Squint your eyes at a map of the South Pacific.
Squint so hard they close. Now imagine a place where the people came from the sea, are sustained by the sea, return to the sea. A place where the highest point above sea level is a five-meter tall pile of sand dredged from the lagoon, where ATMs are a thing of the future, and where the community gathers for Sunday picnics on the international airstrip that only sees landings twice a week…
Are you still squinting? Good.
You are in Tuvalu.
The first Polynesian outriggers are thought to have brought early inhabitants to the archipelago that is now Tuvalu some 3,000 years ago. Sustained by an intimate knowledge of the sea, and by the harvest of fish and coconut, Tuvaluans have lived a life of relative abundance on these atolls of thousands of years.Because of Tuvalu's small land mass and vulnerability to rising sea levels, it has been identified by the United Nations as the country most at risk of losing sovereignty due to climate change.