For a country the size of Rangitoto Island with a population rivalling that of Greymouth, Tuvalu has made quite a mark on the world stage. Over the past decade this group of tiny islands located midway between Brisbane and Honolulu has got itself into the media spotlight over claims that it is facing national extinction as a result of global warming.

Developed nations, say Tuvalu’s leaders, are profligately filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases. They are warming the globe and causing sea levels to rise. For an island nation such as Tuvalu, where the highest land is a mere 4–5 m above sea level, rising oceans are a ticking bomb. Defuse the bomb, Tuvalu’s leaders say, before our people—and millions more in other low-lying lands—face catastrophe. Oh, and while you’re at it, you can pay us for damages.

Pacific nations first voiced concerns about being in the environmental firing line in the late 1980s, as the implications of human-induced climate change began to filter from the scientific community through to the wider public. The president of Kiribati put it plainly when he said he feared that in the future “my country will not be there”. Environmental lobby groups such as Greenpeace picked up the idea of low-lying islands going the way of Atlantis and placed the issue of sea-level rise on the media agenda. Journalists latched on to Tuvalu as the environmental hard-luck story of the new millennium. In no time, the world’s fourth-smallest nation became a poster child for greenhouse annihilation.

Headlines such as “Tuvalu Toodle-oo”, “The Canary is Drowning” and “Tuvalu Sinks Today—The Rest of Us Tomorrow?” began to proliferate. In 2001, environment campaigner Lester Brown wrote, “The leaders of Tuvalu have conceded defeat in their battle with the rising sea, announcing that they will abandon their homeland.” At about the same time the Tuvaluan prime minister, Koloa Talake, upped the ante by threatening to sue the United States and Australia for failing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The lawsuit, which was to have been filed in the International Court of Justice in the Hague, was dropped when Talake was ousted from office in 2002.

The rhetoric, both from Tuvalu government officials and climate campaigners, has remained strident. In a speech to the United Nations in September 2003, marking the 25th anniversary of Tuvalu’s independence, then prime minister Saufatu Sopo’aga told the General Assembly that his people lived “in constant fear of the adverse impacts of climate change”, and were “deeply dismayed that key industrialised nations do not share our concern”. The threat of sea level rise, he said—in language guaranteed to catch the delegates’ attention—is no different from “a slow and insidious form of terrorism against us”.

This year, in a new book on global warming, environmental journalist Mark Lynas portrayed Tuvaluans as facing a Hobson’s choice: “to move, and live cultureless and uprooted in a foreign country, or stay on the land of their forefathers and die”. Like many other writers, he spoke of the “imminent evacuation” of Tuvalu.

Was it all true? Was Tuvalu soon to resemble a film set for The Day After Tomorrow? Were frigates standing by to pick up 10,000 evacuees? Or were the reports of Tuvalu’s imminent demise exaggerated? Over 10 days at Easter 2004, I had the chance to find out. In the company of Christchurch photographer Giora Dan, I travelled to two of Tuvalu’s nine islands. I wanted to get to the bottom of the sea-level issue, but also to find out what the world stands to lose if 25 sq km of Pacific Island real estate goes under the waves.