What is the Tuvalu Controversy about?

The Controversy revolving around the future of Tuvalu is built around two core questions:

-       Is Tuvalu sinking into the Pacific Ocean?

-       What causes the islands to sink?

If most actors agree nowadays that Tuvalu is indeed in danger, they still disagree on the nature of this very danger. There are two main types of positioning toward the first question. Some think that Tuvalu is actually sinking progressively into the Ocean and will completely disappear in the next few decades. Others believe that if the islands will not sink, it might soon become inhabitable, change shape or move away from the reef edge. Whatever of those hypotheses happens to realise in the future, their consequences will be similar for the Tuvaluans as it will force them to abandon their country.

Because it has direct consequences on the management, answers to the second core question are more split and numerous.

Four main positions exist within the debate over the causes of Tuvalu’s sinking:

-       Sea-level rise due to Global Warming

-       Other Global Warming induced adverse effects such as more frequent flooding and the increasing intensity of El Nino and El Nina episodes.

-       Poor local management of the fragility of the territory of the island

-       Natural evolution that can make islands appear and disappear

The answers of the actors to these questions, and the related sub-questions, frame the controversy in a way that can be mapped using adequate tools. This map provides us with information and insights on the way actors position themselves and so on the framework of the controversy.

If positioning themselves around the same object, Tuvalu’s future and the causes responsible for it, actors are nonetheless not debating directly. Actors with different positions tend to confront in an indirect fashion, developing their own media space in the web or publishing and writing in media supportive to their positions.

What first makes Tuvalu’s future a controversy and not a mere debate is this lack of communication between actors advocating different positions.

How a scientific debate turned into a controversy?

Two main reasons led to the turning of the scientific debate into a controversy.

First, mainstream media took over the issue notably after Ian Fry’s broadcasted intervention at the 2009 Copenhagen conference on climate, making the Tuvaluans the announced first victims of Global Warming and Tuvalu a symbol of the emergency to act globally to reduce carbon emission.

 Second, Tuvalu has become a place of experiment in every fields: legal, political, economic, scientific… because of its small size making the crisis management relatively easy and because being the first state directly subjected to the supposed adverse effects of Global Warming.

It is so often seen both as a symbol, of Global Warming adverse effects or of the Global Warming conspiracy depending on the actors, and a laboratory which explains why it turned despite its small size and importance a major sub-controversy of the larger Global Warming one.

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