Sinking Islands: Researching Climate Migration in a Changing Pacific - An interview with Liam Saddington

Your research examines how space and time shape different understandings of climate change. Could you elaborate with the example of Tuvalu and Kiribati?

At the heart of my research is this question of how geopolitics is changing because of climate change, specifically focusing on islands whose entire territory is at or just above sea level where rising sea levels is potentially an existential threat.

The imaginary of the sinking island as spaces that are at risk of inundation dominates how these islands are understood globally and how domestically politicians engage with climate change, adaptation and negotiation to construct these island states as having a finite future. There is a particular politics to that temporality undermining contemporary efforts for adaptation. It also can undermine efforts to attract foreign direct investment into businesses. There’s a very strong political resistance to that. The Pacific Climate Warriors are an activist group that has emerged from the Pacific who are trying to push back against these discourses that remove agency from Pacific Islanders.

At the heart of my research then is what if sea levels are rising and there is a risk of these islands being inundated? What happens to the relationship between territory, sovereignty and statehood if an island state is entirely inundated? Can you still function as a state? Does it maintain a seat at the United Nations?

Until 2016, Kiribati was following a program known as Migration with Dignity. The idea was that you could upskill the population by increasing their access to education and training, so they would have the social capital to migrate to Australia, to the US, to New Zealand and increase the diaspora. But this was resisted and actually Taneti Maamau is the current president who very strongly spoke out against this. Instead, there’s been a focus on land reclamation, on hard engineering projects. For example, the Tuvalu and Coastal Adaptation Project - a seven year land reclamation project to reclaim 800 metres of the coastline and elevate that above future sea levels so that the population will not have to move.

What role do the Tuvaluan youth, memory and mental health play in Tuvaluan climate geopolitics?

The youth are very much at the forefront of Tuvaluan climate diplomacy. And one of the things I look at in my research is how youth bodies are used sometimes. Often there will be youth delegates that are taken along and will give very passionate speeches. At the Pacific Island Forum in 2019, 2 youth opened the ceremony with a strong focus on the necessity of climate action for future generations.

But youth bodies are also used in quite creative ways by the Tuvalu government. Mental health is a significant issue when it comes to climate change. Within Polynesian culture, the family members are buried even next to or kind of within the family home, so they are still part of everyday life. In 2015, Tuvalu was struck by Tropical Cyclone Pam and it washed away a number of these graves on the outer islands. And that is like losing your parents, your family for a second time. So I spoke to a nurse, specialising in climate change, and she said this particularly affected men on the outer islands. So there are many complex ways in which climate and sea level rise have impacts on mental health in these communities.

How did it feel to carry out fieldwork in a place like Tuvalu where the positionality of yourself is implicit with the issues you’re researching?

There is a long history of extractive research practices in the South Pacific. So I’ve been a visiting research fellow of the University of the South Pacific and work very closely with Pacific partners during my research giving public talks or lectures at the University of the South Pacific, but it’s also listening to the ways in which, as a researcher, I can contribute to that research community and ensure that this is one of partnership and not extraction. I’ve done writing and funding workshops and very much listening to what colleagues are saying as well as building ongoing relationships. The research I do has material benefits for the communities that I work with. So, one thing is working with local academics, collaborating on papers together. I specifically in my research, focus on elites, on diplomats, on climate change consultants, on a particular subsection of the kind of knowledge production around climate change.

So over the summer I was doing archival research in New Zealand, tracing the history of British imperialism and colonialism around environmental narratives in the region and actually going into the archives and seeking to bring to light these untold stories, but also actually reflecting on how many of these contemporary environmental narratives are shaped by Britain’s colonial actions in the region, which is sometimes missing from contemporary discussions and will support a colleague’s work in Fiji. So I, think it’s that question of partnership. I think that’s a question of informed consent and trust to the research community that you’re working with of ensuring that there are material benefits for the research you generate with a colleague.

A kind of collective package of being constantly reflecting on your positionality and thinking, why am I doing this research? Who is going to benefit from this research?

A key aspect of this is thinking about spaces of diplomacy, it is looking also at spaces beyond COP; the Pacific Island Forum is a really important space for building Pacific solidarity on climate issues. Thinking about what happens at the G7, what happens at the EU? It’s important to recognise COP is not the only space in which climate diplomacy takes place.