On the coral-crusted shores of Funafuti, a 14-year-old boy scans the ocean between math problems. His classroom sits a stone’s throw from the rising tide. He dreams of becoming a doctor, but he’s running out of land to stand on.
There’s no university in Tuvalu, no major hospital, and, by mid-century, very likely no habitable homeland at all. This archipelago — a string of islands barely poking above the Pacific between Australia and Hawaii — is facing extinction by climate collapse. Not from war or disease, but from rising seas washing away everything its people have ever known, even a teenager’s dream of becoming a doctor in their homeland.
This tiny Pacific nation — just 26 square kilometers, more or less like Manhattan stitched together by corals and ancestral memory — is one of the most vulnerable places on Earth. A place where the average elevation is two meters, the height of an average basketball player. Where the highest point is a modest hill of 4.6 metres on Niulakita, barely taller than a two-story house. A place where entire neighborhoods now flood during high tide, not storms. A place where salt eats the roots of crops before they can sprout and where seawater seeps into drinking wells and…