The chronopolitics of climate change adaptation: land reclamation in Tuvalu

ABSTRACT

Discourses of urgency have dominated adaptation responses to climate change, necessitating fast and decisive action. These discourses are particularly apparent in low-lying island states due to rising sea levels. Tuvalu, an atoll state in the South Pacific, has engaged in land reclamation projects as a means of adaptation. Focusing on these projects, I explore how chronopolitics can help tease apart the complex spatialities and temporalities which underpin adaptation. Chronopolitics describes the relationship between the politics of individuals and groups and their perspective on time, thus it can help to unpack how time perceptions shape adaptation decision-making processes. Drawing on fieldwork in the South Pacific and COP24 in Poland, I contend that adaptation serves as a performative process that supports alternative climate futures. Within this paper, I use critical geopolitics to show how these futures are suffused with power relations, at domestic, international and financial levels. Moreover, through an examination of the 2019 Pacific Island Forum, I argue that land reclamation serves as a visible, material resource to enrol in performative forms of diplomacy. Subsequently, I show how it is imperative that geographers, and social scientists more broadly, are attentive to the temporality and spatiality of adaptation to understand its political potential.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change adaptation
• critical geopolitics
• Tuvalu
• diplomacy
• chronopolitics
• participant observation

1. INTRODUCTION

Anthropogenic climate change is transforming environmental systems across the world. Global greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggesting that several transformations in the Earth systems are now unavoidable (IPCC, 2021, 2022). In response, governments, communities and individuals have engaged in mitigation and adaptation. This article focuses on climate adaptation in the South Pacific island state of Tuvalu. Given their picturesque nature, and charismatic politicians and activists, island states have become emblematic of the climate crisis in the Anthropocene. Low-lying atoll states have featured prominently within global imaginaries on climate change (Farbotko, 2010), with concerns centring on future sea level rise and the possibility of atolls becoming uninhabitable by the mid-21st century (Storlazzi et al., 2018). Indeed, Ratter (2018, p. 173) argues that ‘apart from the lonely polar bear, the narrative of sinking islands is the most popular representation of risks associated with global warming’. Scientists argue ‘the vulnerability of communities in small islands, especially those relying on coral reef systems for livelihoods, may exceed adaptation limits well before 2100 even for a low greenhouse gas emission pathway’ (IPCC, 2022, p. 2046). Alongside bleak narratives of potential inundation, these scenarios have fuelled speculation around the geopolitics of atolls and the future relationship between territory, sovereignty and statehood in atoll states (e.g., Burkett, 2011; Yamamoto & Esteban, 2010). To encapsulate the social, physical, political and cultural magnitude of these inhabited spaces becoming uninhabitable, climate change is described as an existential threat (Farbotko & McMichael, 2019). Due to historic emissions and the ongoing failure of global efforts to reduce anthropogenic emissions, climate change adaptation has become a crucial activity for small island states. Adaptation remains a contested process. For institutions such as the United Nations, adaptation is largely an issue of proper management and merely a matter of examining how governments can design and implement effective adaptation strategies (Harris & Barkdull, 2016). However, for small island states, ‘adaptation is not merely a question of technological solutions but also a social challenge as retreat or relocation is often not considered a desirable option’ (Ratter, 2018, p. 182). Moreover, these adaptation decisions also can reinforce, or contest, geopolitical narratives around the future statehood of atoll states. The prevalence of migration discourses as a response to sea level rise (Farbotko et al., 2016; McMichael & Katonivualiku, 2020; Mortreux & Barnett, 2009) means that particular adaptation pathways depoliticise climate change and avoid transformative approaches. Struggles over climate governance in the Pacific reflect the ability of states to shape ‘their own futures, especially as many of these states are reliant on external project funding’ (Denton, 2017, p. 70). Given this reliance on bilateral donors and multilateral institutions, for example, Green Climate Fund (GCF), adaptation funding is intrinsically shaped by external power relations, international relations and colonial legacies. Bordner et al. (2020) argue that persistent colonial dynamics in the Marshall Islands deny the Marshallese agency over their adaptation with donors unable or unwilling to fund large-scale adaptation. Moreover, ‘it is difficult to identify any externally funded project that has successfully helped rural communities adapt to climate change within the last 30 years’ (Nunn & Kumar, 2019, p. 31) in the Pacific, illustrating the difficulties associated with adaptation.

In the context of Tuvalu, discourses of urgency and severity of climate change have influenced contemporary decision-making processes around adaptation. Large-scale land reclamation projects have been framed as a means of buying the atoll state time and space to adapt to climate change, as well as serving as adaptive measures in their own right, with space substituting for time through a particular chronopolitics. Tuvalu has been chosen as the case study due to funding of a land reclamation project through the GCF and to explore the diplomacy of land reclamation given the centrality that land reclamation played within the 50th Pacific Island Forum (PIF) in 2019 in Tuvalu.

Chronopolitics is a theory that explicates how different conceptualisations of the present alter political decision-making processes (Wallis, 1970). Chronopolitics places a focus on how perceptions of time shape decision-making processes which alongside critical geopolitics’ focus on how ‘strategies of power always require the use of space’ (Sharp, 1993, p. 492) allows for an analysis of how climate change adaptation relies upon, and reinforces, particular spatial and temporal imaginaries around the relationship between state and territory. This paper uses chronopolitics to show imagined climate futures are shaped by, and shape, power relations and diplomatic relationships. These possible futures and imaginaries are prefigured through events, and through an examination of one such exercise, Tuvalu’s hosting of the 2019 PIF, this paper argues adaptation spaces are mobilised through diplomatic performances to contests futures of inevitable inundation and prefiguring futures in which the state remains in situ.

To begin, I outline contemporary literature on small island states, chronopolitics and the relevance of critical geopolitics. Second, I introduce the case study of Tuvalu, examine recent literature on its climate geopolitics, the fieldwork that underpins this paper and discuss contemporary government climate policy documents. Third, I consider how chronopolitics can help geographers and other social scientists to conceptualise the imagined futures enabled by adaptation and how these are suffused with power relations at the domestic, international and financial levels. Fourth, I examine one such exercise of power, namely the performative act of diplomacy at the 50th PIF hosted by Tuvalu in 2019.

