This story was originally published in our May/June 2022 issue as "Climate Chained." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.
Talk to anyone in Tuvalu, a 420-mile-long chain of coral islands located about halfway between Australia and Hawaii, and you will soon learn that the nation is sinking beneath the waves. It’s a common topic of discussion among residents of Tuvalu, a specter constantly looming over the island nation’s 10,000-odd citizens. In a country whose total area is roughly a quarter of Disney World’s, spanning less than a third of a mile at its widest point, it is impossible to avoid the sight of the ever-encroaching ocean.
Technically, though, Tuvalu isn’t sinking. Rather, rising sea levels fueled by climate change threaten to subsume the country, whose average elevation is only 6.5 feet above sea level. In fact, Tuvalu might be at greater risk of flooding than any other nation in the world. The average sea level surrounding the capital of Funafuti, a ring-shaped reef that harbors more than 6,000 citizens, has risen by over half a foot in the last 40 years. That might seem small to people at higher elevations, but in places like Funafuti, it means significant swaths of land that once jutted just above the water have vanished in a matter of decades.
Victoria Keener, a climate change research fellow at Honolulu’s East-West Center, says the projections for Tuvalu are consistent with the global average for sea-level rise, as rising global temperatures continue to melt ice sheets and glaciers into the world’s oceans. “They’re seeing their annual mean temperatures go up [and] their nighttime temperatures not going as low as they used to,” Keener says. “So they’re seeing more warm nights, more extremes, and then more intense tropical storms.”
