The Least Visited Place On Earth Is Disappearing Quickly – And May Be Reborn Online

That may sound cold, but it’s true: Tuvalu’s future is so jeopardized by climate change and rising sea levels that almost the entire country will likely be underwater during high tide within 25 years. It’s an existential threat that’s created a bleak reality for the 11,000 or so residents of the island nation – and what might have otherwise been a paradisical tourist destination might instead soon literally be the stuff of escapist media.

“Sea levels are rising rapidly, threatening to sink our lands below the ocean,” Kausea Natano, then the prime minister of Tuvalu, said in a statement in 2023.

“Extreme weather events, which grow in number and intensity with each passing year, are killing our people and destroying our infrastructure,” he said. “Entire marine and coastal ecosystems are dying in waters that are becoming warmer and more acidic.”

Time is running out for Tuvalu – but why? And what is being done about it?

Trouble in Tuvalu

The most obvious effect of climate change for island nations in the Pacific Ocean – Tuvalu, Vanuatu, Nauru, Kiribati, and dozens more – is probably the rising tides. In 2023, a study by NASA’s Sea Level Change Team found that the sea level around Tuvalu is already 15 centimeters (6 inches) higher than it was in 1993, and that number is not only increasing, but speeding up.

It may not sound like a lot, but it’s twice the rate that the rest of the world is seeing its coasts disappear to the sea. Meanwhile, Tuvalu isn’t exactly the kind of place that can cope with even a small rise: the entire nation averages just 2 meters (6.6 feet) above sea level, and all of it has an elevation of less than 4.5 meters (14.8 feet). Today, around two out of every three Tuvaluans experience the kind of flooding that ought to be expected only once in a century. 

It’s a dire outlook – but unfortunately, it’s far from the whole story. Climate change is basically ruining just about every aspect possible of life in Tuvalu: the encroaching ocean has contaminated the groundwater reserves, making the nation now entirely reliant on rainfall for fresh water supplies; at the same time, droughts are increasing in frequency and severity, so that rain is less likely than ever to actually reach residents.

With no predictable rainfall, and soil made salty and porous by the sea, planting crops is difficult and unpredictable. Local fish, once the basic unit of survival for an island community, are disappearing, and many that stay have become poisonous: they consume micro-algae expelled by bleached coral, and become infected with ciguatera toxins, making those who eat them very sick with vomiting, diarrhea, and fevers. Once a self-sufficient country, surviving in Tuvalu is now expensive, and dependent on imports from richer nations.

And of course, we can’t talk about climate change without mentioning – well, the changing climate. “I left [Tuvalu] in 2010,” Tapua Pasuna, the daughter of a Tuvaluan lawmaker and Miss Tuvalu 2018, told The Guardian in 2019. “When I came back I immediately noticed the difference. The heat is sometimes unbearable now.”

Tuvalu is already one of the least visited countries in the world. Before too long, it’ll likely be impossible to see in person at all. Or will it?

When the going gets tough

Drastic times, as the saying goes, call for drastic measures – and Tuvalu, along with fellow tiny island nations like Vanuatu, is facing the climate crisis with aplomb.

Of course, Tuvalu can’t really change the course of climate change on its own through, say, switching to paper straws – despite being one of the worst affected by it, the nation is responsible for such a small amount of greenhouse gas emissions that trackers often just round it down to zero. 

If that sounds like an injustice to you, then you’re not alone – which is precisely why Tuvalu and nations like it have sought justice in the most literal sense of the term. In 2002, the nation threatened to sue Australia and the US for their outsized role in climate change. From there, they, along with other vulnerable Pacific islands, fought their case in the international climate talks that led to the Doha Amendment to the Kyoto Protocol. They were only the second country to call for an international fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty (and in fact the first to demand it formally from the UN). In 2021, they joined with Antigua and Barbuda to register a new UN commission, the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law, or COSIS, which could allow small countries to claim damages from major polluting nations through judicial means – and indeed, two years later, they brought their first case before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. 

How exactly all of this legal action will shake out remains to be seen – though as of this July, things are certainly going in Tuvalu and like-minded island nations’ favor. But these countries don’t have time to sit back and wait for the rest of the world to get its butt in gear – so in the meantime, Tuvalu has taken some pretty drastic measures at home to delay or subvert the worst. Ambitious land-reclamation projects have raised the capital Funafuti by a meter of elevation, and bolstered the coastlines of various of its islands.

And when all else fails, you can always jump ship.

Leaving the country as a climate refugee should be a “last resort”, according to the government and former prime minister Enele Sopoaga – but when an Australian ballot was set up to award up to 280 Tuvaluans the right to live and work in Australia under a new “climate visa” initiative, more than half of the country’s citizens applied. A few hundred more visas are issued by New Zealand and Australia each year, although for every Tuvaluan to leave would take more than 30 years, The Guardian calculated this year – and by that point, the entire capital may be underwater.

But will Tuvalu itself disappear? Not if they have anything to say about it.

Tuvalu dot tv

Tuvalu is famous as the “least-visited country in the world” – and indeed, its high point for tourism seems to have been in 2019, when 3,600 people visited (by 2021, this figure had shrunk to, ahem, 40). But to think that, when it’s eventually swallowed by the sea, citizens and visitors of Tuvalu will no longer exist, is to underestimate how forward-thinking the island nation can be.

“As our land disappears, we have no choice but to become the world’s first digital nation,” announced Simon Kofe, a Tuvalu MP and Special Envoy for the Future Now Project, in 2022. 

“Our land, our ocean, our culture are the most precious assets of our people – and to keep them safe from harm, no matter what happens in the physical world, we’ll move them to the cloud.”

So, yes, the country has completed detailed 3D scans of all 124 islands within its borders, so as to be able to recreate it digitally. The constitution has been updated, to declare Tuvaluan borders and statehood as permanent regardless of the effects of climate change. Even songs, stories, and dances have been preserved digitally, creating an archive “designed to carry the very soul of Tuvalu,” Kofe said.

The Tuvalu of the future may, therefore, be a Tuvalu that exists inside your virtual reality helmet; a Tuvalu for whom citizenship is real, but no longer physical. 

Of course, there are a couple of practical tasks that need completing before that’s possible. Although one eighth of Tuvalu’s income comes from a very specific online attribute – its country domain suffix, .tv, earns it about $10 million a year from corporations renting it for snappy URLS – the situation on the ground is far more rustic. There is, as yet, no cable internet; cellphones can’t reliably manage a YouTube video, and satellite connections such as Starlink are far too expensive to be widespread.

A rebirth as a digital nation, then, might be easier said than done. “First we will have to bring the internet,” Kofe told The Guardian this year.

“Everything I said in my speech was backed by science,” he said. “If our statehood is permanent and we lose our physical territory, a digital nation is going to be the representation of the sovereign state of Tuvalu.”

But, he admitted, “it is not something that will happen overnight.”