{"id":74096,"date":"2025-08-17T02:47:13","date_gmt":"2025-08-17T02:47:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/74096\/"},"modified":"2025-08-17T02:47:13","modified_gmt":"2025-08-17T02:47:13","slug":"how-to-leave-a-sinking-nation-tuvalus-dreams-of-dry-land-tuvalu","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/74096\/","title":{"rendered":"How to leave a sinking nation: Tuvalu\u2019s dreams of dry land | Tuvalu"},"content":{"rendered":"

In November 2022, Simon Kofe, then foreign minister of the island nation of Tuvalu<\/a>, announced a sensational plan for his country\u2019s survival. Climate breakdown poses an existential threat to small island-nations in the Pacific, but Tuvalu\u2019s geography makes it especially vulnerable. The highest point of elevation in the country is 4.5 metres. If the water rises, there is no hill to run to. In the past four decades, local sea level has risen twice as fast as the global average.<\/p>\n

By 2050, the government expects half of the capital, Funafuti, to be flooded by tidal waters. By the end of the century, more than 90% of the land could be submerged. \u201cAs our land disappears, we have no choice but to become the world\u2019s first digital nation,\u201d Kofe declared in a video address to delegates<\/a> at the UN climate conference Cop27. In the background was an islet of Funafuti, Te Afualiku.<\/p>\n

\u201cIslands like this one won\u2019t survive,\u201d Kofe said. Then came the twist: \u201cSo, we will recreate them virtually.\u201d<\/p>\n

Organ music swelled, the camera zoomed out, and the image of Kofe standing on the island flickered like a glitch in a video game. The leaves of the trees behind Kofe were bathed in sunlight, but as the view widened, the sky was revealed as a black void: Kofe was delivering his address from a digital rendition of the islet. As he continued his speech, the camera went higher, as if on a drone, and Kofe became smaller and smaller. Frigate birds circled above him, signifying bad weather. \u201cWithout a global conscience and a global commitment to our shared wellbeing,\u201d Kofe continued, \u201cwe may soon find the rest of the world joining us online, as their lands disappear.\u201d<\/p>\n

As an advertisement to draw attention to Tuvalu\u2019s grim predicament, it was designed to shock. The words Kofe spoke had been polished by an Australian creative agency affiliated with Accenture. They generated a tremendous market response: travel vloggers began to descend on the \u201csinking nation\u201d, followed by country-counting tourists who wanted to get a glimpse before it disappears.<\/p>\n

The idea of a virtual future for Tuvalu generated frenzied commentary. By creating a digital clone of the islands, a headline in the Guardian pondered<\/a>, could we not \u201cpreserve the island nation before it\u2019s lost to the collapsing climate?\u201d The Sydney Morning Herald reported<\/a>, \u201cTuvalu turns to metaverse to guarantee its existence.\u201d The video won an award at the Cannes Lions international festival of creativity, beating ads for Mastercard and Budweiser. Adweek reported on the \u201caward-winning metaverse project that\u2019s saving a nation\u201d.<\/p>\n

This was a time when the US media was producing two articles<\/a> a day about the metaverse: it was going to \u201cshape our future\u201d, it was the \u201cfuture of connection\u201d, it was \u201creality beyond fantasy\u201d. It also became something that might save poor Tuvalu from extinction. Yet this outlandish idea sidestepped the most basic question posed by Tuvalu\u2019s possible submersion: where are the people going to go? Last year, I flew from New York to Fiji, which provides the only aerial connection to Tuvalu, to find out how Tuvaluans felt about the future that the government had imagined for them.<\/p>\n

Spread 420 miles across the western Pacific, halfway between Australia and Hawaii, Tuvalu is made up of nine islands, six of which are atolls. Funafuti is an atoll, consisting of 33 individual islets. Their combined surface area is smaller than Central Park, and the lagoon they surround is spread over 103 sq miles. From the window of a low-flying, 68-seat aircraft that flies three times a week to Tuvalu from Fiji, I could only see a part of the atoll, not the whole ring. There were no tall structures visible, no sprawl of cement and no bridges connecting the islets, some of which are completely covered in a huddle of treetops.<\/p>\n

