Donatien Garnier

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Climate, migration and culture, the example of Tuvalu

“Climate Refugees” by the Argos Collective, a group of French writers and photographers dedicated to documentary journalism, took five years, between 2004 and 2009, to complete and ended into an exhibition, a book and web videos.

At the time, studies related to climate change focused on the impact on biodiversity. Following our own approach, I working with the Argos Collective decided to question the impact on mankind. This was our basic approach. When we started we had no idea that we would be dealing with migration. However, going through the scarce documentation available, it became obvious that migration would become a major stake by the end of the century.

Our project was to go to different parts of the world, finding communities who were already effectively affected by global warming. We went to Asia, in Nepal, Bangladesh and the Maldives. We went to Africa, visiting Lake Chad. We went to America. I’m afraid we did not go to South America whereas we went to two places in the United States. Maybe because it was urgent to highlight the human consequences of climate change in a state which was then strongly refusing its reality as well as the role played by greenhouse gas emissions. So we went to Alaska and to New Orleans, just after Katrina. We also went to the small state island of Tuvalu in Polynesia. Lastly, we decided to go to Northern Europe, to Germany, Schleswig-Holstein, so as to raise awareness within our European readers, convinced as they were that they would be less affected than the rest of the world.

As a global phenomenon climate change put additional pressure on places where people had to already deal with extreme conditions be it for climatic, geographic or demographic reasons. Sea level rise, hurricanes (which had proved to become more wide-ranging and more powerful) for low lying islands or coastal states, long lasting drought in glaciers countries or arid places, moving weather patterns or extended floods in overpopulated deltas. In such conditions, the adaptive skills developed, sometimes through centuries, tends to come to an end and moving out is the only solution.

We tried to estimate the number of people that would have to leave their land because of climate change. The first global figure, issued by the UN in 2005, projected 50 million people who would have to leave their country or their land because of environmental reasons by 2010. If some of the so-called environmental causes, such as earthquake were not climate induced at least one of them was: sea-level rise. Summing up the appropriate factors, the statistics could become impressive in the long run. Today academics from different fields ranging from climate to migration or demographic studies are working together to produce more accurate data according to the various level of warming expected by the GIEC. It is, for instance, predicted that a rise of three degrees of the global average temperature will force one human being out of seven to migrate. We know that about 30 million people are already internally or externally displaced every year for environmental reasons.

Speaking with people in countries, such as Tuvalu, we were struck by the fact that climate induced migrations had a major difference with other kind of migrations. As José Manuel stated, migrations are usually following cycles at the end of which it become possible to come back to one’s country. In the context of climate change, whole countries are submerged by the sea, or crowded areas plagued by permanent drought, the result is one way travel with no hope of returning.

It has been a key point in our advocacy for the definition of a climate refugee statute. When you move from your country, if you know that you will be able to return, although you don’t know when, maybe in a few decades or maybe in a few generations, if you know that your family will be able to come back, then you remain prepared for that. You do everything to keep in touch with your rela-

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© Donatien Garnier/ Collectif Argos

Donatien Garnier

388 tives that are still there, with your friends, and you keep your cultural matters more or less alive to be able to come back. It’s another story when you know you will never be back.

Another point is that climate change, before it forces people to move, is damaging their lives not only in material or sanitary aspects but also on cultural aspects. This occurs more in traditional communities, where ancient knowledges or beliefs cannot cope with such strong and unprecedented changes in the environment. It causes feelings of despair and accelerates the process of acculturation once the time of moving has come.

To get closer to the issue, I would like to share one of the experiences I had in this work and focus in my stay with the photographer Laurent Weyl in the Tuvalu archipelago. Tuvalu is a very young state lost in the Pacific Ocean, which obtained its independence in 1978. It’s also a very small country where ten or eleven thousand citizens are living. As though Tuvalu can hardly be pointed on a world map, its leaders managed to draw international attention and have their country become a symbol of global warming and climate justice.

Tuvalu is made up of nine atolls, which are more or less coral reefs, so they are very much exposed to sea level rise and hurricanes. Summing up these two factors scientists have already calculated that the islands would be drowned by the end of the century. A notable effect of sea-level rise have already been felt by the population: salinization, for instance. High tides are contaminating the soil and it has become nearly impossible to keep on cultivating traditional Pulaka and Taro roots that are central to the Tuvaluan alimentation. It is the case for coconut trees, another pillar of their culture, from which the Polynesians used to produce everything, from clothes to beverage, food and furniture. Offshore the rise of sea temperature together with coral bleaching have started to impact the fisheries where stands their main resources. It’s increasingly hard for the Tuvaluan people to live on their islands, and they know that they will have to leave definitively their homeland in the next decades. What do you do when you know that? It’s a very complicated issue. Climate change affects the old rules, the way traditional communities were connected with their environment, the way they were explaining the world is not operating anymore, the spiritual links with deities or ancestors

are broken, the confidence in the future is lost, often leading to anguish or depression. Adding to confusion EKT, the main Tuvaluan church, have long opposed a biblical dogma to the reality of the changes: God has given rainbow to mankind as a pledge that there will not be another Great deluge anymore. You can still see rainbows? The sea level is not rising. Later the Church changed its line, influenced by the scientists who were showing their findings, and by the evolution of the Evangelical sphere. Since they have understood they would have to leave their land sooner or later the Tuvaluan people have been impressive in the way they organized themselves in both the diplomatic and the cultural fields. Climate change is now taught at school and children get prepared for their future displacement. They have to be able to adapt themselves elsewhere and they are kept aware that this will be paradoxically easier if they can maintain a strong link with their specific culture, their tongue (the Tuvaluan language is a variation of the Samoan language) and traditions.

In 2001, the government decided to occupy its seat in the UN which represents a high cost for a country of that size. To make it possible the Tuvaluan proposed to have a shared office and a common policy with other low-lying states in New-York. It was quite successful, and the communications strategies they used resulted to be effective. The world could not ignore anymore that global warming was about to erase sovereign states from the map—countries that are among the lowest greenhouse gas emitters. Tuvalu has become a symbol but the country is still fighting for decent solutions, migration in countries, such as New-Zealand were Tuvaluan communities are already existing for instance, and international involvement. Its people have neither nowhere to go, nor no statute other than stateless citizens.

To draw a conclusion, I have the feeling, which I have felt on every trip and every stay during this work, that there is a real need to protect the cultures that are endangered by climate change. Maintaining “ethnodiversity” is preserving technical, but also philosophical solutions to adapt ourselves to the major changes that are coming. This is something that can help us in many ways to reinvent our culture in terms of interspecies solidarity as well as human solidarity. The first step will be the way we build a new imaginary around migration, the way we organize it since we know that climate migrations are now structural, that they will be massive and that they will not end.

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