2. CRITICAL GEOPOLITICS, CHRONOPOLITICS AND SMALL ISLAND STATES

With its focus on discursive practices, spatial metaphors and labels, and the role of binaries in constructing global politics, critical geopolitics offers an insightful theoretical framework for studying the geopolitical imaginaries of climate adaptation. As such, it forms the basis of my theoretical framework. Since its inception in the late 20th century (e.g., Tuathail, 1992; Tuathail & Agnew, 1992) critical geopolitics scholarship has broadened its attention, and climate change has become a key area of interest although in a very different form to classical geopolitics (Dalby, 2013). Geopolitical language and thought have underpinned understandings of climate change with both state and non-state actors, although much research and policy remains ‘constrained by the “territorial trap” of imagining the world as a series of rational and spatially and politically distinct state’ (Barnett, 2007, p. 1372; Agnew, 1994). To understand the geopolitics of climate change, we need to be attentive to how human forcings in the Earth system are affecting not only our political and socio-economic systems and institutions but also our ‘imaginations of the future (im)balance of world political power’ (Hommel & Murphy, 2013, p. 520). Adaptation to climate change, a process focused on addressing futures shifts, is a key process through which geographers and social scientists can think through these power (im)balances.

Within existing scholarship, there are uneven geographies in the representations and understandings of the impacts and representations of anthropogenic climate change and subsequent adaptation with a notable bias towards Western democracies (Manzo & Padfield, 2016). Despite this, particular spaces have become synonymous with the global climate crisis, with particular states in the Global South being understood through a geopolitics of fear fuelled by alarmist imaginative geographies of catastrophe (Chaturvedi & Doyle, 2010). These imaginative geographies have been used to construct atoll inhabitants as tragic victims of climate change (Farbotko, 2005). In doing so, alternative identities of resourcefulness and resilience have been silenced by Western media outlets. Imaginative geographies of vulnerability shape understandings of climate change in the Global South, risking them becoming rendered as subordinate politically, financially, technically and technologically to the Global North (Mikulewicz, 2020).

Islands have come to serve a particular role in climate communication within Western narratives. Atolls such as Tuvalu are constructed as spaces in which the impacts of climate change, and their potential solutions, can be simplified and more easily communicated than on larger, and by implication more complex, landmasses (Farbotko, 2010). Thus, with inundation rendered as inevitable, forced climate migration from atoll states is portrayed as an unavoidable impact of sea level rise. However, these narratives neglect and silence the desires and voices of small islanders. Political leaders, activists and communities from atoll states have rejected discussion of climate refugees – with some Tuvaluans expressing a preference to drown as opposed to leaving their islands (Farbotko et al., 2016). To imagine an alternative geopolitical future, islanders must challenge the narrative that dangerous levels of climate change are inevitable and invoke different temporalities (Methmann & Oels, 2015).

Scholars from across geography, and the social sciences more broadly, have considered the geographies of time and the complex relationships between spatialities and temporalities. Thrift (2006, p. 551) has argued that ‘space and time are no longer seen as a passive backdrop to human endeavour. Rather, they are seen as the stuff of human endeavour, resulting in a background which is our assumption about how the world is’. Thus, scholarship has sought to unsettle conventional views around the history of time, for instance around the role of clock time in creating new forms of temporal doing, with Glennie and Thrift (2005) instead indicating the long setting in of new time technologies and its coevolution of everyday practices. These reflections on time have also been advanced by cultural geographers such as Wylie (2009) who explored the relationship between materiality and memory through spectral geographies, with other cultural geographers reflecting on non-human ghosts and extinction through the lens of spectrality (Searle, 2021). Other more-than-human geographers, examining the onset of climate change and ecological crises, have contemplated the notion of animal time and how thinking through turtle time may open new avenues for communication and geographical thought in the Anthropocene (Bastian, 2012).

Anderson (2010) has explored how the problematisation of the future as indeterminate or uncertain has been met with anticipatory action through anticipatory logics of precaution, pre-emption, and preparedness. He argues that human geographers must engage with the taken-for-granted category of ‘the future’. In relation to climate change, despite its inherent temporality of an era yet to come, ‘the future’ remains an underexamined discourse (Brace & Geoghegan, 2011). However, geographical scholarship has begun to theorise the role that time plays in perceptions of sea level rise. Focusing on low-lying communities in Australia, Fincher et al. (2014) argue that those affected by sea level rise temporally situate their experiences by extending their present and past into an imagined future. In a similar vein, McMichael and Katonivualiku (2020, p. 287) considering planned relocation in Fiji argue that ‘local understandings and experiences of the past, present and future of environmental changes, attachment to place, and relocation have heightened significance and coalesce in the everyday as thick time’.

Within this article, I argue that a conceptualisation of chronopolitics within critical geopolitics can assist in the theorisation of the role of space and time within adaptation. Chronopolitics, or the politics of time, should not be viewed ‘as an alternative to geopolitics (something that rivals it) but as something already at work within it’ (Klinke, 2013, p. 675). Therefore, geopolitical discourses do not only construct the spaces in which world politics is seen to occur but also help to map understandings of time (Klinke, 2013). Wallis (1970) argues that the present may be viewed as a time of transition, in which epoch-making decisions can be made and thus create pathways to several alternate futures. However, the present can be viewed in different ways, if the present is viewed as a period of crucial unalterable decisions, for instance in the contemporary era due to climate change, then it can lead to a politics of crisis as critical moments only occur once in history and thus there is no chance for reversal in the future. Wallis (1970, p. 102) uses the term chronopolitics to ‘emphasise the relationship between the political behaviour of individuals and groups and their time-perspectives’. I argue, that given the narratives around sea level rise and atoll states chronopolitics can provide a lens through which to understand how time features in the geopolitics of climate change adaptation.