The population of Tuvalu is just over 11,000 and more than half of the people live on a single islet of Funafuti, called Fongafale. It is a sliver of land eight miles long, with a small airstrip near the centre. After my plane landed, it came to a stop in front of a small airport building. Going through immigration, customs and the exit took about five minutes. Filamona Lodge, one of the four lodging options in the country, where I had booked a room, was less than 100 metres away. It was a two-storey house, in which more than a dozen rooms had been carved out with thin walls. The upper floor was made of planks of wood. The owner-family lived in the back. The open-air restaurant was almost full when I arrived, because the airport has no lounge, and the departing passengers come here to sit, wait and sweat after checking in their luggage.<\/p>\n

Metia Lotoala, a 30-year-old father of three, with buzzed hair, a goatee and a look of perpetual amusement on his face, showed me to my room. Lotoala grew up in Tuvalu and his family owns the lodge. My room was slightly bigger than the others but the best part, Lotoala told me, was that it was adjacent to a balcony, which overlooked the airstrip. In the evening, I realised what he meant.<\/p>\n

The widest open area on the islet, the airstrip is an essential part of daily life. After 5pm, when the temperature climbed down, it transformed into a town square. Soccer goalposts and volleyball nets were brought out and placed on the runway. Young men dashed about in trainers and shorts; old men watched them sitting cross-legged on their mopeds. Families laid out picnics on mats made by weaving the leaves of the pandanus tree, which, along with pukas and coconuts, line the edge of the airstrip.<\/p>\n

The serpentine coastline of Funafuti atoll, February 2004. Photograph: Torsten Blackwood\/AFP\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

At 6.45pm, under an indigo sky, church bells rang out along the main street and all movement on the islet came to a halt. Those walking back home stopped by the side of the streets, mopeds and cars turned off their engines. Like many island-nations in the Pacific, Tuvalu is devoutly Christian. Every evening, 15 minutes are reserved for prayer time. By the side of a road that runs along the airstrip, I chatted with a police officer who had asked me to stop and wait. She told me that there are 132 police personnel in the country, and the last notable crime took place in 2015, when a drunk motorcycle rider ran over someone who was sleeping the night at the airstrip. Sleeping at the airstrip used to be common practice and continues to be permitted; since the accident, cars and mopeds have been banned.<\/p>\n

Night descended quickly and by 7pm it was dark. Back at the lodge, the plastic chairs of the restaurant were occupied by a couple from Peru, two college students from Hong Kong and an Indian sexologist. A story I heard there, later confirmed by Lotoala, was about a tourist who arrived a few weeks earlier, spent about an hour walking about, then bought a return ticket, and flew back on the same flight he had come on. The tourists I met had been flying around the Pacific and were all heading to their next destination in a couple of days. No one felt they hadn\u2019t spent enough time, no one said they\u2019d be coming back. After a dinner of chicken soup, I asked what had brought them here, to one of the least visited countries in the world. MR Krishna, the Indian sexologist, told me he had come \u201cto see Tuvalu before it disappears\u201d.<\/p>\n

A couple of days later, I went to see Simon Kofe. He was almost defensive when I asked him about the Cop27 address. \u201cEverything I said in my speech was backed by science,\u201d he told me, sitting in the porch of his lagoon-facing house, where the video was filmed on a green screen. \u201cIf our statehood is permanent and we lose our physical territory, a digital nation is going to be the representation of the sovereign state of Tuvalu.\u201d Kofe reminded me that he had \u201cnever used the word \u2018metaverse\u2019\u201d in his address. He was surprised to see that \u201cthat\u2019s what everyone ran with\u201d.<\/p>\n

