The world’s lowest-lying islands are under threat—here’s how to make a difference

It was the most famous dry-cleaning bill in the history of climate change. Smartly suited, Tuvalu’s foreign minister, Simon Kofe, stood knee-deep in the ocean that had spent decades advancing on his island-nation homeland and warned: “We’re sinking, but so is everyone else.”

In the four years since Kofe’s soggy, impactful speech for the COP26 climate conference, the issue of so-called ‘vanishing islands’ has grown conspicuously more acute. Multiple destinations, from the Maldives and Seychelles in the Indian Ocean to Tuvalu’s sister nations such as Kiribati and the Solomon Islands in the Pacific, are at risk, as well as atolls and isles stretching from the Bay of Bengal to the Florida Keys.

And, as Kofe put it, nowhere is immune; this is a threat that by the century’s end will be lapping at the shores of every coastal community. “Sinking” is largely a misnomer; it is inundation from rising sea levels that is causing land to disappear. An island nation such as Tuvalu has a mean elevation lower than the height of an average basketball player, combined with a very limited amount of habitable land — roughly 3% of the area of New York City. As a result, even small rises in sea level can be disproportionately destructive.

And with climate change gathering pace, that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Thermal expansion and the melting of ice sheets and glaciers has seen the rate of sea-level rise quadruple over the last century.

If efforts to keep the global temperature increase to within 1.5C of pre-industrial levels by the end of the century are successful, the ‘baked in’ damage will wreak havoc on island nations for centuries.

“Even if we can stabilise air temperature at 2C [higher], which is plausible,” says Robert Nicholls, professor of Climate Adaptation at the University of East Anglia. “The lag in the melting of glaciers and expansion of the oceans means the sea level will go on rising for hundreds, if not thousands of years. These islands are fundamentally threatened just based on what we’ve done historically.”

A 2023 assessment by NASA’s Sea Level Change Team found that sea levels around Tuvalu rose by nearly six inches over a 30-year period. By 2050, much of the country’s land and infrastructure will sit below the high-tide level.

The same is true for Palau, in Micronesia. “We have about 500 islands, many of which are atolls,” says Ilana Seid, a Palauan ambassador to the United Nations and chair of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS). “Those will be completely underwater in 50 years.”

There’s nothing gently incremental about this inundation. Ever-more-powerful storms of the sort that battered Jamaica in October 2025, can take vast chunks out of shorelines in a single episode. Associated sediment loss, subsidence and salt-water intrusion further erode land, threatening food production and accelerating depopulation. Islands can vanish economically and culturally long before they do so topographically.

Floating cities

The alarming impermanence of islands and island nations is a global reality. Yet the challenges they face aren’t uniform. Palau, for example, has some larger volcanic islands as part of its highly dispersed landmass, which could conceivably serve as safe havens for displaced communities.

Yet the geology and topography of somewhere like the Marshall Islands, located in the central Pacific Ocean in Micronesia, makes it existentially vulnerable. The island nation’s collection of five main islands and 29 coral atolls occupies only a tiny fraction of the vast ocean around them — yet this is spread across half a million square kilometres of remote Pacific. For many islanders, relocation simply isn’t an option.

Other destinations however, such as Indian Ocean honeymoon favourite the Maldives, are sufficiently economically robust to employ innovative mitigation and adaptation measures. Hulhumalé is an artificial island near the capital Malé built to be climate-resilient and to alleviate overcrowding elsewhere on the archipelago. It’s elevated more than 6.5ft above current sea levels and ringed by coastal defences that form a buffer between land and sea. It’s hoped Hulhumalé will eventually house a quarter of a million people.

Other schemes deploy solutions that wouldn’t have been out of place in the 1995 dystopian adventure film, Waterworld. A floating city is being created in the Maldives in a collaboration with specialist Dutch firm Waterstudio. It will be moored a 10-minute boat ride from the capital Malé. The first 60 houses are currently being constructed on platforms in Colombo, Sri Lanka, and will be towed 470 miles to the Maldives before the next monsoon.

