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 consequences

Sea 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.

Workers prepare for coastal protection works on Funafuti atoll, Tuvalu.

Few places are experiencing it as rapidly as the Pacific Ocean where factors such as ocean currents and winds combine with global warming to create a ‘pile-up’ effect on some of the most vulnerable low-lying islands.

In the independent island nation of Tuvalu, the level has risen 21 centimetres in 30 years, nearly twice the global average. At the current rate, some projections suggest 95 per cent of the country could be under water by 2100.

Why high tides are the real danger

The greatest day-to-day challenge for island communities is the increase in the number and intensity of high tides.

“Our islands are drowning,” Ms. Altangerel said.

With the country averaging under two metres above sea level, traditional methods in coastal protection – whether building sea walls or nature-based methods such as planting mangroves – “no longer work” in managing these tides, she said.

“If we plant mangroves, the mangroves will be simply swallowed by the sea… The king tide will just wash over the mangroves, or they can wash over the seawalls,” she said.

It’s not just about coastal areas disappearing, it’s also the people’s sense of nationhood and also the future existence of these countries are very much under threat 
— Tuya Altangerel

Migration, a solution?

Whilst adaptation projects are underway, migration is also an option. In 2023, the Tuvaluan and Australian Governments launched the Falepili Union, a treaty allowing 280 Tuvaluans to relocate to Australia each year for residency or citizenship.

Last year, 90 per cent of the country’s population applied for the first round of the visa ballot.

Other agreements are in place in Kiribati and Vanuatu which allow working citizens to obtain visas in Australia. Meanwhile, New Zealand offers 75 residency visas per year to Kiribati and Vanuatu, and the United States has an agreement with the Marshall Islands where citizens can live, work and study in the US without a visa.

Against this backdrop, there are concerns over the implications for the culture and heritage of Pacific peoples, especially those in traditional livelihoods, if populations move away en masse.

Can a nation survive without land?

With rising sea levels, it’s possible that some island nations could physically disappear.

“It’s not just about coastal areas disappearing, it’s also the people’s sense of nationhood and also the future existence of these countries are very much under threat,” Ms. Altangerel said.

© UNDP/Silke von Brockhausen

A young boy walks through a village square a month after a cyclone caused widespread flooding. (file)

An International Court of Justice ruling in 2025 clarified that loss of its physical territory due to sea-level rise does not automatically result in the loss of its statehood or sovereignty, allowing Tuvalu to remain a nation state with rights over its ocean resources and a seat at the UN, even if its islands are underwater.

A template in Tuvalu

In Tuvalu, UNDP – working alongside the Government and the Green Climate Fund – started a novel adaptation plan back in 2017 based on detailed sensor mapping to create over seven hectares of new land designed to stay above projected sea levels beyond 2100.

The Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project dredges sand to create elevated land that is protected against storm surges in the islands of Funafuti, Nanumea, and Nanumaga.

Before (above) and during (below) land reclamation work under the Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project.

“These are very drastic measures,” warns Ms Altangerel with the project costing close to $55 million so far: “We basically rebuild the land around the atolls so that there is safe land where people can build shelters, housing.”

Phase two started in 2024 where a further eight hectares will be added along the southern shoreline of the nation’s capital, Funafuti, on the island of Fongafale where 60 per cent of the nation’s population live. Many Tuvaluans from less protected atolls have already migrated there seeking protection.

Another way the Government and the UNDP is supporting Tuvaluans to remain, is through providing an insurance scheme when flooding occurs from high tides, and an initial 400 households in Funafuti will receive automatic payments of up to $1,500 per high tide event.

For Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands – three of the four lowest lying countries in the world – the measures in Tuvalu may offer a template for their future adaptation and their survival.

“If we manage to safeguard Tuvalu as a nation…we’re contributing all of this amazing work to be scaled up and replicated across the Pacific, but also across other small island developing States,” Ms. Altangerel said.

Saving the Pacific

Visiting the Pacific islands, that stretch thousands of miles apart in the world’s largest ocean seven years ago, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “if we save the Pacific, we save the world.”

As the world marks Earth Day on 22 April, in Tuvalu, the effort is not only about adaptation, but survival and the question of whether a nation can hold onto its land, identity and future as the seas rise.