Last Friday, the IfW sent Grimalda an official warning that he had to be back by Monday at the latest. He was indirectly ordered to catch the plane. The deadline that the IfW gave the 51-year-old Italian was much later than agreed prior to the investigation. The researcher actually had to be back on German soil on September 10.
According to him, Grimalda’s fieldwork on Bougainville — the largest island of the Solomon Islands — did not exactly go smoothly. He says he was held for a while by men with machetes who demanded a ransom in exchange for his release. His research documents were stolen, and Grimalda struggled to gain access to many communities living on Bougainville. When he emailed his employer about the delay, he heard nothing back. Must be fine, he thought.
Rising sea levels
On Bougainville, Grimalda spent six months researching the consequences of climate change for the many communities on the island, which officially belongs to Papua New Guinea. Surrounded by a rising Pacific Ocean, Papua New Guinea is directly experiencing the effects of global warming. He learned that virtually all communities that had lived on the coast for centuries had moved inland because of the approaching seawater. “The old locations are now 20 centimeters under water.”
Communities on the island — about twenty times the size of Texel — are also increasingly facing food shortages, Grimalda learned. “People used to harvest more than enough sweet potatoes, bananas and coconuts there to live on. Now many Bougainvilleans regularly go to bed hungry.”
Grimalda would contribute as little as possible to this on the return journey, he firmly promised the people he spoke to on the island. “Their problems are largely caused by emissions from Europeans and North Americans. As a white man, I feel responsible for that. My choice not to take the plane is just a drop in the ocean, but it is all I can do.” Grimalda finds it uncomfortable that he is now being received as a hero due to his choice on social media because of his “privileged position”.
Return journey by land and sea
On the outward journey, Grimalda also avoided the plane as much as possible, but he still had to take to the air twice. Now he expects that this will not be necessary, because local residents actively supported his intention. He travels on a freighter from Bougainville to Papua New Guinea, then takes the boat to Indonesia and then the ferry to Singapore. From there he continues his journey overland, on trains and buses. He boards the ferry one last time between Greece and his mother country Italy.
Grimalda doesn’t know what the future holds for him. Before the IfW can fire him, they must give him one final warning, he says. Only then does the protocol allow a resignation letter to be sent. Research institute IfW did not respond to questions on Wednesday morning NRC. “I want to make it clear that the climate crisis is an extraordinary situation. We cannot continue as usual. Maybe soon I will no longer be a researcher, but an activist. Then I just have to accept that.”