A Wave Of Problems

Water, water everywhere. Photo: Michael Field

Tuvalu in February is spring tide season which sometimes, in an apocalyptic kind of way, results in waves crashing over the reef. This year it was insidious, with seawater seeping out of the ground. No one was swept away but seawater flooded the compost pits in which people have been growing their root crops for centuries.

Yet life on Tuvalu is threatened not by global warming as much as by AIDS, alcohol and little money. Often the Air Fiji plane, which flies twice-weekly between Suva and Funafuti, carries Tuvaluan men returning from serving on ships around the world. At any given time around 400 are aboard mainly German ships, providing Tuvalu with the bulk of its income. Each year 60 men graduate from the Tuvalu Maritime Training Institute on Amatuku inlet, north of Fongafale. The school is headed by Jonathon Gayton, who says Tuvaluans are popular because they are physically strong and have a culture of sea faring.

"Tuvaluans have the advantage of being cheap too, cheaper than Filipinos, and they are good at their jobs," Gayton says.

Officially Tuvalu has no HIV/AIDS but the government knows that some day it will arrive with its returning sons. Seamen with change in their pockets, enough for beer that is just A$2 a can, are able to pass their days in a haze. Even the Finance Minister Bikenibeu Paeniu, maintains what passes as a bar on Funafuti, a locked room full of beer and rudimentary benches under the stars.

Tuvalu has become a poster-child for the environmental movement, innocent victims of the West's profligate gas-guzzling, carbon emitting ways. Prime Minister Saufatu Sopoanga has no doubt his country is threatened by global warming related to climate change.

"We do not need further scientific research into this global phenomena on sea-level rising; it is already there. We are talking about the extraordinary high tides now. It is becoming common to Tuvalu.

"We cannot turn back the tide ourselves, single-handed. We hope the industrialized countries would be able to help us," Sopoanga says.

He understands the West's motives in building its industries to improve the lives of its people. "But Tuvaluans have future generations, too who want to enjoy the same resource, the same kind of life that Tuvaluans have today."

The University of Hawaii put a tide gauge on a wharf in 1991 that turned out to be sinking itself. Since 1993 the 14-nation Australian-funded South Pacific Sea Level and Climate Monitoring Project has been monitoring sea level, but is yet to come up with significant numbers. During El Nino events, Funafuti seems to rise out of the sea and some evidence is suggesting that the island on a geological time scale is also rising.

Yet at Amatuku 140 years ago the London Missionary Society erected a stone classroom, now the oldest building in Tuvalu. It now floods.

Is Tuvalu’s “water” problem local rather than global? Photo: Michael Field

"Why would the missionaries have built the school in a place that floods every spring tide?" Gayton says, suggesting it did not flood when it was built.

There is suspicion though that the problem is not global, but local. While the landmass of Tuvalu's nine atolls is just 10 square miles, Fongafale, where the worst of the flooding is occurring, also happens to have around 6,000 people living in an area little bigger than the average city park in neighboring New Zealand or Australia. The government has used the money from selling its successful Dot TV Internet name to pave the roads, and Taiwan has built a large new three-story administration building that towers over the islet.

This might well be having its own severe environmental impact. Human habitation has rendered the once-crucial freshwater lens too brackish to use. Yet around 10 kilometers across the lagoon, on the other side of Fongafale is unoccupied Tepuka islet. As close to perfection as it seems possible to get these days, it shows no signs of sinking.

The single biggest environmental insult to the atoll is the runway. Ahead of the November 1943 Battle of Tarawa the Americans cut down all the coconut trees and built a runway on Fongafale. To do it they dug out large pits at either end of the runway, borrowing the sand and coral. These "borrow pits" went below sea level, and remain today. Tuvaluans have not helped their cause by turning them into pigpens and rubbish dumps, severely blighting the landscape with stench and mess. Various plans over the years to tidy them up and perhaps fill them in have come to nothing, mostly because Tuvalu has no soil to spare.

As the tides flooded the land around Funafuti in February, Maldives President Abdul Gayoom telephoned Sopoanga to express the solidarity of one low-lying nation for another. But Sopoanga says his people believe God created Tuvalu, literally for them.

"They are very strong Christians and they believe God created this world, including Tuvalu and the people of Tuvalu, so they believe God would not desert them, that God will look after them."

Sopoanga rejects the idea his people might have to leave soon. "As long as Tuvalu is above sea water, there will be people staying here."