“A total of 5,000 units, housing 15,000 people, are slated by 2030,” says the firm’s principal architect Koen Olthuis — and this is just the beginning. “The story of vanishing islands is often told as a tragedy: land disappearing and cultures displaced. But I see it as the beginning of an innovation-driven evolution.”

“The real question is no longer how do we stop the water but what can evolve on water? We can’t save every grain of sand, but we can protect the identity, culture and community that define these islands.”

Floating cities aren’t feasible for many places in the firing line. The cruel irony is that the nations with the most negligible carbon footprints are the ones bearing the full force of the effects — without the funds to combat it. “It’s fundamentally unjust,” says Justin Francis, of Responsible Travel, an operator that specialises in trips that benefit local communities and nature.

“The costs [of major infrastructural adaptations] are out of reach for many small island states,” says Ambassador Ilana Seid. “Take the Marshall Islands example: in order to reclaim land to build resilience, the cheque sizes are multiples of their annual GDP.”

Their best approach is often low-budget, localised measures such as reef restoration or the planting of mangrove trees to help sediment accumulation and to dissipate wave energy — so-called nature-based adaptation (NBA).

With support from the World Bank and other donors, Kiribati — a Central Pacific island group with around 120,000 inhabitants — has embarked on such a scheme with marked success. Nearly 40,000 seedlings have been planted on the fringes of a string of its islands such as Aranuka and North Tarawa. Survival rates of the seedlings were around 90% after the first year in some places, a heartening statistic and a promising sign of what coordinaed local action can achieve.

Conscious travel

For the responsible traveller, the world’s vanishing islands present a quandary. The urge to visit destinations renowned for their unrivalled natural beauty and rich cultural traditions before it’s too late — what is sometimes marketed as ‘last-chance tourism’ — is strong. Yet there’s an equally powerful desire not to contribute to the problem via the carbon footprint required to reach such fragile corners of the earth.

It’s a dilemma shared by the often tourism-dependent island nations themselves. Jamaica, for example, is still reeling from the devastation caused by Hurricane Melissa in October. The storm’s wind speeds were clocked at a record-breaking 252mph prior to making landfall on the Caribbean island, and fed by climate change-fuelled marine warming, such megastorms will only become more common. Across the globe, island nations find themselves nervously positioned on the frontline.

Yet Jamaica can’t hope to rebuild from damage estimated at a third of the country’s GDP without the US $4.3bn (£3.3bn) that tourism brings to the island each year. The first priority in the lull left in Hurriance Melissa’s wake was ensuring as much of the tourism sector as possible was back to normal before the mid-December beginning of peak season. Tourism supports 175,000 jobs in Jamaica, with hundreds of thousands more indirectly reliant on the industry.

This bind is echoed across other island nations confronting similar pressures, from the Caribbean to the Pacific. Speaking from COP30 in Brazil, Ilana notes that pulling down the tourism shutters is neither economically viable nor culturally desirable, regardless of the stakes. For Palau, she explains, tourism remains not only a financial lifeline but a means of safeguarding heritage, identity and the ecosystems that define the nation.

“We need tourism to help fight back. Our message in Palau is that we want the world to come and enjoy the things that we’ve protected for many, many generations,” she says. “It’s about thoughtful, conscious tourism — understanding the ecosystems we visit are incredibly fragile, and making deliberate choices to spread our impact so no one thing or place is overloaded.”

In Palau, there’s already proof tourism can support, rather than undermine, environmental resilience. ‘The country was the first in the world to introduce an official ‘pledge’ scheme, requiring visitors to commit to protecting the islands’ natural and cultural heritage on arrival. More than 80% of its waters are designated as a marine sanctuary, and community-led conservation projects are funded by visitor contributions. Rather than limiting tourism, Palau is reshaping it, demonstrating how island nations can continue to welcome travellers while actively restoring coral reefs, supporting local livelihoods and strengthening cultural traditions.

She adds: “We’d like to educate visitors and show them they have a joint interest in keeping our ecosystems pristine. We’d like them to come back, and their children to come back, and it’s down to all of us to figure this out together.”