Faced with the possible disappearance of its territory due to climate change, Tuvalu decided to create a virtual twin country. The small island nation in the Pacific is digitally recreating everything from its houses to its trees, while striving to save what it can.
Tuvalu, a small country in the Pacific Ocean made up of nine coral islands, faces a future in which it may no longer be habitable.
Sea level rise caused by climate change is eating away at its coastlines.
Faced with such an existential threat, what do you do? Build dams? Try to recover some land from the sea? Leave the territory? They are all solutions being considered by other island nations facing similar problems and also by Tuvalu.
But this country decided to go one step further in its attempt to preserve its land and its statehood.
As the nation’s physical reality sinks beneath the ocean, the government is building a digital copy of the country, recreating everything from its houses to its beaches to its trees.
Tuvalu hopes that this virtual replica will preserve the beauty and culture of the nation, as well as the legal rights of its 11,000 citizens for generations to come.
The initiative was first announced in 2022 by Tuvalu Foreign Minister Simon Kofe through a video speech released at COP27 in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.
The plan is part of a broader government project called Future NowFuture Now, (or Te Ataeao Nei in Tuvaluan), which focuses on both international diplomacy and pragmatic adaptation to climate change.
In the video, which looks more like a sequel to The Matrix than an official government speech, Kofe appears at first to be standing on a beach, with white sand and palm trees. But as the camera zooms out, revealing more of the landscape, the image begins to falter. Rocks and sand move unnaturally and a seabird flies over a black abyss in the background.
This is not the real Tuvalu, but the beginning of its digital twin, a virtual reconstruction of Te Afualiku, a low-lying islet expected to be the first to be submerged.
“Our land, our ocean, our culture are the most precious assets of our people and, To keep them safe from harm, no matter what happens in the physical world, we will move them to the cloud“Kofe says in the video.
In addition to creating a virtual copy of the islands, the project Digital Nation o Digital Nation seeks to preserve the nation’s cultural heritage. Citizens have been invited to send sentimental objects for digitization, and to share valuable memories such as traditional dances or stories told by grandparents.
The idea is to create an archive “designed to transport the very soul of Tuvalu,” Kofe noted in 2023.
But the minister also made it clear that there is a very practical element to the project. The small island States, faced with the loss of their physical mass, They are grappling in a very real way with the question of how to preserve their sovereignty.
Current international law is not suitable for countries facing a loss of territory or habitability due to climate change.
International standards require that a sovereign nation-state have both a clearly defined territory and a permanent population, two characteristics that can no longer be guaranteed in the case of Tuvalu in the future.
Therefore, in addition to securing the nation’s borders within the metaverse, the government of Tuvalu seeks to create digital passports, stored on blockchain technology, to allow the government to continue functioning.
This mechanism will allow everything from holding elections and referendums to keeping a record of births, deaths and marriages.
Ultimately, Tuvalu hopes the project will provide a new model of state, better adapted to the needs of a world facing a climate emergency.
Tuvalu has already enshrined in its own Constitution a new definition of State recognized by a growing number of countries, especially those in a similar situation.
remains to be seen whether other nations not facing existential threats will view the idea in a positive light.
Some are skeptical of the “digital country” proposal, arguing that it relies on the same kind of resource-intensive approach that is causing climate change in the first place.
Even within the Tuvalu government there has been criticism of the project.
At its core, the plan recognizes that changes are happening on the islands and that many will inevitably have to leave as life becomes more difficult and opportunities more scarce.
According to a recent evaluation by NASA scientists, Much of Tuvalu’s territory, including its critical infrastructure, will be below the current high tide level by 2050.
Under all climate scenarios the country will experience more than 100 days of flooding each year by the end of this century. And then there are the other impacts to consider, such as saltwater intrusion, heat waves and cyclone intensification.
Scientists have shown that exceeding an average 1.5°C rise in global temperature is a major threat to small island states.
Between February 2023 and January 2024, global temperatures exceeded 1.5°C for an entire year for the first time.
Developed nations are still not reducing their emissions fast enough to change the upward temperature trajectory. Faced with this reality, the digital twin will allow members of the Tuvaluan diaspora to remain connected to each other and to their land.
This arguably represents a change in rhetoric for the Pacific island nations, whose central mantra until now has been “we will not be submerged, we are fighting.”
The prospect of a mass relocation from Tuvalu to Australia (about 5,000 km away) has already recently become a reality, after a 2023 treaty between the two nations allowing the migration of 280 Tuvaluans each year.
Migrants will have visas that allow them to live, work and study in Australia, and the possibility of obtaining citizenship.
But Not everyone believes that the time has come to give up the physical territory of the islands.