3. ATOLL STATES: TUVALU, LAND RECLAMATION AND SEA LEVEL RISE

Situated in the South Pacific, Tuvalu is one of the smallest sovereign states with a land area of 26 km², although it has a large exclusive economic zone of 900,000 km² (FAO, 2020). Along with other atoll states, Tuvalu has been identified as extremely vulnerable to climate change, often seen as at risk of being entirely submerged by rising sea levels (Roy & Connell, 1991). Consequently, Tuvalu has become known as the ‘canary in the coalmine’ for climate change (Farbotko, 2010). Besnier (2016, p. 5) notes that ‘since independence, and particularly since the beginning of the millennium, Tuvalu has become the object of frequent newspaper column-filling journalistic attention in industrial countries, much of which emphasises the remoteness and vulnerability of the country’ with most coverage of Tuvalu focusing on climate change. Moreover, Tuvalu’s symbolic role within Western climate narratives has also been co-constructed by Tuvaluan leaders during climate talks and negotiations (Goldsmith, 2015). Central to this has been discussions surrounding the potential inundation of Tuvalu’s land.

Across the Pacific, land is a crucial component of Pacific islanders’ culture with the relationship between land, sea and people underpinning identities and reinforcing people’s sense of place (Holliday, 2020). McCubbin et al. (2015) argue that Tuvaluan culture and identity are based on three interconnected pillars of land, food and community. Moreover, faith forms a key component of this land-based identity as Tuvaluans believe that God gave them their land, cementing their communal ties to the land within their faith (Mortreux & Barnett, 2009).

In Tuvaluan, ‘fenua’ refers to both a people and a place (Farbotko & McMichael, 2019; Farbotko et al., 2016). As noted by Stratford et al. (2013, p. 71), this tie to the land has been key in the construction of the nation-state, arguing that:

fenua has been elemental in the emergence of sovereign identity and filial loyalty to the nation. On the one hand, fenua serves to uphold a persistent impression of a stable relationship between ‘people’ and ‘island’. On the other hand, limiting a fenua to the territory of the island from which it takes its name actually belies the importance of mobility and migration.

Consequently, there has been the emergence of hybrid identities, linking migrant’s home islands with their new homes, for instance, the ‘Nanfuti’ identity of Tuvaluans from the island of Nanumea living in the capital Funafuti. Degradation of land through sea level rise has pressing implications for Tuvaluan livelihoods as well as longer term challenges to identity formation.

This paper draws from three periods of qualitative research undertaken between June–September 2018, December 2018, and July–October 2019 in the South Pacific and at the United Nations Climate Change Negotiations in Katowice. Much of the analysis of climate geopolitics has been highly attentive to the role of text, from newspaper articles, speech transcripts and legal documents (e.g., Farbotko, 2005; Goldsmith, 2015; Jaschik, 2014). More recently, geographers and political scientists have been increasingly interested in the role of conferences within climate diplomacy (Brun, 2016; Mahony & Hulme, 2018) as they provide a space in which to observe the construction, and contestation, of geopolitical imaginaries. As such, through a methodological focus on in-depth interviews and participant observation as well as analysis of policy documents, I place prominence on the voices, emotions and performances of those who construct and contest these geopolitical discourses in the conference space. Participants were recruited through numerous means; some were approached directly at COP24. Gatekeepers included academics at the University of the South Pacific Campus in Tuvalu and the British High Commission in Suva. In total 55 interviews were conducted with diplomats, politicians, civil servants, climate change consultants, non-governmental organisation (NGO) representatives, academics and representatives from regional organisations. These interviews were conducted as part of a wider project considering climate geopolitics in the Pacific. In total, Pacific islanders made up 71% of participants with 51% of these identifying as Tuvaluan. Although these interviews provide important context, not all participants were able to comment on land reclamation and so a smaller subset underpins this paper. Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identities of participants. Participant observation was conducted at COP24 and the 50th PIF in Funafuti, Tuvalu.

Scientists, climate activists and governments across the globe have framed climate change as a ‘climate emergency’. Emphasising the impacts of climate change on contemporary society cements climate change within present day discourse, rather than as a hypothetical future. By doing so, it is hoped urgent climate action shall follow (McHugh et al., 2021). These actors have sought to bring about mitigation to reduce future climate change but also adaptation to contemporary climate change. This section draws upon an analysis of government documents to consider how the temporalities of the recent past and the present justify the necessity of climate adaptation in Tuvalu. First, I consider how climate change has been constructed as a threat to the future sovereignty of Tuvalu. Second, I consider how the discussion of tropical storms has made climate change present and visible in Tuvaluan government discourses and their impacts on development. Finally, I consider the policy justifications for land reclamation.

Climate change, and specifically sea level rise, has been constructed as a threat to the Tuvaluan nation within domestic climate policy documents. Within the 2012 Te Kaniva Tuvalu National Climate Change Policy, the government sets out the significance of ensuring the security of the Tuvaluan people and the need to maintain national sovereignty. The government strategies set out to ‘ensure that Tuvalu continues to have the capacity to remain as a nation’ and that a ‘resilient Tuvalu continues to be inhabitable to current and future generation of its people’ (Government of Tuvalu, 2012, p. 26). As the future territorial sovereignty of Tuvalu is constructed as under threat, anticipatory action is made necessary in the present (Anderson, 2010) to ensure the continued habitability of the Tuvaluan islands. Within the report, there is an acknowledgement that these ‘strategies come with high price tags that we don’t have the resource and capacity to meet’ (Government of Tuvalu, 2012, p. 26) and a focus on securing international support in the present to secure Tuvalu’s sovereign future. Here there is tension between the urgency of action for adaptation, and the lack of domestic funding to secure Tuvalu’s future.

The Tuvaluan government constructs a clear narrative in which climate change is not just a future threat, but a contemporary challenge which has already been experienced.

Impacts of climate change are already felt in Tuvalu, most recently during Tropical Cyclone Pam in March 2015 which caused widespread damage by large waves and storm surges. Damage included seawater flooding and destruction of agriculture and infrastructure, contamination of water supplies, coastal erosion and scouring. It is estimated that 45% of the total population was internally displaced and the total economic loss and damages were Aus$13.95 million. (Government of Tuvalu, 2016, p. 7)

Here, climate change is situated in the present as something ‘already felt in Tuvalu’, illustrated by recent damage from Pam which struck Tuvalu the year before the GCF submission. It is worth noting that although climate change is expected to increase the magnitude of tropical storms, it will not generate tropical cyclones. Despite this, the government invokes extreme meteorological events such as Pam as a manifestation of climate change. Conveying the magnitude of these impacts, the proposal emphasises qualitative descriptions and quantitative data that reference the economic impact and the high percentage of Tuvaluans displaced by the storm. Elsewhere in the proposal, the impacts of Pam, and by extension climate change more broadly, are explicitly expressed in reference to temporalities. The Tuvaluan Coastal Adaptation Project (TCAP) application states:

