UNITED NATIONS — It’s the awkward conversation she knows she should have with her parents as a young woman. They’ve alluded to it before, but couldn’t bring it up directly. And Grace Malie was glad she could avoid the subject with them, even though she and her friends do talk about it.
While her home, the tiny but shrinking island of Tuvalu, slowly erodes rising sea levels due to climate change, Should she survive on the remaining highlands? Or should she flee her home, her culture, her heritage and her past for Australia — in which her government negotiated as “Plan B?”
The 25-year-old, who will address a special summit of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday sea level rise as a representative of her country, has years to decide — decades, even. But it is a decision that, like the mythical sword of Damocleshangs like the sword of Damocles over the entire generation of a nation. And two of the biggest issues facing the top are what to do with people like Grace Malie and how countries like Tuvalu will maintain their sovereignty even if they lose their land.
“This is not about going away,” said Kamal Amakrane, executive director of the Global Center for Climate Mobility and climate envoy to the president of the General Assembly. “This is not about giving up. This is not about giving in. This is about agency.”
Such a situation is unprecedented. It is unlike other climate, conflict or economic refugees who flee with little or no warning as storms strike or droughts devastate their livelihoods, said Alex Randall, the UK-based coordinator of the Climate and Migration Coalition.
The vast majority of people permanently displaced by climate-related disasters remain in their own countries and travel short distances – such as those who left New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. This is about today’s youth making a long-term decision, stay or go, that lingers in the back of their minds. It’s a conversation that’s happening now, even though the flight won’t happen until later.
“It’s a very difficult conversation, very emotional,” Malie said in an interview. “And it’s 50-50. Some of us want to stay. Some of them, because they have families,” will probably go to Australia.
And that is what Malie thinks her own future will be. If she has children, she would think about “the lives of my children. I would have to choose Plan B. Worst case, move.”
“I want them to be safe and have access to quality living, access to quality water, quality living. And to provide that, moving is an option,” she said. “But if I was living alone, you know, without children in the future as planned, then I would choose to stay.”
Her parents wouldn’t say it directly, but they’ve dropped hints that she should consider going to Australia, Malie said. She said they want the best for her.
Tuvalu’s Climate Minister, Maina Talia, has experienced the same discomfort, but from a father’s perspective. He said he has spoken to his four young children about the inescapable threat of sea level rise to their home and future, but has not quite broached the idea of leaving the island to them.
Talia said he fears that if his children leave Tuvalu for higher ground, “their identity will be compromised.”
“It’s not an easy conversation because I want my kids to grow up the way I grew up,” Talia said. “It’s an emotional experience.”
Talia calls sea level rise “an existential threat.” And it’s those two words — “existential threat” — that are central to Wednesday’s summit. For years, small island states have used that phrase, as have leaders of the United Nations and climate activists. But now it’s coming back to bite them because island nations want their sovereignty, their culture, to survive — even if their country doesn’t.
“We’ve really tried to get (the Alliance of Small Island States) to move away from that concept of existential threat, given that when we say that means, does that mean the state no longer exists? The people no longer exist? And that’s not the case,” said Michai Robertson, an adviser to the Alliance of Small Island States.
Belize Prime Minister John Briceño said: “Sovereignty is defined by the will of the people, not by the vagaries of climate change. Once a state is established, it will continue to exist and thrive, regardless of the challenges it faces.”
The UN’s Amakrane said the main goal of Wednesday’s summit is to reaffirm the issue of sovereignty regardless of what the oceans do.
“The land is still there,” he said. “It’s just that the surface is underwater.”
For most, if not all, of the young people’s lives, there will be some land on Tuvalu, just less and less — with more and more of it flooded during storms, high tides and rising oceans. And when she doesn’t have to worry about a family, Malie said the increasing hardships of life there will be worth it.
The threat of her home slowly disappearing has hung over her since she was born. Even when she went to school in Fiji, she and her fellow students from Tuvalu “were mostly ridiculed as the ‘sinking island children,’” she said. “That is something that drives us to continue our fight.”
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