Earth Day: The battle to save a drowning Pacific island nation
In 2025, more than 90 per cent of Tuvaluans applied for a visa scheme to obtain residency or citizenship in Australia. Just before that, in 2022, the Government of Tuvalu created the first ‘digital nation’ in the metaverse to preserve its statehood and culture if its physical territory disappears.In these small, isolated island communities, many with only a few thousand residents, there are scarce resources available to combat the existential threat that rising sea levels pose. Left alone, there is very little they can do.
© UNICEF/Lasse Bak Mejlvang
Children in the Pacific Ocean island of Tuvalu play at a coastal area protected by sandbags.
“A lot of times people say, ‘you’re just talking about a thousand people, you’re talking about six thousand people’. But for us, those 6,000 people are at the frontline of this climate crisis, and we owe everything to them to safeguard their livelihoods and not disturb their daily lives,” a senior official at UN Development Programme (UNDP) in the Pacific, Tuya Altangerel, told UN News.The Government, with support from the UNDP, is stepping up efforts to save Tuvalu by protecting the country’s most populated islands.Small increases, devastating consequencesSea level rise is primarily driven by global warming which causes water to expand as it heats up and accelerates the melting of land-based ice sheets and glaciers.