The economic damages and the cost of recovery mean that many years’, if not decades’, worth of development was undone in the matter of days and impose additional burdens on the sustainable development path for Tuvalu. (Government of Tuvalu, 2016, p. 3)

The Tuvaluan government attributes the economic impact of Pam to climate change, expressing this through the currency of time rather than monetary terms. There is an assumption within this quotation that development is linear, and progress can be expressed through time. Using the currency of time, the Tuvaluan government expresses the severity of damage through a temporal framing that communicates climate change’s contemporary significance. This temporal setback is understood as a ‘burden’ for Tuvalu’s sustainable development, invoking questions of climate justice. Kelman (2018) argues that climate discourses in small island states that privilege climate issues can distract from other development issues which need to be tackled concurrently. Within their application, the Tuvaluan government resists this dominant narrative – instead intertwining the two by expressing climate damages through the lens of development time.

This weaving together of development and climate change is also evident in the 2021 TE Kete: National Strategy for Sustainable Development. Under the government’s key outcome results, it states that key strategic action 1.4.1 is ‘[to] develop long-term national adaptation strategy, including a staged land reclamation programme, that takes into account a worse-case scenario of sea level in Tuvalu rising by one metre by year 2100’ (Government of Tuvalu, 2021, p. 5). Increasingly, land reclamation is being reimagined as a form of adaptation for atoll nations such as Kiribati (Jacobs, 2020), the Maldives (Duvat, 2020) and Tuvalu (Round, 2019) to adjust to rising sea levels, declining agricultural productivity and environmental degradation. Land reclamation is a net gain of land from the sea, wetlands, or other bodies of water through human intervention (OECD, 2001). Within island states, land reclamation has increased the habitable landmass and created new space for agricultural production. Here the government of Tuvalu offers a geopolitical counter-spatialisation (Larsson, 2007) to hegemonic representations of Tuvalu as a ‘sinking island’ and victim of climate change lacking agency by undertaking land reclamation (e.g., Farbotko, 2010). This promotes an image of a proactive state embracing climate adaptation, providing that it is supported financially, with Te Kete identifying the need to ‘secure increased funding from global climate financing facilities’ (2021, p. 5) echoing the aforementioned Te Kaniva Tuvalu National Climate Change Policy. The TCAP is an example of this.

Launched in 2017, the TCAP is a seven-year project focusing on the atolls of Funafuti and Nanumea, and the island of Nanumaga. These were selected by the Tuvaluan government as their coastlines ‘have a high concentration of houses, schools, hospitals and other social and economic assets’ and ‘two of the three target islands in the GCF project (Nanumea and Nanumaga) are among the four islands hardest hit by Cyclone Pam’ in 2015 (Government of Tuvalu, 2016, p. 3). Co-funded by the GCF and the Tuvaluan government, the TCAP will cost US$39 million. The project seeks to ‘reduce exposure to coastal hazards in the three target islands, developing a long-term coastal adaptation strategy, building capacity of national and local authorities to better implement adaptation actions, and investing in youth as future stewards of a resilient Tuvalu’ (TCAP, 2020).

The proposal suggests Tuvalu is vulnerable in the present to sea level rise and ocean related hazards due to previous underinvestment and small-scale adaptation due to resource constraints. This is emphasised through the interweaving of present and future threats:

Despite the extreme level of vulnerability, Tuvalu currently does not have a single engineered coastal protection infrastructure project that is thought to withstand current and future impacts of sea-level rise and intensifying tropical storms. (Government of Tuvalu, 2016, p. 3)

Without external funding for the TCAP, this present – occupied by a vulnerable Tuvalu – will continue and deteriorate as climate risks multiply. Throughout the TCAP funding proposal, the idea of a present already affected by climate change and expected deterioration in the future is highlighted. Echoing McMichael and Katonivualiku (2020), this understanding sees tight enmeshment of the past and future within current experience of climate change in the Pacific. Climate change has already altered the present, therefore, legitimising an expectation of a changed future – indeed a particular imagined future of deterioration (Fincher et al., 2014).

Constructing the present as a moment of transition – in which the environmental conditions are deteriorating – serves as a chronopolitical device (Wallis, 1970). The government has increased the stakes of adaptation, strengthening the case for the TCAP as the present provides a unique moment for adaptation. Land reclamation is portrayed as a means by which to secure Tuvalu’s future against sea level rise and environmental extreme events such as storm surges (Government of Tuvalu, 2017). Within the next section, I consider the chronopolitics and geopolitics of utilising land reclamation as a form of adaptation.

4. BUYING SPACE AND TIME: THE CHRONOPOLITICS OF ADAPTATION

Governmental and intergovernmental decisions on climate adaptation are informed by imaginations of the future configuration of the state and its territoriality. Subsequently, these decisions then shape what futures are possible through the prioritisation of certain spaces, islands, and socio-economic systems. As such, adaptation processes, institutions and discourses have relied upon and reinforced particular geopolitical imaginaries.

Given the construction of sea level rise as an existential threat to atoll states (Farbotko & McMichael, 2019), adaptation has been portrayed as a means to nullify this threat. Discourses of urgency, severity and impending change have influenced contemporary adaptation decisions within island states for instance undertaking land reclamation.