Media outlets, especially those covering technology, have portrayed Tuvalu as a country leaping into a digital future, but in terms of internet accessibility, landing in Tuvalu felt like time-travelling to the mid-2000s. No international telecommunications service has coverage here. The only way to connect to the internet was to buy a sim card from the office of Tuvalu telecom, which opens for a few hours every weekday. A woman handed me a sim card after noting down, by hand, the details of my passport in a long register. The sim card offered 2G speed and sketchy network. It cost more than $10 for two gigabytes of data, and I was unable to load a YouTube clip of Kofe\u2019s famous address. I was told that a few houses had set up Starlink, Elon Musk\u2019s satellite internet connection, but it is far out of the financial reach of most locals. In a bid to counter China\u2019s overtures in the region, Japan, Australia and Taiwan, led by the United States, are working out a plan to connect several Pacific states with an undersea internet cable, but completion is years away.<\/p>\n

\u201cFirst we will have to bring the internet,\u201d Kofe told me. \u201cIt is not something that will happen overnight.\u201d<\/p>\n

An urban scene at Funafuti atoll. Photograph: Ashley Cooper\/Corbis\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

In 2023, the government of Tuvalu amended its constitution to note that \u201cthe state of Tuvalu \u2026 shall remain in perpetuity in the future\u201d, irrespective \u201cof climate change or other causes resulting in loss to the physical territory\u201d. Since then, Tuvalu has managed to get more than a dozen bilateral partners, including New Zealand and Australia, to formally acknowledge its permanent statehood. The idea has unanimous appeal, and acceptance, across the region, where several other countries\u2019 boundaries are similarly threatened by the climate crisis.<\/p>\n

In international law, a state is traditionally defined as an entity with four attributes: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to form relationships with other states. Submersion means Tuvalu will fail to meet the first two criteria. And with this, come other tricky questions. The sale of fishing licences contributes almost half of Tuvalu\u2019s national income \u2013 would an underwater but online Tuvalu retain these territorial rights over maritime territory? The government has taken steps, by amending its constitution and securing bilateral agreements, to secure its future sovereignty over the waters \u2013 but this may have far-reaching implications for international law, and the commonly understood meaning of statehood itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cStatehood is a fiction, a legal fiction that we came up with,\u201d says Sumudu Atapattu, the director of the Global Legal Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison law school. In this century, as the climate crisis will scramble the commonly understood meanings of nationhood and sovereignty, the world is going to have to come up with, in Atapattu\u2019s words, \u201ca new fiction\u201d. Digital statehood is an attempt at this redefinition, but at this stage the details are unknown.<\/p>\n

Recent bilateral agreements with New Zealand and Australia provide residential visas to a few hundred Tuvaluans each year to move to those countries, but a far greater number of locals aspire to emigrate than the 355 who receive these visas every year. In June, when applications opened for the first time for 280 Australian visas to be allocated to Tuvaluans, more than 8,000 people applied. But at the current rate, it will take more than 30 years for everyone to leave Tuvalu, by which time Funafuti, according to government estimates, might be underwater.<\/p>\n

Grace Malie grew up in Fongafale. For high school she moved to Vaitupu, the largest atoll of Tuvalu, where just over 1,000 people live. Students from all the other islands attend Motufoua secondary school while living with local families in Vaitupu. Malie told me she learned the local dances, faatele in Tuvaluan, from all the eight inhabited islands of Tuvalu, each of which has distinct linguistic dialects and customs. Later, she went to study at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, moved back to Fongafale, and worked briefly as an assistant to Kofe.<\/p>\n

In 2023, at the age of 24, Malie visited Cop28 in Dubai as a youth delegate. \u201cI find it kind of hard to accept when I ask people where they are from, and they say, \u2018New York\u2019, and I say, \u2018The big city!\u2019\u201d she told me. \u201cBut when I say, \u2018I\u2019m from Tuvalu\u2019, they\u2019re like, \u2018Where?\u2019, and I say, \u2018In the Pacific\u2019, and they\u2019re like, \u2018Where?\u2019, then I say, \u2018You know Australia? Hawaii? Yeah. Somewhere in between there.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Malie said that the people she was talking to probably couldn\u2019t even imagine what Tuvalu looks like.<\/p>\n

