THE tiny and remote South Pacific island state of Tuvalu is planning an evacuation as sea levels rise and threaten its coral atolls.
The former British protectorate just south of the Equator is pleading with its nearest neighbour Australia — 2,500 miles to the southeast — to accept its population of 11,000.
One islet has been washed away by a cyclone and increasing amounts of sea water are seeping into plantations of breadfruit, coconut and a root vegetable staple called pulaka.
The islanders want to settle in Queensland or on a couple of uninhabited islands that the Tuvaluan Government has offered to purchase in the Torres Strait.
The Australian Government has so far rejected the islanders’ requests to accept them en masse as refugees or migrants, but it has said that it will assist in any rescue effort should the islands be swamped in future. That will be too late, say the increasingly concerned Tuvaluans, who stand to lose their homes, crops and half a million years of cultural history to the encroaching tides.
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A Tuvaluan church minister based in Brisbane, Teofilo Ioane, from the atoll of Nukulaelae, said: “Australia has helped Tuvaluan people a lot for which we give thanks, like with drinking water tanks on our islands. Now they say to us ‘don’t worry, we will help you’ but they are waiting to see our bodies floating in the water before they come to our rescue.
“That will be too late then, after a cyclone has covered us. We need to move our people now to preserve our culture and traditions.”
However, a spokesman for Philip Ruddock, the Australian Minister for Immigration, said: “This was an urgent matter ten years ago, the minister went there 20 years ago and it was an urgent matter then, and I am sure it will be an urgent matter next year.
“What we have said is that if it comes to the point where Tuvalu and a number of other islands in the region that are fairly low-lying are no longer inhabitable we would be part of any international response to deal with that situation. But it is not at that situation at the moment. People are still able to live there and we will provide assistance in other ways.”
With sea-level monitoring still a relatively young science, there are no cast-iron figures to prove that the ocean around Tuvalu is rising faster than in other parts of the world. But rising they are, by at least 1mm to 2mm a year.
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Compounding the islanders’ fears is that their five atolls and four coral islands (none higher than 5m above sea level) are on a cyclone track. Cyclones are nothing new to the Tuvaluans, but as their land area shrinks and the waters rise there is an increased chance that one could wipe out an island.
Dr John Church, a leading marine research scientist from Australia’s chief scientific body CSIRO, said: “There is evidence of sea levels rising globally. There is evidence of sea levels rising at Tuvalu . . . Is (a devastating cyclone) going to happen tomorrow? I can’t answer that, but I think they are vulnerable.”
New Zealand takes 75 Tuvaluans a year and offers all islanders a three-month, visa-free visit to find work and lodge migration papers.
Mr Ioane said that Tuvaluans did not want to leave their island home and were the most sedentary of Pacific peoples.
While the Samoans and Tongans have embarked on great migrations in their canoes, he said, the people of Tuvalu, formerly known as the Ellice Islands, have largely stayed put.
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Mr Ioane said: “We are different in that respect. We have such great attachment to our islands and we never like to leave for long. We are not migrators, but we do not want to wait until our land is gone and we are swimming for our lives. There is no Tuvaluan living here scrounging off the state or being a burden. They are hard-working people who will work in the mines of Queensland day after day if they are asked.
“We need the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, to extend the hand of ‘mateship’ — that great Australian tradition he is always going on about — to us.”