Although the TCAP focuses on three islands, land reclamation is only planned for the capital, Funafuti. As the Tuvaluan government’s flagship adaptation project, the TCAP clearly illustrates how the government is prioritising hard engineering. Lono, a Tuvaluan government official, when asked about the TCAP, explained:

So, the priorities, what the focus of the project is, depends on our climate change priorities. … And I think the building of sea walls and the protection of islands was key. Why? Because we needed space to think. To give us more time. So, we have to build the islands. (interview, Lono, 29 August 2019)

Johnson (2020) has considered the fluidity of islands, unpacking the physical transformations of islands through different spheres of change. He contemplates the geographies of horizontal expansion through land reclamation and how this alters perceptions of land space. However, as evidenced here, physical expansionism alters perceptions of island space and also of island time. Given narratives around the impending climate crisis and the urgency of action through Western understandings of Tuvalu as a ‘sinking island’, these hard engineering measures are seen to alleviate the immediate nature of the threat, giving Tuvaluans ‘more time to think’. Consequently, it is seen as imperative that the Tuvaluans ‘build the islands’ with the creation of new physical space for the nation. In doing so, space has become a substitute for time with adaptation projects focusing on space creation seen as prolonging Tuvalu’s habitability. Thus, the present is seen as a time of transition in which epoch-making decisions can be made (Wallis, 1970) by delaying the impacts of sea level rise and its degradation on Tuvaluan land. This viewpoint, however, is not ubiquitous. Maatia, a Tuvaluan representative at COP24 in Katowice, argued:

In terms of not only buying time – we do not want to leave. We cannot say we do not want to leave and then we do nothing. We do not want to leave our home and at the same time, the Government of Tuvalu is trying to explore the alternatives that are available out there. So, in terms of extending the reclaimed land, it is vital for the protection of the land. (interview, Maatia, 6 December 2018)

Here, Maatia offers an alternative rationale for the TCAP’s land reclamation. Maatia argues the project is ‘not only buying time – we do not want to leave’, seeing any narrative of buying time as potentially endorsing a future in which Tuvaluans would need to relocate thereby asserting land reclamation as a means of voluntary immobility (Farbotko & McMichael, 2019). Maatia contends that the TCAP is illustrative of the Tuvaluan desire to remain and the necessity of reinforcing Tuvalu’s assertive international diplomacy with domestic action thereby collapsing the binary between domestic and foreign politics. Proactive domestic approaches to climate adaptation strengthen Tuvalu’s international position on climate action (discussed further in section 5). Reference to exploring the alternatives alludes to the multiple geopolitical futures imagined for Tuvalu. There is a clear emotional politics at play here, enforcing the rootedness of Tuvaluans. Kilipaki, a Tuvaluan government official, when describing the TCAP, reported:

The word is adaptation. To adapt to the encroaching sea, sea level rise, we need to reclaim. … It is not only reclamation to have bigger land, but it is reclamation to grow. The reclamation plan is steady, to build infrastructure yes. But we can also plant edible trees. … Breadfruit tree, bananas, coconut. So, you know? It is also a win–win solution. We can expand the land but also try to plant more of these edible crops that we can eat for food security. (interview, Kilipaki, 20 August 2019)

This interview extract illustrates the centrality of land reclamation within the current adaptation strategy of the Tuvaluan government. Reclamation is presented as not only an adaptive strategy to sea level rise but also a means of ensuring the food security of Tuvalu in light of increased rainfall variability, increased drought frequency and intensity, and saltwater intrusion into the soil. The TCAP is framed as a solution to multiple issues which are affecting Tuvalu in both the present and the future. Lono described the role of institutions such as the GCF in funding climate adaptation:

We cannot adapt on our own. We have to adapt with support from our development partners and international and multilateral organisations. So, the funding that some of our bilateral partners were supposed to give directly to us, they gave to international financial institutes … we submitted [the application] in 2015 and it got kicked back by GCF. Then in 2016, we resubmitted, and it went through. (interview, Lono, 29 August 2019)

This quotation illustrates the fundamental tension at the heart of Tuvaluan climate adaptation. Lono identifies the significance of adaptation for Tuvalu and how ‘we have to adapt’, thus emphasising the perceived responsibility of the government to implement adaptation to climate change and its agency to bring about adaptation. However, this agency is tempered by dependence on development partners and international organisations for adaptation funding, planning and implantation. Tuvalu’s adaptation is restricted and shaped by international organisations such as the GCF, illustrated by the evolution of TCAP. Originally, the TCAP’s focus was on building protective barriers such as seawalls to protect vulnerable parts of the coastline. However, following the completion of the neighbouring Queen Elizabeth Park, the local community shifted its focus towards reclamation. Kanaloa, a Tuvaluan climate change consultant, described how:

After the completion [of the Queen Elizabeth Park], initially, the coastal protection for Funafuti was just a sea wall – TCAP will pay for that. And then they [the Falekaupule – a traditional assembly of island elders which shares powers with an elected Kaupule] saw this, once the government has erected this Queen Elizabeth Park, they wanted this too. Land reclamation does not only protect them from the waves, it also means they have more land. (interview, Kanaloa, 20 August 2019)

This illustrates the attractiveness of land reclamation as a form of adaptation for Tuvaluans as it is seen as addressing issues of land scarcity alongside climate change. Following a renegotiation with the GCF, funds were diverted towards land reclamation with the government planning to reclaim 80,000 m² (Round, 2019). Taukelina, a senior official in the Funafuti Kaupule, explained the difficulty of diverting the funding:

It is the Falekaupule that asked to change from protection to reclamation. We have had a hard time arguing with the UN and the Green Climate Fund. They said no, this is just for protection. … We said we don’t want that, what we need is more space on this island. If we don’t get any extra there, we are going to be in trouble. There will be lots of social problems. Servicing the schools, and hospitals. And places for people to live in, accommodation. There is not enough. (interview, Taukelina, 28 August 2019)

Crucially, this extract illustrates how the meaning of adaptation is contested in specific relation to the forces of capital, and how this contestation plays out through the interactions between states and international bodies such as the GCF. Despite pressures from international bodies for other adaptation approaches, Tuvalu has focused on land reclamation. Notably, protective measures such as sea walls are no longer seen as sufficient for Tuvaluans to adapt to climate change, reclamation is seen as an adaptation measure that not only prevents seawater intrusion but also creates further space for Tuvaluans and the Tuvaluan nation. This creation of space is seen as facilitating adaptation climate issues such as food security as discussed above by Kilipaki.

Previous research has illustrated how Tuvaluan perspectives on sea level rise have focused on imaginaries of the ‘edge’ between land and sea shaping competing ‘riskscapes’ of climate change (Yarina & Takemoto, 2017). However, this edge – or boundary – is materially and politically manifested through coastal features and the delimitation of baselines (Sammler, 2020). Nevertheless, the shoreline is not, as is often seen, a distinct place separating water from land but a dynamic zone that is porous and connected to other places (Kothari & Arnall, 2020). Atolls are dynamic geomorphological features, with imaginaries of an ‘edge’ lending itself towards technocratic and protectionist solutions to sea level rise, such as seawalls, that allow humanity to control the atoll edge through fixing it via costal protection (Yarina & Takemoto, 2017).