Malie appreciated how Kofe\u2019s speeches were changing that. But she was also disturbed by the image of the virtual islet where Kofe was standing in the 2022 video. \u201cThe visuals are for people who are not living here to be able to see, and for us, it is like \u2026\u201d Without finishing that sentence, Malie popped her eyes and retreated into her chair behind outstretched hands. Was it scary to watch? I asked. \u201cYes,\u201d Malie said. \u201cIt brought the reality closer to home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Funafuti\u2019s dumpsite, November 2019. Photograph: Mario Tama\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

I met Malie shortly after she had returned from Cop28 with her friend Tamala Pita, who was sitting with us at the restaurant of Filamona Lodge. As youth delegates, Malie and Pita told me, it was exhausting to talk about erosion, submersion, migration and weave it together with their personal experiences. \u201cIt was emotional,\u201d Malie said. \u201cYou are talking about losing your home to these strangers, and you think about what you are saying, and you start crying, it is just emotionally draining.\u201d Both Malie and Pita broke down several times during the nine days in Dubai; they consoled each other and were consoled by youth delegates from other developing nations. Both were stunned by the excessive, needless use of indoor lighting and air-conditioning. Pita said: \u201cThere were lights on the floor of the metro station! I was like, do you really need that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Whenever Malie is away, she is always thinking of returning. I asked her what she misses when she is travelling. \u201cOhh,\u201d she said, letting her shoulders droop. Then, with a burst of energy: \u201cEverything! Being able to sleep with your door open, the wind coming into the house, there is no homelessness here, there is no stress.\u201d Many houses in Tuvalu have openings on all sides, with sloping roofs made of thatch or corrugated iron. Generally, the house is one big hall, where the family sleeps on mattresses on the floor. The bedding is rolled up and put in a corner in the morning, and the hall becomes the living room.<\/p>\n

What is it like to consider, I asked Malie, that Tuvalu might become uninhabitable in her lifetime. \u201cWe need to convey that possibility, but we also want to try to make sure that doesn\u2019t actually happen to us,\u201d she said. It is a difficult balance. Tuvalu is walking a fine line: to get the attention of the world, it must publicise its own disappearance, while doing everything it can to survive. The government of Tuvalu is reclaiming land on the lagoon side, with funds from the UN. That gives Malie hope. So does her religious faith. \u201cWe always have journalists coming up and talking about these scientific facts, but then we have to remain true to our fight and our cause and our people, and we have remained resilient and remained hopeful,\u201d she told me. \u201cWe\u2019ve said this so many times, but the motto of Tuvalu is \u2018Tuvalu mo te Atua\u2019, which means, Tuvalu with God.\u201d<\/p>\n

Until recently, Tuvalu was best known for its fortuitous top-level domain \u2013 .tv. In 1995, a government office in Fongafale received a fax, informing them that Tuvalu\u2019s country code on the world wide web had been assigned. The government officials gathered around the fax, one recalled in 2019, and wondered: \u201cWhat the hell is this internet thing?\u201d Before long, video platforms wanted URLs ending in .tv, and Tuvalu cashed in. Every streaming company running a website address that ends in .tv, from Amazon to Apple to Hulu to Twitch, pays a licensing fee. Last year, it contributed more than $10m to the country\u2019s $80m revenue. Besides the licences for tuna fishing in its territorial waters, which amount to about $35m, .tv is Tuvalu\u2019s second-largest source of income.<\/p>\n

