Spotlight – September 2019

ENVIRONMENT 9/2019 Spotlight 15

Foto: Michael Runkel/robertharding/laif

O

n the hottest days,

Leitu Frank feels as if

she can’t breathe any

more. The housewife

and mother of five

children walks out

of her airless concrete home to feel the

breeze in a simple wooden shack by the

water’s edge. She folds clothes and looks

out at the calm blue sea, the moods and

rhythms of which are increasingly unpre-

dictable, as its rising proximity threatens

to strangle her family.

“The sea is eating all the sand,” says

Frank, 32, dressed in a pink T-shirt and a

sarong. “Before, the sand used to stretch

far out, and when we swam, we could see

the seabed and the coral. Now it is cloudy

all the time, and the coral is dead. Tuvalu

is sinking.” “Tuvalu is sinking” is the local

way of describing the effects of climate

change on this tiny island archipelago on

the front line of global warming.

A Polynesian country situated in Oce-

ania, Tuvalu is no more than a speck in the

Pacific Ocean, midway between Hawaii

and Australia. Once the Ellice Islands, part

of the British colony of the Gilbert and El-

lice Islands, Tuvalu gained independence

in 1978. The fourth-smallest nation in the

world, it is home to just 11,000 people,

most of whom live on the largest island of

Fongafale, where they are packed in and

fighting for space. Tuvalu’s total land area

is less than 26 square kilometres. Already,

two of the country’s nine islands are

about to disappear, the government says,

swallowed by sea rise and coastal erosion.

Most of the islands sit only three metres

above sea level, and at its narrowest point,

Fongafale is just 20 metres across.

During storms, waves hit the island

from the east and the west, “swallowing

the country”, in the words of the locals.

Many say they have nightmares that the

sea will soon swallow them up for good,

and not just as a distant fear in their sleep,

archipelago

[)A:kI(pelEgEU]

, Inselgruppe

concrete [(kQNkri:t]

, Beton

proximity [prQk(sImEti]

, Nähe

sea level [(si: )lev&l]

, Meeresspiegel

shack [SÄk]

, Hütte

speck [spek]

, Fleck

strangle: ~ sb. [(strÄNg&l]

, jmdm. die Luft nehmen

unpredictable

[)Vnpri(dIktEb&l]

, unberechenbar

The archipelago

of Tuvalu in the

Pacific Ocean