FONGAFALE: Tuvalu Battles for Maritime Boundaries Amid Sea Rise, Tuvalu and its 11,000 people, who live on nine atolls scattered across the Pacific, are running out of time.
Fukanoe Laafai would like to start a family. But she is struggling to reconcile her plans with rising sea levels that scientists predict will submerge much of her homeland by the time her children would reach early adulthood.
Tuvalu, whose mean elevation is just 2m, has experienced a sea-level rise of 15cm over the past three decades, one-and-a-half times the global average.
By 2050, NASA scientists project that daily tides will submerge half of the main atoll of Funafuti, home to 60 per cent of Tuvalu’s residents, where villages cling to a strip of land as narrow as 20m in parts.
Life is already changing: Tuvaluans rely on rainwater tanks and a central raised garden for growing vegetables, because saltwater inundation has ruined groundwater, affecting crops.
A landmark climate and security treaty with Australia announced in 2023 provides a pathway for 280 Tuvaluans annually to migrate to Australia, starting next year.
On a recent visit to Tuvalu and in interviews with more than a dozen residents and officials, Reuters found anxiety about rising seas and the prospect of permanent relocation.
Four of the officials revealed progress on an emerging diplomatic strategy to establish a legal basis for Tuvalu’s continued existence as a sovereign state – even after it disappears beneath the waves.
Specifically, Tuvalu aims to change the law of the sea to retain control of a vast maritime zone with lucrative fishing rights, and sees two pathways to achieve that: a test case in the international maritime tribunal, or a United Nations resolution, Reuters reporting found.
Frustration with the global response to Tuvalu’s plight, even after the breakthrough deal with Australia, had led Tuvalu’s diplomats to shift tactics this year, two of the officials said.
The new approach and methods have not been previously reported.
Tuvalu’s land amounts to just 26 square kilometres. But it is dispersed across a far-flung archipelago, creating an exclusive economic zone of some 900,000 square kilometres – more than twice the size of California.
In this close-knit and deeply Christian society, residents told Reuters they feared relocation would mean the loss of their culture.
“Some will have to go and some will want to stay here,” said Maani Maani, 32, an IT worker in the main town of Fongafale.
“It’s a very hard decision to make,” he added. “To leave a country, you leave the culture you were born with, and culture is everything – family, your sister, your brother. It is everything.”
For now, Tuvalu is attempting to buy time. Construction of sea walls and barriers to guard against worsening storm surges is occurring on Funafuti, which is 400 m at its widest. Tuvalu has built 7 hectares of artificial land, and is planning more, which it hopes will stay above the tides until 2100.
By then, NASA projects a sea-level rise of 1m in Tuvalu, or double that in a worst case, putting 90 per cent of Funafuti under water.
