Tegua - Vanuatu's First Island Victim Of Rising Seas - Independent

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As a Pacific island destination, Lateu struggles to sell itself. A typhoon wiped away its only beach a few years ago and today a handful of squalid thatched huts stand forlornly on its coastline. It will soon be a deserted village, its population the first real victims of rising sea levels brought about by global warming. Even the village's palm trees are dying, their roots washed away by inexorably rising seas. The roofs of its thatched huts are leaking, there are gaping holes in the palm frond walls. All that remains of several are a few pathetic looking poles, braced against the prevailing wind from the vast expanse of the Pacific.

Lateu's people don't bother to patch their huts anymore, and an unpleasant mould covers the ground of every dwelling as a result of frequent flooding. For a while the islanders tried to rise above the surging seas by putting their huts up on makeshift foundations of coral, but they soon gave up. Now they are preparing to move to higher ground, some 300 metres inland, where they have already built six communal structures with financial aid from Canada. Lateu is the only village on Tegua island, a half-moon-shaped speck of land less than four miles long and 10 miles wide in the South Pacific. It is one of five coral atolls in the Torres Group, 650 miles north of Vanuatu's main island, Efate. Getting here involves a flight in a small plane that goes once a week to the Torres' main island, Loh, and a prohibitively expensive, wet and frightening 40-minute ride over the open sea in a fisherman's boat.

The impact climate change has had on Tegua atoll is hard to ignore. Everywhere on the windward side of the island, palm trees are immersed by the sea. Some have survived the ordeal, others have fallen, littering the shallow waters of the coast line. "At the end of the Eighties, our village was flooded for the first time," says Reuben Seluin, 63, Lateu's village head. "Nowadays it happens every other month."

When the islanders resettled Tegua in the Sixties, they built Lateu directly next to the bay. During low tide, a tiny pond of sweet fresh water appears between the sea's coral ground. The pool gave Lateu its name. Aside from a rain water tank, the only thing Vanuatu's administration ever built on this island, it used to be the only source of drinking water for the atoll. Now the women use it to do their laundry. During high tide, waves crash on a low pile of coral that separates the village from the sea, but Mr Seluin says that Lateu used to have a white sand beach. Part of it, he says, was washed away by a tsunami, triggered by an earthquake on Torres in 1997. "With every big tide that followed, the sea came a bit closer. I can't tell you whether this is due to climate change. I just know that we used to have a beach, and that it's gone."


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