Tuvalu is disappearing — NZ needs to take action

Happy Tuvalu language week. To answer your probably most pressing question, Tuvalu is a small collection of islands and atolls located about 3500 kilometres north of New Zealand.

If you're thinking of the small atoll north of Samoa, you're on the right latitude, but that's Tokelau. You want to look on a map for the larger islands of Fiji and then head north. Keep going past Rotuma, past the (weirdly French) Wallis and Futuna, but just before you get to the long spread of Kiribati.

There, among the low-lying volcanic archipelagos, you'll find the tiniest of the Commonwealth monarchies of which Charles III has just become king. Tuvalu is currently reviewing whether to keep the monarch as head of state. To be fair, though, that began back in July, when Elizabeth was still queen (RIP).

Of the 11,000 population, 6000 live in the capital of Funafuti. Nearly 5000 call Aotearoa home. If that doesn't seem a large enough number to warrant a national language week, then perhaps you need to better understand what's happening to the Tuvaluans, and why New Zealand needs a yearly reminder.

The world's fourth-smallest country also has the smallest GDP of any sovereign nation in the world, coming in around $80m, or one-tenth the personal fortune of its new monarch. It is technically listed by the United Nations as an LDC: limited development country.

The reason that's a technicality, though, is because the Tuvaluan government declined to be upgraded to a developed country since that would, under current guidelines, cease the funding it receives from the UN to deal with the effects of climate change.

You see, Tuvalu is literally disappearing. When people talk about Pacific countries vanishing due to climate change, they may not know it, but they mean Tuvalu. When its prime minister, Kausea Natano, stood before the UN General Assembly last month, he stated very bluntly:

‘‘Most societies see climate change as mainly about cutting carbon emissions or mitigating future impacts. We are facing a looming situation far more profound – the near certainty of terminal inundation. Our peoples, in my generation or the next, will be unable to exist on the islands that have nurtured our ancestors for centuries.''

This is a country desperate to be heard. Last year, at the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, its foreign minister, Simon Kofe, addressed representatives from a lectern in the sea to highlight how much more immediate rising water levels are for certain countries.

October in the Pacific does not mean darling buds, lambs and green gardens. It means preparing for cyclones because, for low-lying Pacific nations, tropical storms are particularly devastating.

For Tuvalu, it is not about throwing money at the problem, though that is certainly what detractors would have you believe; that this is all an elaborate grift for climate funding. Those detractors never seem to have been in the islands, though; never seen how ocean water can compromise fresh-water purity.

While Tuvalu certainly won't say no to any help, it would rather larger countries helped by helping themselves. The Pacific contribution to global emissions is laughably low, considering the severity of the impact on the region.

Notably, Natano never mentioned financial aid in his speech. Instead he asked for security of sovereignty beyond the uninhabitability of his land. The 65-year-old leader did not come cap in hand to the world, but rather alerted the world that it must prepare for a Tuvaluan populace without Tuvalu.

This is where New Zealand has a responsibility to help. Auckland remains the great port of the South Pacific, and this country has long postured about being not only a destination for Pacific migrants – albeit a not entirely fairly paying one – but also as a leader in the region.

Well, leadership cannot simply be about funding. There needs to be action, long-lasting and embraced by the whole nation.

Jacinda Ardern's words to the UN General Assembly about climate change will ring hollow if the prime minister after her does not follow through.

This cannot be a party political issue. It has to be embraced by Kiwis en masse, because otherwise the heritage of lowlying island nations like Tuvalu, Rotuma, Tokelau, Wallis and Futuna, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands will be all that remains of them.

That is why Tuvaluan language week matters. Not just because it reminds us of the impact of their community on Aotearoa, but because it calls us to remember how our actions impact where they have come from.

We celebrate many cultures and languages in New Zealand throughout the year, but as our Tuvaluan community celebrates its language, and works to keep it alive, it does so with the near certainty that its homeland will be lost.