Before it became independent in 1978, Tuvalu had been under British rule for almost a century. When independence was looming, it was important to Tuvaluans to not be merged with the Gilbert islands, which became Kiribati. Tito Isala, a septuagenarian with curly white hair, who was part of the committee that negotiated the terms of independence in the 1970s and lived with his wife a few houses down the road from my lodge, told me that Kiribati, which has a surface area of 300 sq miles, would have \u201cswallowed little Tuvalu\u201d. They decided to become an independent country comprising nine atolls, eight of which were inhabited, and adopted the name Tuvalu, which in Tuvaluan means eight standing together.<\/p>\n

Today, Fongafale, on its less than one sq mile of land, houses more than 6,000 people, and offers them few services. There was no ATM in the country until a few months ago. There are no barbershops; people cut their own hair or wait till their next visit to Fiji. A small garden run by a Taiwanese aid agency is the only source of fresh produce. A bag of vegetables can be bought once or twice a week, at $13 each. Locals catch fish in the lagoon, which is the only source of fresh meat in the country besides pork; neither is available in plenty. The population is sustained by imported food.<\/p>\n

An aerial shot of Funafuti. Photograph: Tala Simeti\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

A supermarket, a warehouse really, near the north end of the airstrip, accounts for more than 70% of the country\u2019s imports. It sells butter manufactured in California, Japanese washing machines, and sofas of unspecified origins; this is also where everyone buys vegetables, grain and meat. Sacks of rice are piled in one corner. Imported, processed food has disturbed the diet. A quarter of Tuvalu\u2019s population has diabetes.<\/p>\n

Tuvalu, according to the UN, is among the world\u2019s least-developed countries. On the northern end of Fongafale, just before the point where Kofe made his famous address, there is a huge garbage dump \u2013 among the tallest structures on the island \u2013 which sometimes combusts spontaneously. On the southern end is a rusted warship, and the stony beach is covered in broken glass and plastic bottles, torn clothes and washed-up Blundstone boots. People who live here feel deeply connected to the place, but even they concede that to see how beautiful Tuvalu is, one must get out of Fongafale, and go to the outer islands. \u201cToo many people live here, that\u2019s the problem,\u201d Lotoala, the motel owner, said to me.<\/p>\n

One evening in the balcony next to my room, I asked Lotoala what he thought about the threat posed by the climate crisis to Tuvalu. \u201cDo you mean that the islands might drown?\u201d he asked me. When I said yes, he responded: \u201cI don\u2019t think it will happen.\u201d With a boyish, confessional smile, he added: \u201cPeople don\u2019t like you when you say that. But I don\u2019t think it will happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

He knew that when the tides run high, around March every year, water seeps through the ground in Fongafale. \u201cBut it only happens at that one place,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has been happening there since I was a kid.\u201d Lotoala believes that it will be \u201chundreds\u201d of years before the islands are fully submerged, but he knows that it will become increasingly difficult to continue to live here. \u201cThis is what I tell my children: you have to think about moving, about being flexible, you have to have that mindset, you should not get stuck here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The idea of submersion is not convincing to all the locals. They have seen the erosion of Fongafale before their eyes and are acutely aware of the changing climate, but at the same time, they have also seen atolls grow and gain ground. Tito Isala dismissed all talk of a digital future with a wave of his hand: \u201cIt is defeatist, hopeless.\u201d Nor was he excited about the idea of Tuvaluans settling on foreign shores. \u201cWe do not want to relocate,\u201d he said. \u201cWhere are we going to go? New Zealand?\u201d Isala said. \u201cHow do they treat the M\u0101ori?\u201d He gave me another hypothetical. \u201cAmerica? Who wants to deal with their Trumps and Bidens?\u201d<\/p>\n

Isala opened an iron chest in his living room and pulled out a large, laminated, navigational map of Funafuti. He unrolled it on the top of the trunk. \u201cThe islets make the shape of a human face in profile; we are here, at the back of the head,\u201d he said, pointing to Fongafale. \u201cHere we have lost land.\u201d Then he pointed to the chin on the map, at an islet of Funafuti called Motuloa. \u201cMotuloa has grown its landmass,\u201d Isala said.<\/p>\n

