Tuvalu is facing extinction.
The island nation is expected to be one of the first countries in the world to be completely lost to climate change. The three coral islands and six atolls that make up the country have a total land mass of less than 26 sq km.
At current rates of sea level rise, some estimates suggest that half the land area of the capital, Funafuti, will be flooded by tidal waters within three decades. By 2100, 95% of land will be flooded by periodic king tides, making it essentially uninhabitable.
The waters are rising so fast that Tuvaluans everywhere recount stories of finding themselves standing knee deep in seawater, which bubbles up through the porous ground in the centre of the island. Erosion and large amounts of washed-up debris are evident along the exterior coastline. Remnants of infrastructure and vacated homes lie abandoned along the edges of the shore. Cemeteries are being worn away and residents have resorted to creating tombs next to their homes.
The surging waters, fueled by the climate crisis, also pose extreme risk to drinking water, food security and energy supply. Critical subsistence food crops such as coconuts and pulaka (taro) are failing in the high-salinity soil and weather and temperature changes bring devastating cyclones, record temperatures and more frequent periods of drought. Fresh food is almost nonexistent, making the population more reliant on imported products, which are expensive and lack nutritional value.
In the face of this reality, work is under way in Tuvalu to reclaim land, along with attempts to preserve its culture and history online, in groundbreaking plans that could see Tuvalu become the first wholly digitised nation existing in the metaverse.
In the folowing year, during COP27, Kofe's address was recorded in front of a virtual copy of Te Afualiku, the first island in Tuvalu to be digitally recreated through satellite imagery, photos and drone footage able to capture grains of sand on the beach and the direction of water currents in the ocean.
Te Afualiku is the blueprint for the digitisation of all Tuvalu’s islands and its geography; the coral atolls and reefs, the lagoon, the porous sandy soil, the palm trees and what is left of the pandanus, breadfruit and taro – a landscape that may cease to exist in the real world.
Not only that but the government are examining how to use augmented and virtual reality to allow displaced and future generations of Tuvaluans to continue to exist as both a culture and a nation, complete with ancestral knowledge and value systems. If this concept becomes a reality, the Tuvaluan people will be able to interact with one another in a digital dimension, in a way that imitates real life and helps to preserve shared language and customs.
