are creeping up. Over the last half-century the rate of rise has averaged just a couple of millimetres a year, but already it’s beginning to accelerate,1 in tandem with rapidly-rising world temperatures. The minuscule increments of the past have stacked up, leading to a steady cumulative effect which is already taking its toll on island life.
For years Tuvaluan political leaders have toured the big UN conferences, pleading and cajoling industrialised country governments to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The Tuvaluans – together with their colleagues from Kiribati, the Maldives, Samoa and other low-lying island nations – became the symbolic first casualties of global warming, fêted on the media circuit.
But nothing much was done, and the Tuvaluan politicians, betrayed by false promises, eventually returned home empty-handed to feed their pigs and sit watching with impassive faces each year’s high tide rise a little higher than the last.
And no amount of impassioned talk can change the laws of physics. Thoughout all the meetings, the press conferences and the speeches, the glaciers and ice caps kept melting and the seas – filled with this new water and the ‘thermal expansion’ caused by the ever-increasing warmth – kept rising.
Tuvalu’s ocean clock is still ticking today, but it’s nearly out of time. The people of the islands are now faced with the choice they’ve always dreaded – to move, and live cultureless and uprooted in a foreign country, or stay on the land of their forefathers and die. From the distant vantage point of my home in Oxford, I heard that the choice had finally been made.
FUNAFUTI ATOLL
The first person I met in Tuvalu was Paani Laupepa, the tall, solidly-built Environment Ministry official long one of the most articulate voices of his country’s plight. I’d seen him quoted in countless media reports, and was looking forward to questioning him more.
‘No, no, no,’ he insisted. ‘You must go and rest. We can talk any time – you go and lie down.’ Then he beetled off on his motorbike – everyone on Funafuti has motorbikes – and left me little option but to obey.
It was ridiculously hot, and I lay under a mosquito net whilst a small fan whirred impotently a few feet away. Already Suva, the Fijian capital where I’d boarded my flight a thousand kilometres away over the cloud-flecked open Pacific, seemed like a different world. As I lay on the bed, sweat quietly dripping, I could hear nothing, just the occasional buzz of a passing motorbike, the swish of wind in the palms above, and the far-off rumble of the ocean.
Once the harsh sunlight began to soften a little, I wandered outside to explore. A hundred metres on my left was the lagoon, fringed by a narrow beach, the water mottled with purples and light blues where the sea floor alternated between sand and rock. A few women stood chatting in the water, only their heads showing above the rippled surface – looking as natural as old ladies passing the time of day at a London bus stop. Every now and then someone would heave themselves out of the sea fully-clothed, and set off, dripping, back to their house. I marvelled at their almost amphibious lifestyle – being wet or dry made little difference in this equatorial heat.
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