The local understanding of the adaptability of the atolls is backed up by some scientific data. When Malie had told me submersion \u201cis a possibility\u201d, she wasn\u2019t simply dismissing the projections of sea level rise by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. \u201cThe signs are very clear, especially from the IPCC reports,\u201d Malie said. \u201cBut then you have other science, which is uncertain, which says it [submersion] might happen, it might not happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

This \u201cother science\u201d is mainly based on the work of Paul Kench, a coastal geomorphologist who has studied shoreline changes in the Maldives, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, Kiribati and Tuvalu. Kench studied coastal changes and physical geography of islands at the University of Auckland, then did his PhD at the University of New South Wales, where his dissertation was on atolls in the Indian Ocean. When we spoke on Zoom, Kench was in Singapore, where he is a professor in the department of geography at the National University. Kench has amassed a significant body of work to show that rising sea level does not necessarily mean the submersion of low-lying atolls. The projections of Tuvalu\u2019s disappearance assume that atoll islands are static structures. Kench\u2019s work shows that they are instead dynamic entities that are constantly transforming themselves, even gaining landmass.<\/p>\n

Looking into the centre of the Funafuti lagoon. Photograph: Kalolaine Fainu\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Using data from aerial images going back to the second world war, Kench showed that in the past four decades, while sea level rose in Tuvalu twice as fast the global average, total land area slightly increased, by 2.9%. The greatest gains were made by the islands of Vaitupu and Nanumaga. Fongafale itself had gained 4.6 hectares in the past four decades, even as the locals were watching both tips of the islet being eroded before their eyes. In 2018, Kench published another paper with two other researchers, which is the most comprehensive analysis of Tuvalu\u2019s coastal changes. The paper showed that 73 of the 101 islets analysed had accreted surface area amounting to 80.7\u2009 hectares. The remaining 28 had eroded, losing 7.24\u2009hectares in total. These changes happen through a combination of factors. The reef is continuing to produce sediment, Kench told me, and the waves are continuing to deposit crusts of reef that break away from the vast rim.<\/p>\n

Kench\u2019s work has been used by conservative thinktanks and climate change deniers \u2013 or what Kench refers to as \u201cthat idiotic part of society\u201d \u2013 to raise doubts about sea level rise. \u201cYou can\u2019t control it,\u201d Kench said, with the weariness of a man who has for years been dealing with such misinformation. \u201cYou can\u2019t control what those maniacs do.\u201d Kench does not dispute that sea levels are rising and that this is a result of human-made climate breakdown. But he maintains that when it comes to atoll islands, \u201ca lot of the gloom and doom scenarios are based on emotive, or intuitive, reasoning.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I asked Kofe about Kench\u2019s work, he said that the government finds it \u201cinconclusive\u201d. Kench can appreciate the tricky spot Tuvalu finds itself in, but he feels his work could have been used differently. \u201cWe got a lot of criticism,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause it didn\u2019t really show what they wanted it to.\u201d The government of Tuvalu accused him, Kench told me, \u201cof undermining Tuvalu\u2019s international negotiations\u201d. He was surprised by the vehemence of the reaction. \u201cThey could have said, \u2018We are going be living here in our country, but our lands are changing around us in ways that we are only starting to understand, and we are going to need a lot of help.\u2019\u201d But that does not make for, Kench admitted, \u201ca sexy headline\u201d.<\/p>\n

Kench emphasised to me that he was not an expert on habitability. \u201cLand is only one part of that metric,\u201d he told me. \u201cI stick to my lane.\u201d But he is astonished by how little attention has been given to the physical islands amid the rising sea. \u201cOver the last 30 years, agencies have been very happy to spend hundreds of millions [of dollars] in measuring sea level rise,\u201d Kench said. \u201cBut they\u2019ve spent zero on actually measuring the thing that they keep saying is going to disappear because of sea level rise.\u201d<\/p>\n

