Dear Friend and Reader:
What happens when your country drowns? Such a question we’ve never asked, at least not in my lifetime.
But that’s what is posed in this article from Mother Jones about a community of inhabitants from the islands of Tuvalu, the first of the world’s climate refugees.
The rising Pacific has brought sea water to within 16 feet of the highest point of the islands — Mt. Howard, so named by Tuvaluans as a rebuke of former Australian Prime Minister John Howard who refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Twenty-five hundred Tuvaluans have relocated to nearby Auckland, New Zealand. That’s twenty percent of their population. They will be there until conditions improve; meaning their island shores are reclaimed and become completely inhabitable again or, a new country is found to relocate them permanently.
This migration could have been prevented: this tiny island nation raised the alarm of the rising sea threatening to drown them in the 1990s, warning that unless something was done to mitigate global warming elevating the local sea level, Tuvalu would be completely under water by 2050. Over a dozen years later, a representative group of Tuvaluans without a country have immigrated to New Zealand. Given the rise of waters across the planet many more islands and small nations, some with far larger populations, may be expected to migrate to safety in neighboring nations because their own countries are under water.