The Independent, in its article “On the brink of ruin due to climate change, Pacific Islanders know who is to blame,” by Alex Croft, presents river flooding in Fiji, coastal erosion, and the supposed impending disappearance of Tuvalu as evidence that Pacific Islanders are already living on the “frontline of the climate crisis.” This is misleading. The observational record shows that floods caused by tropical cyclones and heavy rainfall are longstanding features of Fiji, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) expresses low confidence in global changes in river-flood magnitude or frequency, and peer-reviewed research shows that Tuvalu has actually gained land area during decades of rising sea level.
The Independent begins with the story of a family living beside Fiji’s Nadi River, where four neighboring homes were reportedly swept away by flooding. The reporter immediately transforms that flood into climate change, calling the village the “frontline of the climate crisis” and later declaring that flooding is increasingly common in Fiji and other Pacific islands.
But a river flooding after heavy tropical rainfall is a weather event. Demonstrating that climate change caused it, or even materially worsened it, requires considerably more evidence than pointing at a flooded riverbank. Ironically, The Independent eventually provides a perfectly ordinary meteorological explanation for what is happening. The Sabeto Valley communities are located beside mountain streams only a few kilometers from the ocean, and, the article acknowledges, “During tropical cyclones, heavy rainfall causes disastrous sudden rises in the level of the river.”
Exactly. Tropical cyclone. Heavy rain. River rises. Flood. Where in that sequence did the reporter establish that carbon dioxide caused the flood? He didn’t.
Even the IPCC is far more cautious about flooding than The Independent. Section 11.5.2 of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, dealing specifically with observed flood trends, notes that its earlier assessments found “low confidence for observed changes in the magnitude or frequency of floods at the global scale.” AR6 says studies show increases in some regions and decreases in others, while the hydrological literature remains heterogeneous and difficult to synthesize globally. See the table from that report below, note the highlight in yellow.
That is a long way from The Independent’s implication that a flooded Fijian riverbank can simply be labeled climate change.
There is also actual historical flood data from Fiji that The Independent might have consulted before declaring the case closed. A peer-reviewed study, “Flooding in Fiji: findings from a 100-year historical series,” reconstructed the Ba River flood record in northwestern Viti Levu from 1892 through 2002. Floodwaters reached the local sugar mill approximately once every four years, yet the researchers found no increase in the frequency of major floods during the 20th century, despite substantial land-use changes and river-channel siltation. The study found that major floods were produced by tropical cyclones and tropical rainstorms.
An even longer follow-up study examined a 122-year record of major flooding on Fiji’s Ba River. Once again, the researchers found no statistically significant increase in the frequency of major floods over time.
That is observational evidence extending back to the nineteenth century. It is considerably more informative than interviewing somebody standing beside a river and declaring the water to be climate change.
None of this means floods aren’t dangerous. Nadi has experienced numerous serious floods, and flood-control infrastructure is entirely sensible. The Australian Infrastructure Financing Facility for the Pacific reports 26 major floods in the Nadi catchment since 1991 alone, including the devastating January 2009 event that killed 11 people and left approximately 12,000 homeless. That is precisely why Australia is helping finance flood modeling and mitigation infrastructure there.
But the existence of floods does not establish a climate trend, much less attribution to greenhouse gases.
Even more remarkably, The Independent provides evidence of a major non-climate factor affecting local vulnerability. It reports that large mangrove swamps around Denarau Island once provided natural protection against severe weather. Then, according to the article, many of those century-old mangroves were removed to construct luxury hotels because they interfered with tourists’ access to the sea and didn’t fit the desired manicured landscape.
So natural flood protection was removed for coastal development, hotels were built in vulnerable locations, and now nearby flooding is presented to readers as evidence of the “climate crisis.”
You can’t make this stuff up.
Then The Independent trots out Tuvalu, the perennial poster child for supposedly disappearing Pacific islands. The article says the situation is so dire that Tuvalu has created a “digital nation” to preserve itself after its physical territory supposedly disappears beneath the waves.
There is just one problem with that narrative.
Tuvalu isn’t disappearing.
A landmark 2018 peer-reviewed study in Nature Communications, “Patterns of island change and persistence offer alternate adaptation pathways for atoll nations,” examined aerial and satellite imagery of all 101 islands of Tuvalu between 1971 and 2014. During that period, local sea level rose approximately 3.9 millimeters per year. Yet Tuvalu’s total land area increased by 73.5 hectares, or 2.9 percent. Eight of its nine atolls increased in land area, and 73 of its 101 individual islands grew.
