Death by drowing

The ocean should be Teatu Tsuria's friend. A villager in the tiny South Pacific nation of Kiribati, he lives on a soft white beach fringed with coconut trees and catches enough fish in his canoe to feed his five smiling children. He wakes up each morning to the whisper of the waves and falls asleep at night fanned by a cooling sea breeze. But the ocean is Mr Tsuria's most implacable foe. It is killing his crops and poisoning his water. In the next decade it will swallow his thatched wooden hut and his modest plot of land; within a few generations, it may have annihilated his homeland.

The ocean should be Teatu Tsuria's friend. A villager in the tiny South Pacific nation of Kiribati, he lives on a soft white beach fringed with coconut trees and catches enough fish in his canoe to feed his five smiling children. He wakes up each morning to the whisper of the waves and falls asleep at night fanned by a cooling sea breeze. But the ocean is Mr Tsuria's most implacable foe. It is killing his crops and poisoning his water. In the next decade it will swallow his thatched wooden hut and his modest plot of land; within a few generations, it may have annihilated his homeland.

Kiribati (pronounced "Kiribas") - 33 coral atolls strung across two million square miles of the Pacific - is steadily vanishing beneath the waves. Around the world, sea levels are rising as greenhouse gases discharged by industrialised countries warm the oceans. The future is bleak for low-lying island states - and Kiribati, barely two metres above sea level, could be the first to go under.

The latest round of international talks on global warming collapsed in The Hague six weeks ago, following a dispute over implementation of a miniscule cut in carbon dioxide emissions. Despite a dramatic appeal for action by 40 vulnerable island nations, no date was set for the resumption of negotiations. Wealthy, developed countries believe that they can afford to bide their time.

For the 92,000 inhabitants of Kiribati, one of the world's most remote spots, the matter is rather more urgent. The ground is literally disappearing beneath their feet. As the seas continue to rise, they could be forced to emigrate en masse, together with tens of millions of other people in low-lying island and coastal communities around the globe.

Mr Tsuria has watched the tide creep ever closer, devouring large chunks of beach and felling 30-year-old palm trees. A ferocious storm in 1997 flooded his home and the pits in which he cultivated taro, a staple root vegetable; nothing grows here now. The water in his well has turned brackish. His family can no longer drink it. If they wash with it, they develop rashes.

"When we came here 11 years ago, the sea was about two metres further away," says Mr Tsuria, who lives in the village of Eita, on Tarawa, the densely populated main atoll. "I am very worried, but there is nowhere for us to move to. All of the land is occupied and anyway, I have no money for another plot. What will become of my children and my grandchildren?"

Similar stories can be heard all over Tarawa, a horseshoe-shaped chain of islets surrounding a central lagoon. Pancake-flat and barely 500m wide, the atoll is being eaten away from both sides, with the population squeezed into an ever narrower strip of land between the lagoon and the Pacific.

So badly eroded are Tarawa's beaches that the Mormon Church recently imported several tons of sand from Australia to build a new house of worship here.

The international community, too, should spare a thought for beautiful, dirt-poor Kiribati - a former British colony known as the Gilbert Islands - as it digests the latest findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations body that collates the work of 3,000 leading scientists.

Their 1,000-page unpublished report, excerpts of which have been seen by The Independent, predicts that sea levels will climb by 14cm-80cm between now and 2110. It says that the effects will be borne disproportionately by the world's most impoverished countries, which make a negligible contribution to global warming and are least well- equipped to adapt.

The report - which is being reviewed by governments and will be finalised at a conference in Shanghai later this month - says that even if greenhouse-gas emissions were reduced sharply in the immediate future, "sea levels will continue to rise due to thermal expansion for hundreds of years". Other studies suggest that the oceans may ascend even more rapidly than forecast by the conservative IPCC.

For Kiribati, which nestles against the International Date Line, the implications are clear. A year ago, its citizens were among the first people on the planet to welcome the dawn of the new millennium. Before the end of the century, they could become the first environmental refugees, their 3,000-year-old Micronesian nation wiped off the map, their unique language, legends and culture extinguished.

As you drive along Tarawa's single paved road, with the deep blue ocean unfolding on one side and the turquoise lagoon on the other, it is difficult to comprehend that this is a place that faces oblivion. All around you, everyday life is being played out in accordance with the languid rhythms of the Pacific. Young men in lavalavas (sarongs) wade out across the mudflats to the reef, fishing-nets slung over their shoulders. Bright-eyed children shin up tall palms to collect the sap, which is fermented to make the local grog, sour toddy. Groups of laughing girls immerse themselves in the warm lagoon. Elderly women sit on the ground, salting clams and weaving mats from pandanus leaves.

