Read The Attacking Ocean for Free Online Page A

profoundly concerned about global warming and rising sea levels, which threaten to submerge the entire country. Even without sea level rises, the islands are extremely vulnerable to destructive wave action. For instance, the construction of a World War II airfield on the Islands of Funafuti involved the building of piers, infilling beach areas, and excavating deepwater access channels. These humanly made alterations in the 1940s changed local wave patterns, so much so that much less sand now accumulates to form and replenish beaches. Hungry waves now devour and erode the shore even faster than before.
    Apart from rising sea levels, there are also concerns about so-called king tide events, exceptionally high tides that occur at the end of the southern summer and raise sea levels above normal high tide limits. Even without factoring in rising sea levels, such tides already flood low-lying areas, including the airport. A belt of narrow storm dunes lies on the ocean side of the islands, the highest ground on Tuvalu. But occasionalcyclones topple these formations, again increasing the islanders’ vulnerability to rising seas—and more frequent severe weather events are forecast for the future. High tides and cyclones cause enough disruption before one factors in an estimated sea level rise of twenty to forty centimeters over the next century, which could render Tuvalu uninhabitable.
    With the population having more than doubled since 1980 and a history of poor coastal management, Tuvalu’s future as a self-sustaining country is, at best, uncertain. Small islands like Tuvalu have few options. There is nowhere to retreat to, nor is it even marginally economical to build seawalls or to reclaim land in the face of the encroaching ocean. There remains relocation, perhaps moving to another island or to Australia, New Zealand, or elsewhere where there is space to absorb thousands of islanders. Just as in other places, there are deep ancestral ties to the islands, which means that at present very few Tuvalans leave their homeland permanently, perhaps no more than seven people out of every thousand. Seasonal employment in agriculture in New Zealand is accessible to up to five thousand workers from Tuvalu and other Pacific islands, with talk of expanding the scheme to Australia, but this does not offer a permanent solution for a vanishing archipelago.
    Some commentators have called for the relocation of the entire population to Australia, New Zealand, or to Kioa Island near Vanua Levu, a major island in the Fijian archipelago. Kioa has been a freehold for settlers from Tuvalu since 1947. However, a mass migration to the island bristles with economic and political difficulties, and is not on the immediate horizon. Former Tuvalu prime minister Maatia Toafa has pointed out that the government does not consider the threat sufficient to evacuate everybody. Of more immediate concern is a serious shortfall in freshwater supplies, especially during droughts caused by La Niña. A long dry spell in 2011 led to water rationing, households on the capital atoll of Funafuti being limited to two buckets a day. Desalinization plants are likely to be the dominant water source in future centuries—if the islands are still inhabited. Fortunately, unlike some other Pacific islands, Tuvalu has a guarantee from New Zealand that land and spacewill be found for everyone on the islands if such a dire situation as permanent abandonment arises.
    THIRTY-TWO ATOLLS AND a single raised coral island comprise the tiny nation of Kiribati in the central Pacific, none of them more than two to three meters above sea level. 7 Nearly 113,000 people live on twenty-one of these islands, scattered over three and a half million square kilometers, most of them on the principal island, Tarawa, where there is severe overcrowding. One of the poorest nations on earth, Kiribati is on the front-lines of global climate change, for sea level rise may submerge the islands within a few