Read that again. Sea level rose, and Tuvalu got bigger.
The researchers concluded that their findings “challenge perceptions of island loss” and show that atoll islands are dynamic landforms. Wave action moves sand, coral debris, and sediment around reef platforms. Islands can erode in one location, accrete in another, migrate across the reef surface, change shape, and in many cases increase in area.
This is the scientific reality behind the shorthand sometimes used to say coral atolls “float” with sea level. They don’t literally float like boats. Rather, living reefs, carbonate production, waves, currents, and sediment transport create dynamic landforms capable of changing with their surrounding environment. Climate at a Glance’s discussion of islands and sea-level rise explains the same process and highlights the Tuvalu evidence.
This doesn’t mean Tuvalu faces no problems from sea-level rise. It is extraordinarily low lying, coastal flooding is real, freshwater resources can be vulnerable to saltwater intrusion, and individual shorelines can erode even while total national land area increases. But “Tuvalu faces coastal hazards” is very different from “Tuvalu is disappearing.”
And the people running Tuvalu appear to understand that distinction rather better than Western climate journalists do, because they are building for the future.
The United Nations Development Programme’s Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project completed 7.8 hectares of raised, flood-free land in Funafuti in late 2023. A second phase was designed to reclaim another eight hectares and protect approximately 800 meters of shoreline.
That second phase has now produced another eight hectares of newly reclaimed and elevated land on Fogafale. According to UNDP’s announcement, the project cost approximately $17.5 million and was funded by Australia, New Zealand, and the United States.
In other words, while newspapers repeatedly tell Western readers that Tuvalu is destined to vanish, Tuvalu is literally making new land.
There is also a financial dimension that The Independent barely explores. Tuvalu has spent years making its threatened status central to its appeals for international climate financing. The Green Climate Fund’s own Tuvalu page lists tens of millions of dollars in project financing associated with the country, plus millions more in approved readiness support. The World Bank has also provided additional grants to support climate and disaster resilience.
Calling that a “grift” is a political judgment rather than a scientific conclusion. What can be documented is that the disappearing-island narrative has become highly useful in attracting international climate finance, while the inconvenient peer-reviewed finding that Tuvalu’s land area increased by 2.9 percent receives vastly less attention.
Indeed, The Independent itself reports that Pacific representatives say existing climate funds are insufficient and demand additional support. Readers might reasonably expect that demand to be reported alongside the millions of dollars already flowing into adaptation projects and the remarkable fact that Tuvalu is simultaneously reclaiming and elevating new land.
There is one final detail readers deserve to know. The Independent discloses at the very end that the reporting trip for this article was funded by Wellcome as part of its “All Rise!” and “Birthright!” campaigns ahead of COP31. The newspaper says Wellcome had no influence over editorial decisions, and there is no evidence establishing otherwise. Still, when a story built around demands for urgent climate action results from a reporting trip financed as part of campaigns promoting climate action ahead of a United Nations climate summit, readers are entitled to consider that context.
The people of Fiji deserve protection from floods. Build levees. Improve drainage. Preserve mangroves instead of bulldozing them for resorts. Strengthen bridges. Improve river management and cyclone warnings. Stop putting vulnerable infrastructure immediately beside eroding riverbanks. Likewise, Tuvalu can continue doing what it is already doing: reclaiming and elevating land, protecting shorelines, improving freshwater infrastructure, and adapting development to a dynamic atoll environment.
What Pacific Islanders don’t need is journalists pointing at every flooded river, eroded bank, or tropical cyclone and announcing that they have witnessed climate change. The IPCC’s own assessment is far more cautious about observed global flood trends. Fiji’s century-long flood record does not show an increase in major flood frequency. Tuvalu’s peer-reviewed land-area record shows the country grew while sea level rose.
Those are not obscure facts. They are readily available scientific evidence, and finding them requires little more than doing the basic research a climate reporter should have done before boarding the plane.
Instead, The Independent took a climate-campaign-funded reporting trip, found tropical cyclones, heavy rainfall, river flooding, eroding banks, removed mangroves, and low-lying coral islands, then packaged the entire collection as proof of a climate crisis. It substituted anecdotes for trend analysis, assumption for attribution, and a predetermined narrative for the inconvenient observational evidence sitting in plain sight.
That isn’t serious climate journalism. It is advocacy masquerading as reporting.
If this is The Independent’s standard for covering climate science, the thing most obviously in danger of going underwater isn’t Tuvalu. It’s The Independent’s journalistic credibility.
Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
Anthony Watts
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.