I went to see Fualifeke, a tiny islet at the top of the forehead on Isala\u2019s map, which has gone through a strange mutation over the past few decades. While its shore had been severely eroded on the lagoon side, it had gained almost the same amount of ground on the sea side.<\/p>\n

Getting to the outer islets is not easy. There are no boats waiting in the lagoon to ferry you about. A day before the trip, I had to find someone with a boat and then hope for good weather. Lotoala set it up. But on the day we were supposed to leave, he told me that though we had the boat, the man who had promised to take us couldn\u2019t be found. We decided to go for a few hours anyway. It was a burning hot afternoon, though the temperature was only 30C. It was not the sticky heat of New Delhi, where I lived for a decade in summer temperatures of over 40C, but equally sapping.<\/p>\n

Sun shone in a blue sky; clouds streaked the horizon. We poured water on the aluminium surface of the boat for a few minutes before sitting down. There was no padding on the seats, and the bare surface would have scalded the skin. When we were done dousing, Lotoala sat on the bow, his cousin at the stern. I was joined in the middle by the students from Hong Kong and Krishna, the Indian sexologist. The lagoon water was comparatively placid, but our small boat was soon seesawing as it moved across patches of emerald and cobalt water. When frigate birds flew by the boat, my co-passengers hooted with excitement.<\/p>\n

When we reached the islet after about half an hour, there was one house, a few hundred coconut trees and a dazzling bank made up of what looked like white gravel, but turned out to be tiny, pearly bits of coral reef. We swam in some shallow patches of water but only for a few minutes. The heat was exhausting. I saw the Hong Kong students clamber out of the warm water, squinting. The bleached reef was impossible to stand on without footwear. We all walked into the trees to find sand and shade.<\/p>\n

Everyone took long breaths and drank from a tank that collected rainwater. Lotoala climbed a sloping trunk with a big knife and tossed down green coconuts. Each of us had many coconuts. We poured cool, sweet water into our mouths, then cut them open to scrape out the flesh inside. We sat down, facing the sea, and Lotoala happily pointed out where the shape of the island had changed. He said that the area covered by chip stones in front of us was not there until a few years ago. \u201cIt just happens,\u201d he said, enjoying the incomprehension on my face. The previous day, we had talked about the projections of Tuvalu\u2019s submersion: \u201cI don\u2019t know if it will,\u201d he said. \u201cYou can never be sure about nature.\u201d<\/p>\n

A satellite view of Funafuti. Photograph: Universal Images Group North America LLC\/Alamy<\/p>\n

On our way back, no one spoke a word, the heat had drained us. I could easily recognise Fongafale from miles away, with a dark trail of smoke rising from the garbage dump, into the blue sky. When we came back to the lodge, Lotoala told me that when he was growing up, the heat wasn\u2019t this bad. He was wagging his finger at the airstrip, which was baking under the sun without a patch of shade. \u201cWe used to play there in the afternoons.\u201d The heat is worse on Fongafale than perhaps any other islet of Funafuti, he said, primarily because of the airstrip: no other atoll has so great an area of asphalt exposed to the sun. Everyone complains passionately about the rising temperature.<\/p>\n

When I took a walk one afternoon, the heat pinned me down within minutes and seemed to rise out of the ground. The sun was directly above, shadows were small, and Fongafale had the look of a ghost town. People had receded indoors. Hapless tourists stood by the side of the road waving at the occasional passing moped, requesting a lift to their accommodation. When I crossed the white-hot airstrip, where Lotoala used to kick a football at this hour, I wondered if the rubber soles of my sandals were sticking to the ground. In the restaurant at the lodge, Lotoala found me gulping down water and sweating profusely. He laughed heartily when I explained, and said: \u201cBoss, you do not take a walk at 2pm!\u201d The heat, Lotoala believes, might make it impossible to live in Funafuti long before water takes over the land. His mother, sitting nearby, nodded in agreement.<\/p>\n