“The concept of creating a digital nation of Tuvalu in the metaverse implies that Tuvalu will disappear due to rising sea levels and that we should make a digital copy of it,” said former Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga, now leader of the opposition in 2023 .
“There is no basis for such a proposal in international law, and there is absolutely no reason to believe that Tuvalu will disappear even if sea levels rise.”
Speaking in September at a UN General Assembly plenary session on the existential threats from rising sea levels, Tuvalu climate activist Grace Malie told delegates that her country and other oceanic states “will not go quietly into the sea”, but that they will “continue the fight” for their land, their culture and their future.
“What’s at stake is more than just our homes,” he said. “It is our dignity, our culture, our heritage. It’s not something we can put in suitcases and take with us.. “We have done the least to cause the climate crisis, but we are paying the highest price.”
And even as some of its people consider migrating to Australia, Tuvalu has redoubled its efforts to pressure that country to reduce its extraction and export of fossil fuels.
Others, however, point out that building a digital twin of Tuvalu does not mean giving up efforts to save the islands. stop them, Efforts to protect the country’s physical terrain can be complemented by preserving its memory in the metaverse.
“The Digital Nation program does not represent an acceptance of the loss of the nation as a physical entity,” says Taukiei Kitara, a Tuvaluan researcher at Griffith University in Australia and co-author of a recent study on the Digital Nation initiative.
Kitara points out that the project has the advantage of being driven by Tuvaluans themselves and is also just one of many in Tuvalu’s fight against climate change.
The government is also investing millions of dollars in land reclamation through a coastal adaptation project.
In the last two years, swaths of land have been added to the islands of Funafuti and Fogafale through the construction of elevated land, providing space for housing, infrastructure and other essential services.
On the outer islands of Nanumaga and Nanumea new protective barriers are preventing tides from reaching homes, schools, hospitals, farmland and cultural assets.
“Planning for multiple scenarios – both best-case scenarios, worst-case scenarios and those in between – is sensible when it comes to risk management. This is the approach of the current Tuvalu government and previous governments,” adds Kitara.
Leaving aside the question of whether or not the government should prepare for a future beyond the islands, some have suggested that the Digital Nation plan is simply not practical in a country that remains comparatively disconnected from the digital world.
Some critics argue that the digital plan is little more than a public relations exercisedesigned to capture international attention and persuade wealthier nations to reduce their emissions, something that is key to the physical survival of the islands.
But the effort the Tuvalu government is making to map its islands and improve connectivity suggests that this project is more than just a means of applying diplomatic pressure.
In the first year after the announcement of COP27, Tuvalu has completed a 3D scan of its 124 islands and islets using Lidar technology, a pulsed laser remote sensing technique.
The country is also improving its digital connectivity by building an undersea telecommunications cable, which will help provide the bandwidth necessary to implement the plan.
In March and April 2024 a global non-profit organization called placewhich supports open access to cartography and other geographic data, began mapping Funafuti, the capital of Tuvalu, using drones and 360-degree cameras to record every detail both from e l air as at ground level.
This raw data can be used to create an image similar to those from Google Earth or Street View, but with the extremely high resolution needed to capture every detail of the islands, which in some places are only tens of meters wide. When it comes to very fine details, the precision of satellite images is not enough.
“We drove all over the island, then switched to motorcycles and hiked trails with GoPro cameras,” says Frank Pichel, Place’s operations supervisor. “I think we’ve done about 80 or 90 kilometers and we’ve really covered everything we could.”
Pichel points out that, far from being a public relations exercise, the creation of a “digital twin” It has several applications in the real worldsuch as helping the nation adapt to and mitigate climate change in practical ways.
By recording the size and angle of roofs, for example, the capacity of solar panels can be modeled in the future. Meanwhile, scans of water storage tanks can help estimate the availability of drinking water on the island.
It is an approach that is not exclusive to places like Tuvalu, although in the latter case the cultural aspect and the urgency of climate change add another dimension to the task, adds Pichel.
“Advanced economies are looking to go down this path, even if they don’t use the term ‘digital twin.’ London wants a ‘digital twin’ of its underground wiring to make sure it doesn’t run into the old sewer network. So it’s something that’s been around in spatial data management for a long time.”
The next step for Tuvalu will be to map the rest of the islands and then fill in the remaining gaps, Pichel says.
Due to the distances, as the coral islands are located in a chain of about 676 kilometers, this is a difficult and time-consuming task.
Nevertheless, Place’s team hopes to return and capture more data every two years from the islands, which are constantly changing due to the impact of climate change..
As sea levels rise, building a digital replica can help Tuvalu save more of its nation than it would have without such a plan.
The physical future of the islands may be uncertain, but their digital journey has only just begun.