Notably, through TCAP, the Tuvaluan government has shifted from a protectionist stance regarding existing land to an expansionist attitude through which the elevation and extension of land provides a means to safeguard the state and facilitate adaptation. According to the TCAP (2021), ‘the reclamation will serve a two-fold purpose of protecting this shoreline [on Funafuti] from further wave attack, as well as providing new raised safe land’. Reclamation is viewed as creating space to protect existing land, and creating new space to facilitate development that will alleviate other impacts of climate change, such as increased food insecurity. In doing so, this new space also creates time for future adaptation whilst delaying the possibility of emigration. Within Tuvaluan climate adaptation, space-creation has become synonymous with time-creation.

Geopolitics cannot be limited to a spatial science alone; it must be attentive to imaginaries of time and how the future construction of space can be disrupted by phenomena such as climate change. As argued by Klinke (2013, p. 685), ‘geopolitical writing does not merely construct the spaces of world politics, but it also maps understandings of time’. Temporal generalisations haunt geopolitical discourse as much as spatial simplification. Narratives of the inevitable inundation of atoll states dominate discourses surrounding low-lying island states. As an anticipatory measure, land reclamation challenges both current contemporary apocalyptic discourses and imagined future climate threats. As opposed to the ‘sinking’ or erosion of the island, land reclamation projects shift the focus to advancement. Given the temporality of land reclamation projects, reclaimed land plays a pivotal role in performing climate futures that are deemed desirable by the Tuvaluan government. Now, I turn to how these land reclamation projects have been used by the Tuvaluan government as spaces to host conferences, geopolitical events, to stage and perform the political position and identity of the Tuvaluan state (Craggs, 2014b).

5. DIPLOMATIC PERFORMANCES: THE 50TH PACIFIC ISLAND FORUM

Climate diplomacy encompasses a plethora of state and non-state actors across multiple fora, engaging with a range of issues including efforts to increase, or restrict, global ambition on mitigation; securing new forms of bilateral and multilateral funding for adaptation and mitigation; ensuring protection for those who are displaced; creating precedents for litigation; and more broadly raising the profile of climate change (Light, 2017). Geographers have explored the symbolic, performative and theatrical role of climate change conferences and summits in climate diplomacy (e.g., Death, 2011). In this section, I consider the performative role that climate change adaptation projects play within climate diplomacy and the shaping of climate geopolitics. As argued by Craggs and Mahony (2014, p. 420), conferences are key geopolitical sites beyond just the specific climate politics, as symbolic locations, spaces of legitimation ‘and as stages for political identities to be performed’. I argue that diplomatic events can facilitate the showcasing of particular adaptation solutions which disrupt hegemonic imaginaries of inundation and allow performances of alternative sovereign futures. In order to do so, I will consider a site of climate diplomacy beyond the United Nation – the 50th PIF which was held on the reclaimed Queen Elizabeth Park in Tuvalu.

Opened in 2017, the Queen Elizabeth Park is a 40,000 m² reclamation project using 115,000 m³ of sand dredged from Funafuti’s lagoon (Property, 2017). Situated close to the airport, the Rt Honourable Doctor Sir Tomasi Puapua Convention Centre (named after Tuvalu’s second Prime Minister) hosted the 50th Meeting of the PIF Leader’s Summit in August 2019, attended by an estimated 600 delegates and over a dozen world leaders. Among the various Pacific regional organisations, the PIF is perhaps the most prominent internationally, although its dominance has been challenged in recent years with the Micronesian members announcing their intention to leave the organisation over a dispute over the appointment of a new secretary-general. Founded in 1971 as the South Pacific Forum, the PIF was renamed in 2000 to reflect its broadened membership and inclusion of North Pacific members. Since its foundation, the PIF has sought to exert an assertive attitude, stressing the Pacific island’s role in shaping the diplomatic agenda and attempting to create a regional identity (Fry & Tarte, 2015). Although the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environmental Programme (SPREP) was established in 1992 to focus on environmental issues, the PIF is the dominant authority for coordinating climate change action in the region with climate change dominating the annual PIF summit (Goulding, 2015). First discussed in Rarotonga in 1991, Pacific leaders have continually called for greater efforts on mitigation and adaptation with the 2018 Boe Declaration stating that ‘we affirm that climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific and our commitment to progress the implementation of the Paris Agreement’ (Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, 2018).

Through hosting the conference on the reclaimed land of Queen Elizabeth Park, the Tuvaluan government sought to place issues of sea level rise, climate change and adaptation at the centre of the PIF. Scholarship has highlighted how subaltern actors use conferences to create spaces that open up political space; symbolic meanings can be embedded within the staging of conferences to highlight matters of perceived importance (Craggs, 2014b; Shimazu, 2014). Using the choreography of the forum, the Tuvaluan government placed a spotlight on climate change. Held a week before the PIF, the convention centre’s opening ceremony was combined with the closing ceremony of the Youth Climate Change Forum which had been held in preparation for the UN Secretary-General New York Climate Change Summit in September 2019. By integrating the two events, the Tuvaluan government emphasised climate change within the upcoming PIF.

Whilst attending the ceremony, I noted that Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga emphasised how the conference centre had been built on reclaimed land. He described how three years previously he had asked local stakeholders including the Funafuti’s Kaupule, cabinet members, local planners and engineers ‘can we do it?’ Sopoaga continued that the construction of the centre and the hosting of the forum was ‘to prove our calibre – it is not a small task to host such a big gathering of Pacific Island Leaders’. Gesturing towards the conference centre, he asked the audience to ‘witness the response to this call – as we can see. In no uncertain terms, our boys and girls, our engineers, carpenters, constructors and planners resoundingly responded in a convincing answer – yes we can’. The completion of the Queen Elizabeth Park and the convention centre has been presented as demonstrative of the ‘calibre’ of Tuvalu in its ability to undertake major construction projects and to undergo major adaptation programmes. As noted by Craggs and Mahony (2014, p. 415), ‘conferences are key sites for the visible performance of expertise and power’ with the forum providing an opportunity to disrupt narratives of Tuvaluan helplessness. Sopoaga finished his speech by situating the reclamation project within Tuvalu’s broader position in the international community. He described how Queen Elizabeth Park was ‘testimony to what can be done in Tuvalu’ emphasising how ‘solidarity’ has enabled Tuvalu as a ‘sovereign independent country, albeit small, to be an active member of the international community. Tuvalu means standing together. Told to us in the beginning, we cannot go alone’. Tuvalu’s ‘big smallness’ has led to it holding a significant symbolic role in climate change discourses through the actions of domestic leaders and international commentators (Goldsmith, 2015). Although Sopoaga acknowledged the support of development partners such as Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan in the construction of the conference centre, the project and Tuvalu’s hosting of the PIF is seen as illustrative of a proactive approach to climate change. A key marker of the ‘success’ of Queen Elizabeth Park is Tuvalu’s ability to act as a sovereign state – something perceived to be threatened by rising sea levels (Farbotko, 2010). Although foreign dignitaries, such as the Australian High Commissioner, were present, the vast majority of the audience of 400–500 were Tuvaluans – emphasising how these discourses were also aimed at domestic audiences.