I had arrived in Tuvalu at the time of a national election, hoping to find the usual ferment around the time of voting. But the election means a lull in Fongafale. The ferry to the outer islands wasn\u2019t running, the government building was empty, and there were no rallies or speeches. Tuvalu has no political parties. The cabinet is made up of two representatives from each of the eight inhabited islands, who vote for a prime minister among them. All candidates had returned to the islands, and the sofas in the lobby of the government building, which has decent internet, were occupied by kids spending their afternoons playing games on their smartphones.<\/p>\n

While voting was ongoing at different community halls in Fongafale, a group of young men were downing cans of Filipino beer in a yard by a small house. I joined them. They were a boisterous bunch, who had attended high school or university in New Zealand and Australia. When I told them I was from India, they wanted to know how to pronounce the names of some Indian cricketers who had recently toured Auckland and Sydney. It delighted them that I could name the cricket grounds in those cities; one of them, who had studied in Brisbane, broke out in a little dance when I said: \u201cthe Gabba!\u201d With glazed eyes, they told me about the tall buildings, the glittering streets, the nightlife. Everything about those cities gladdened them and they spoke of their time there with longing and excitement. They wanted to go back, but they weren\u2019t sure how.<\/p>\n

Unlike Lotoala, who runs his own lodge, or Grace, who works with the government, these men, like many others in Tuvalu, hear the siren song of the great cities of Oceania, which present them with opportunities for a life that is not accessible to them in Fongafale. This yearning exhibits itself in the thousands of people who apply each year for the Pacific Access Category visa which has granted 75 Tuvaluans residential rights in New Zealand each year since 2019.<\/p>\n

In 2023, Tuvalu signed the Falepili Union treaty<\/a> with Australia, which stipulated \u201ca special human mobility pathway for citizens of Tuvalu\u201d to migrate to Australia and millions of dollars in aid; in exchange, Tuvalu must consult on defence and security matters before engaging with other nations. When signed, in November 2023, the treaty was seen as an overture by the United States to counter China\u2019s investments in the Pacific states, like Vanuatu<\/a>. But the part of the treaty that most concerned locals was that Australia will award 280 Tuvaluans residential visas every year through a ballot system, and the beneficiaries will receive the same health, education, housing, and employment rights enjoyed by Australian citizens. Additionally, Tuvaluans will retain the ability to return to their home country. It has been publicised as a \u201cclimate visa\u201d by the international press, but the reasons for the widespread appeal of immigration are also economic.<\/p>\n

When I called Lotoala in August, he told me that he wasn\u2019t among the Tuvaluans who had applied for the Australian visa, but he wasn\u2019t surprised that every third person in Tuvalu wants to \u201chave this opportunity\u201d. \u201cI have a business,\u201d he told me. \u201cI can work here and feed my family and live a comfortable life. But maybe 1% of people here, 100 families, can afford such a life. What we earn is not what normal people earn. Most people have no way to make money. Most work you can find pays A$5 per hour.\u201d Lotoala mentioned that over the past months, tourists from the US and Europe have expressed to him their shock at the prices of daily essentials in the shops. \u201cEven we feel the pressure every now and then,\u201d he added. \u201cLife here can get very tough.\u201d<\/p>\n

Lotoala said that more and more people are feeling \u201cstuck\u201d in Tuvalu. Moving to Australia, or New Zealand for that matter, seems like a way out. \u201cIf I didn\u2019t have a business, I\u2019d take my family to Australia, find a job and level up from there,\u201d he said. \u201cIt is like a new opportunity, to build a new life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Reporting for this story was supported by the Joan Konner Program in the Journalism of Ideas.<\/p>\n

Listen to our podcasts here<\/a> and sign up to the long read weekly email here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In November 2022, Simon Kofe, then foreign minister of the island nation of Tuvalu, announced a sensational plan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":74097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[64,63,75,128],"class_list":["post-74096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-environment","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}