A light, taunting shower of rain fell in Funafuti recently. It lasted minutes, with the slightest film of moisture quickly burned away by the bright sun, dashing the hopes of this crowded, parched atoll.
Funafuti and the other eight tiny islands that comprise the Pacific nation of Tuvalu, home to slightly more than 10,000 people, have not seen substantial rainfall since November last year.
The government, which declared a state of emergency at the end of last month, says the dry spell is unlikely to break until January.
The drought is chiefly attributed to La Nina, the climate phenomenon which unleashes extreme weather across large parts of the Pacific region, but the crisis has also been linked to climate change, with rising sea levels imperiling the islands’ freshwater lens — the layer found beneath coral islands — and leaving many Tuvaluans anxious over the viability of their country.
Climate change is part of the curriculum at Nauti Primary School, where the subject has an obvious resonance.
“The pupils talk about it and we discuss what it means,” headteacher Fanoiga Falasa said.
The view among the students is that man-made climate change is testing the tenability of the country, Falasa said, sitting in his office on the edge of the school’s large courtyard. In better years a playing field would grow there — today it is a square of desert, all dust and clumps of arid lawn.
“Some of them are happy, thinking [climate change] might lead to an overseas trip,” he said. “Some of them feel sad because they might lose their identity, their culture, their home.”
Do they feel angry?
“In some ways, yes, because of the bigger countries and what they contribute to climate change. We are a small country and we are the ones who suffer,” he said. “I would be very sad if we had to leave our country. Our ancestors are here. We would lose a lot.”
The highest point on Tuvalu, which lies halfway between Australia and Hawaii, is less than 5m above sea level. Most of it is less than a meter above. From the air, Funafuti appears as a sliver of unattached coastline. The atoll curls around a large lagoon, the widest stretch from one coast to the other measuring barely 400m. There are no streams or rivers. The land allows few crops to grow.
There is very little room for error. Should sea levels rise, this beautiful, tiny country — the land area of all nine islands combined is 26km2 — will become uninhabitable, swallowed whole by the Pacific Ocean.
In the memorable words of Saufatu Sapo’aga, a former Tuvaluan prime minister, climate change for this country is “no different to a slow and insidious form of terrorism.”
The big powers have left their mark on Tuvalu in other ways too. The massive airstrip that runs the spine of Funafuti is out of all proportion to the land that surrounds it. The runway, built in World War II by US forces, used materials from a series of “borrow pits” dug deep into the earth, puncturing the freshwater lens. The pits remain an open wound, filled with a useless mix of natural water, salt water and piles of waste. On the water’s edge are dozens of misshapen shacks that house the country’s poorest people.
Around the corner from the primary school, the Tuvalu hospital is limiting admissions to try to cope with the water rationing. Its taps ran dry on Wednesday last week and emergency reserves were called in from the temporary desalination plant installed early that week by the New Zealand Defence Force as part of a response coordinated with an Australian contingent and the Red Cross.
The hospital faced an outbreak of gastroenteritis two weeks ago and it is prepared for a spate of waterborne diseases, Puakena Boreham said.
“It is not a public health crisis at the moment, but it will be if it gets worse,” she said.
Sitting on a wooden bench in the hospital reception room, a pregnant Fakatau Teulub was waiting for her seven-month checkup. It will be her fourth child.
It is “hard, very hard” for her household to get by on the ration of two buckets of water a day, she said.
In temperatures of about 30oC, 40 liters is barely enough for drinking and cooking for Teulub, her children and her husband, a fisherman. Hardly a drop is left for bathing, for washing clothes and dishes. The family’s livestock, two pigs and two chickens, go thirsty.
Teulub would emigrate in a heartbeat, she said.
“We’re dying to move, but we don’t have the money,” she said.
Roy Lameko, 62, has seen droughts come and go, but “nothing as bad as this.” He, his wife and son have not washed their clothes for weeks. They all bathe in the sea.
“We keep a cup of water to rinse afterwards,” he said.
Lameko, who is hanging pieces of tuna to dry outside his house, said that with the few crops the islands rely on — coconuts, breadfruit and pulaka (or swamp taro) — failing, people are being forced to dig into any savings to purchase expensive imported foods.
Lameko has two other children, both of whom live in Auckland and send money back monthly to Tuvalu.
Will they return?
“I don’t know. They want us to go there, but the problem is money,” Lameko said, then laughed. “That’s our only problem — money and water.”
Like the equally low-lying Maldives in the Indian Ocean, Tuvalu is a symbol of the human price of climate change. Tuvalu’s 2008 environment act obliges ministries to “raise the level of understanding throughout the world about the implications of climate change.”
“We believe that this [current crisis] is indeed the facts of climate change,” Pusinelli Laafai, chairman of Tuvalu’s national disaster committee, told journalists who traveled to Tuvalu aboard an New Zealand Defence Force aircraft carrying aid. “We think [industrialized countries] have an obligation to help us, if not to restore what was damaged or taken away, at least to assist us in some sense, to mitigate the effects of what they have done. That is what we ask.”
However, Laafai is confident that the nation-state will not come to an end or have to relocate.
“In the long term, we will stay here I think and we will try to cope,” he said. “We’ll manage somehow, even if it’s difficult and expensive.”
Over at the water distribution point next to the government-owned desalination plant, Nelly Semiola said he is going nowhere, although he understands that many of his friends and compatriots want to escape the droughts, remoteness, poverty and fragility.
“I want my life to be here,” he said. “I grew up here. I got married here. So if what’s coming is coming, that’s OK. If we survive, we survive. If we die, we die.”
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