Using the reclaimed land for the conference, the Tuvaluan government has sought to perform the role of a state capable of holding its own on the international stage despite the challenges faced by sea level rise and climate change (Craggs & Mahony, 2014). This narrative of assertiveness and demonstrating Tuvalu’s capabilities concerning climate adaptation was highlighted by other participants. When asked about Tuvalu’s position on climate change, Lono, a Tuvaluan government official, stated:

So, it is about action and taking action. So, we build, we reclaim this. Holding the forum on reclaimed land is a statement. You know? We can’t wait. We had to do something. It is important we carry this message to our partners if you are willing to help. You can help us with the infrastructure development. (interview, Lono, 29 August 2019)

As asserted by Lono, the hosting of the forum on reclaimed land is seen as a statement that illustrates the technical capacity of Tuvalu to adapt to climate change – given enough support from international partners. Moreover, there is a temporality to the Queen Elizabeth Park project with his reference to ‘we can’t wait’ illustrating the perceived imperative of immediate action to combat the impacts of climate change. Fletcher (2011, p. 29), asks ‘might a theory of performative geographies … open new avenues for thought in examining island identities?’ Through the reclamation of the lagoon, and the subsequently hosting of the conference, the Tuvaluan government has enrolled particular spaces and diplomatic acts in its construction of the atoll state as proactive, pre-emptive and capable in light of climate change. This performance of a state able to act both domestically and internationally can be seen in the hosting of the opening ceremony, the meticulous planning of the event, and the prominence of international representatives. I recorded in my field diary:

Significant effort went into the organisation of the opening ceremony even though the Convention Centre remained unfinished only days before the Forum starts. Hundreds of balloons had been inflated, fabric drapes laid out over the opening plaque and over 400 chairs laid out for guests. It was quite amusing before the ceremony watching civil servants desperately trying to find scissors for the ribbon. … There were numerous photographs following the Opening Ceremony. This included various assortments of cabinet members, MPs, local officials, and contractors. Notably, the Prime Minister was keen for the Australian High Commissioner and Taiwanese Ambassador to be present and summoned them over for photographs with the Australian High Commissioner being at the centre of the photographs. (field diary, 2 August 2019)

Although the convention centre still needed significant work before the forum, the government prioritised hosting the opening ceremony. Within Tuvaluan diplomacy, importance was placed on the aesthetics of the conference centre as a diplomatic space. Neumann (2013, p. 152) argues that ‘the attention to aesthetics be seen as an investment in efficiency, for well groomed sites maintain the aura of diplomacy, and a diplomacy that takes place within an aura is an efficient diplomacy’. As part of this, ‘development partners’ were not only referred to in Sopoaga’s speech but also they were placed centre stage – literally – during the ceremony, highlighting the significance the government sees international partners playing in securing Tuvalu’s future in situ. Moreover, the hosting of the conference demonstrated the willingness of the government to engage in adaptation. The conference centre is an impressive piece of architecture, contrasting with most existing architecture in Funafuti and prominently dominating the shoreline. Its presence on the landscape was seen to be a statement of Tuvalu’s capacity, and determination, to undergo substantial efforts to adapt to climate change. Farbotko et al. (2016, p. 548) argue that ‘appeals to sedentarism and performativities of tragic loss of connection to land are clearly of importance to Tuvaluans when discussing climate change risk in-situ’. Through hosting the PIF on reclaimed land, the Tuvaluan government has performed an imaginary future in which risks can be mitigated to a degree that the Tuvaluans will remain in situ – engaging in what I term active sedentarism.

Beyond the conference centre, the Tuvaluan government used other spaces to reinforce the importance of land reclamation. Hospitality plays a key role in staging political relations (Craggs, 2014a). During the PIF, the architecture of hospitality played a key performative role in highlighting potential climate futures. During the PIF, leaders stayed in bungalows run by the Funafuti Lagoon Hotel and constructed on reclaimed land, intended to illustrate how land reclamation could feature in future Tuvaluan adaptation. Key individuals present at the forum indicated Sopoaga had been particularly keen for the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, to stay overnight. Maatia, a Tuvaluan representative at COP24 in Katowice nine months before the summit, explained:

building the conference centre to host the Pacific Forum next year. All these constructions are built in the lagoon, they are all reclaimed land. We do hope that it will be a successful project. And if it is, then by the look of it, it could be extended. It is a lesson learned for other Pacific Islands. (interview, Maatia, 6 December 2018)

Illustrative here is how the reclamation of the Queen Elizabeth Park could provide a blueprint for climate adaption across the Pacific islands. Land reclamation provides Tuvalu with an option to tackle land scarcity and to adapt to climate change, as reclaimed land can be elevated to protect coasts from rising sea levels. However, as exemplified here land reclamation also serves as a visible, material resource to enrol in performative forms of diplomacy. Anderson (2010, p. 786) asserts that ‘futures are … made present through practices that stage an interval between the here and now and a specific future’. Adaptation serves as that practice in the case of Tuvalu’s climate geopolitics. Through widespread media coverage, the Tuvaluan government utilised the summit to prefigure a future in which Tuvaluans are not displaced by climate change but persist in situ through adaptation, allowing the government to continue to engage in diplomacy as a sovereign state.

