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“I had the wall here initially and that was destroyed by the very high tides in 2005. I built this quite some time back. Over the years that was destroyed so I rebuilt it,” explains Anote Tong, the president of Kiribati, a tiny coral island nation of 33 atolls stretching across the Pacific Ocean, with a total land area of 811 square kilometres.

Kiribati sits remote, a seven-hour flight from Australia, 10 hours from the United States. Its coral islands are narrow strips of land, so low on the edge of the world that when seen from water level, they seem to disappear against the blue sea. But they really are vanishing.

“For quite some time I did not sleep because I didn’t have a solution to a problem that there wasn’t a solution to.” Says Tong. “What happens to us in the future? Do we disappear as a culture? These are the issues that keep me awake.”

Tong’s worries are down to global climate change, which is causing the seas that have supported life in Kiribati for 4,000 years to rise. It’s his job as president of his country to decide whether to fight or flee. Historically, the islands of Kiribati were among the last places to be colonised by man, one of the last stops on humanities great migration out of Africa. But today, Kiribatinas could be one of the fdirst peoples forced to move on because of global climate change.

At the southernmost tip of Kiribati, fishermen like 23-year-old Ribita Iobete feel the threat of global climate change the most. “The temperatures are getting hotter and there is a change in the level of the sea,” he says. “It’s getting higher. These changes are affecting the food we grow. Before, our coconuts were big but now they are as small as our fists.” Sea water has also begun to seep into the water table, which is giving drinking water drawn from the well a salty taste.

Ribita’s 83-year-old father, Iobete Iobete, has declared war against the rising tide by building a sea wall and standing guard over it every evening. But the sea is inexorable. The waves are getting higher and the trees are dying. A study in 2008 by the University of Colorado in the United States estimates that even if carbon dioxide emissions are stabilised, sea levels will continue to rise as much as 2 metres by the end of this century. It’s a trend that spells disaster for Kiribati’s 113,000 residents, who live on islands just 2 metres above sea level. In fact, some scientists estimate Kiribati will be under water in less than 50 years’ time.

“Already we have whole villages being washed out,” says Tong. “ There is no running away from the reality that the seas are rising.”

Where to from here?

As a small, relatively poor nation, Kiribati simply does not have the resources – like the tourist-rich Maldives – to look for alternatives. It cannot buy new territory, afford to give its residents money to go and start a new life elsewhere, or build high-tech solutions as they are doing in Holland. Kiribati’s fate is at the mercy of wind, waves and the global economy.

“If we had one single island, I think it might be possible to put sea walls around it,” says Tong. But given the geography of Kiribati, this is an impossibility. “Where does that leave us?” he asks. “We have to face the reality and that seems to be that we have to relocate. The question is: How do we relocate?”

Tong is particularly incensed by the fact that while those in the international community continue to point fingers at each other regarding responsibility for and leadership on this climate change issue, it’s the Kiribatians who experience the impact. “To me it’s offensive and insensitive because it [the international community] doesn’t recognise the plight of our people,” he says.

But some countries are taking a more positive approach. Kiribati has already entered into programmes in cooperation with the governments of Australia and New Zealand.

According to Tong, New Zealand currently takes in 75 Kiribatians on an annual basis as migrants, picked at random. “If each country of this world would do that, I think we would solve our problem,” he says. He envisages a kind of slow-motion evacuation, one person at a time. To help with this migration plan, training centres like the Kiribati Institute of Technology are aligning their curriculum with countries looking for skilled labour. But so far the only real deal has been struck with Australia; nursing students will be trained up, then eventually offered jobs there. “Australia is going to be a big place for us, a big adjustment,” says nursing student Molomolo Tiira. “I’ll miss my culture, my country, the language, maybe the food and the ocean but other than that, I’m planning to stay there.”

Despite her reservations, she is realistic about the poor prospects in Kiribati. She realises that moving to Australia may be the only opportunity for her family to have a future.

But Tong believes this kind of gradual emigration is better than evacuating the islanders all at once, which would potentially create a nation of climate change refugees. “We will be victims regardless of what happens,” he admits. “Other countries will be next.”

As he sees it, the biggest problem for the international community is what to do with the people who will become climate change victims in future. “This represents the single biggest moral challenge to humankind,” he says. “And if it doesn’t respond to this, then there is no credibility to anything.”

This feature was compiled with the help of tve (Television Trust for the Environment) and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), a specialised UN agency that is dedicated to financing agricultural development projects.