I-Kiribati, as they are called, have lived the same subsistence lifestyle for generations, growing crops, catching fish, gathering firewood, building shelters. They have no television and little contact with the outside world; only a handful of tourists visit. Society revolves around the extended family and the maneaba, the communal meeting-house that is the focal point of every village.

For these gentle, engaging people, the notion of uprooting themselves and resettling in another country is inconceivable. But they know that something is badly amiss.

All around Tarawa are signs of severe coastal erosion, particularly on Betio, the westernmost islet. Two uninhabited islands, Tebua Tarawa and Pikeman, have completely vanished beneath the surface of the lagoon. In the cemetery in Betio, which overlooks the Pacific, ancient gravestones have been washed away. In Bairiki, the administrative centre, concrete houses have just crumbled into the sea.

Many families have built crude sea walls to protect their homes from the unusually high spring tides. Others have resorted to more desperate measures. A few years ago, Uearimone Saiborui physically moved her house in Eita away from the lagoon, dismantling it piece by piece and reassembling it 10 metres back from the water.

"We kept getting flooded; I couldn't sleep at night for worry," Mrs Saiborui said. "But the high tide still comes close to the house, so maybe we will have to move again. The sea is such a big problem here that I fear for my beloved Kiribati."

Bolted to the new jetty in Betio are two tidal gauges, one installed by the University of Hawaii, and the other by Flinders University in Adelaide. Analysis of their data suggests that the sea level has been ascending by 3.3mm a year for the past 25 years, faster than the global average.

As the waters rise further, there will be nowhere to go. There is no high land in Kiribati - with the exception of Banaba, a raised limestone atoll that the British mined for phosphate, exhausting its final valuable reserves just before granting the country its independence in 1979.

With Banaba wrecked by mining, i-Kiribati joke that they will have to climb to the tops of coconut trees to escape the ocean. But the islands will become uninhabitable long before the last morsel of land is submerged. The underground lenses that are their only fresh water supply will be polluted by frequent floods; fiercer storms together with higher waves are expected to accompany global warming. Deprived of water, the few crops - taro, pandanus and breadfruit - that grow on these smudges of barely fertile land will die. Diseases will spread, and roads and infrastructure will be damaged. Warmer water will gradually kill the coral reef, and the precious fisheries - the islanders' sole source of protein - will disappear. Fishermen say that the reef is already dying.

"We don't believe we have a future as a country if the sea level rises," says Johnny Kirata, Kiribati's chief fisheries officer. "Either we go under the sea, or there'll be no fish for us to eat."

Not everybody subscribes to this doomsday scenario. Many people in this devoutly Christian nation quote the Old Testament - Genesis, chapter 9 - in which God promised Noah, after he left the Ark, that there would never "any more be a flood to destroy the earth". There were no greenhouse gases back then, of course.

Some locals attribute the erosion on Tarawa to causeways built between the islets, which have changed all the natural currents and flows in the lagoon. They point to accretions of sand at various sites, and conclude that the land is simply shifting around.

However, Nakibae Teuatabo, a former senior Ministry of Environment official who is Kiribati's foremost expert on climate change, is certain that there has been a net loss of land. He is also perturbed by the apparent changes to established weather patterns.

Mr Teuatabo says that the outer atolls, where no coastal development has taken place, have experienced similar erosion to Tarawa. On the island of Nonuti, for instance, 60 miles to the south, 10 families have been forced to move their houses back from the water.

"I remember first hearing the global- warming theory on the radio in 1987," says Mr Teuatabo. "At first I didn't believe it was true; perhaps I just didn't want to believe it. But now I am convinced of it. It coincides with all the signs of change that we see here in Kiribati."

His concerns are echoed by Kiribati's Environment Minister, Kataotika Tekee. "We don't need scientific papers to tell us what is happening," says Mr Tekee. "We've been living close to nature for thousands of years. We drink the water from the wells and eat the fruit from the trees. We understand our own environment. Our problem is that we are only a small voice in the world."

Just outside Mr Teuatabo's village is an offshore island called Abairarang, which was once used as a campground by Boy Scouts. Over recent years, it has shrunk by around one-third, and the palm trees have given way to some stunted shrubs. He says: "This is my model for what will happen to Kiribati."

All that his compatriots can do is cross their fingers and pray for a miracle. With the West still dragging its feet, Kiribati and other endangered Pacific nations - described by one early explorer as "pearls of priceless beauty ... an earthly paradise" - cannot help but feel that they are somehow dispensable.

By the time that they can prove to developed countries the consequences of their actions, they will be gone, Third World victims of First World greed.

As Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, head of marine biology at the University of Queensland, says: "We are going to wonder about this historically. Why did a society ignore its own scientific evidence of a peril of this magnitude? What kind of a society would do that?"