6. CONCLUSIONS

Climate adaptation is a political process, insofar as particular environmental changes are prioritised over others within adaptation efforts (Nightingale, 2017). This prioritisation occurs at the highest levels of diplomacy and is carried out according to diplomatic and financial logics. Embedded within the way these adaptation efforts are foreseen are particular spatial and temporal imaginaries. This paper has focused on land reclamation in Tuvalu to examine the specific spatiotemporal imaginaries that operate in adaptation discourses in atoll states. The present is constructed as a period already affected by climate change, and the increasing magnitude of climate impacts as determinate of future trends. As such, atoll states are understood as having a finite future, threatened by rising sea levels with subsequent adaptation shaped by these geopolitical discourses that underpin alternative imaginaries of the future of the state. This paper attends to the performative aspects of the 2019 Pacific Island Conference to show how climate futures are imagined and reimagined – closed and opened – through affective and symbolic diplomacy. In the conclusion, I elaborate on the ramifications of this for the study of (spatio)temporality in geographical thought and for future research concerning climate diplomacy and atoll states.

Large-scale adaptation projects, such as land reclamation, are seen as preventing, delaying or at least slowing, the impacts of climate change thereby buying time to pursue greater global mitigation or alternative adaptation pathways. Illustrated through the TCAP, space and time can become interchangeable within adaptation with the creation of new ‘space’, also creating time for the state. This paper understands this process through the lens of chronopolitics (Wallis, 1970). Land reclamation services as a chronopolitical device that disrupts the vertical geopolitical imaginaries of sinking islands through the creation of a pathway for continued habitation (Elden, 2013). Indeed, chronopolitics notes ‘how time is used to conserve or challenge (geopolitical) order’ (Klinke, 2013, p. 685). Hard engineering projects provide communities with the promise of an alternative future to migration, resisting hegemonic representations of inevitable inundation.

Within the IPCC, responses in coastal areas and small islands to sea level rise are framed as: protection, accommodation, advance and planned relocation (IPCC, 2022). Through advancing, land reclamation moves into the hazardous area of the lagoon to reduce climate risk – providing an adaptation strategy that is transformative (Mach & Siders, 2021). and encompasses the values of the Tuvaluans. Fundamentally spatial, these land reclamation projects move beyond the static defence of the atoll edge and see the proactive extension of the land into previous ocean space (Yarina & Takemoto, 2017). Centred on the premise of extending, protecting, or creating land this adaptive strategy is grounded upon the significance of land within Polynesian culture, and concerns over its degradation due to climate change. Farbotko et al. (2016) have written about the geographic performance of sedentarism and rootedness within Tuvalu. However, whilst rootedness encapsulates the current policies, voluntary immobility and sedentarism suggest a degree of inactivity and inertia which does not reflect the assertive and proactive response of the Tuvaluan government and Funafuti Kaupule. Instead, I have posited that there is a geographic performance of active sedentarism. Through land reclamation, the act of advancing the landmass into the ocean performs an active sedentarism that creates an alternative possible geopolitical future allowing the population to remain in situ.

Nevertheless, these projects remain restricted by limitations. Nunn et al. (2020) argue that adaptation in Pacific has largely been ineffective or sustained. Hard-engineering projects do not provide a permanent solution – the estimated lifespan of TCAP is 40 years – after which political decisions will need to be made about Tuvalu’s future (GCF, 2020). International funding bodies, such as the GCF, are reluctant to fund unproven or experimental projects and, for now, financing them unilaterally or by bilateral means, remains beyond the reach of atoll states. Indeed, Nunn and Kumar (2019) suggest that sharply rising climate costs in donor countries next decade will likely lead to a reduction in funds made available to Pacific islands. As asserted by Bordner et al. (2020) there is a ‘need to return sovereignty over climate adaptation decision-making to affected states in order to avoid loss of the most severe and permanent kind’. Consequently, diplomacy has proven a vital approach for states to try and facilitate access to adaptation finance free from external restrictions.

Ambitious adaptation projects prefigure a future in which the sovereignty of atoll states is upheld, human rights respected, and the state and population remain in situ. Newly reclaimed land, and other adaptation projects, can be enrolled into diplomatic performances to assert the adaptive capabilities and potentials of vulnerable states. Illustrating the importance of examining climate diplomacy beyond the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the PIF was used by the Tuvaluan government to prefigure a future in which it continues to participate within the international system despite the climate crisis. Beyond atolls, critical geopolitics allows geographers to examine the performative nature of adaptation to resist, reinforce and co-opt geopolitical imaginaries of what futures are, or are not, desirable or even possible. Adaptation is enacted in anticipation of long-term environmental and socio-economic change, with imagined futures conceived about multiple presents and pasts (Fincher et al., 2014). Ongoing adaptation is used by state, and non-state actors, to challenge hegemonic discourses and transform space to make alternative futures visible. Adaptation, and its diplomatic potential, allows actors to articulate how future relations could, or should, be configured.

Scholarship has argued that ontologically the state is constituted through specific practices and traditions (Jeffrey, 2013; Painter, 2006), however, there is acute materiality embedded within these practices and traditions. Inundation is rendered as a material threat to the continuity of the state because it disrupts the future of these specific practices and traditions. These land-based adaptation strategies reassert the territorial component of the Westphalian state and thus are presented as allowing atoll states to maintain their sovereignty. Beyond the remit of this paper, it is evident that there is an everyday geopolitics of climate change that is present in adaptation projects. As sea levels continue to rise, climate adaptation projects, such as land reclamation, will proliferate and alter the physical geography of islands. These transformations raise questions about how these changes will affect individuals, identity and communities. Given the significance of land in underpinning Pacific islander culture and understanding of place (Holliday, 2020), it is unclear how land reclamation will alter these identities. How are perceptions of island space, and the futurity of this space, changing not only in response to climate change but also due to the efforts to mitigate its impacts?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank Fiona McConnell and Ian Klinke for their support, guidance and feedback throughout this project. I also thank Jonathan Turnbull for his insightful comments on this paper.

DATA AVAILABILITY

The data are not publicly available due to privacy or ethical restrictions.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) with a Dudley Stamp Memorial Award [reference number 19.18]; St Catherine’s College, University of Oxford, with a Phillip Fothergill Travel Award; and the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) [award number ES/W005646/1].