The Country That Made a Copy of Itself

The runway at Funafuti is the widest flat surface in Tuvalu, and for most of the day it is not a runway. Children play football on it. Motorcycles cut across it. In the evening people bring mats out and sit on the warm tarmac because it catches the breeze and the rest of the atoll does not. Twice a week a siren sounds, everyone clears off, an ATR from Suva lands, and twenty minutes later the pitch reopens.

This is a country of nine atolls, 26 square kilometres of land, about 10,000 people, and a highest point of 4.6 metres above sea level. It is also, since 2022, a country that has begun building a copy of itself on servers.

The announcement

At COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Tuvalu's foreign minister Simon Kofe appeared in a video address standing knee-deep in seawater on what had been dry land. It was the second time he had done something like it — the year before he had addressed COP26 from a lectern in the lagoon — and the second time it worked, in the sense that people who do not think about Tuvalu thought about Tuvalu for a day.

What he announced was less easy to photograph. Tuvalu would create a digital version of itself: territory scanned and rendered, government records and services moved online, cultural material archived, and a legal argument constructed for the proposition that a state can continue to exist as a state after its territory becomes uninhabitable.

The instinct is to read this as a stunt, and the first response of a great many commentators was exactly that. It is not. It is a specific answer to a specific problem in international law that nobody has had to solve before, and the people working on it are lawyers rather than futurists.

The legal problem

Statehood, under the 1933 Montevideo Convention, requires a permanent population, a defined territory, a government and the capacity to enter relations with other states. Remove the territory and it is not obvious what happens to the other three. Nobody knows, because it has not occurred.

The stakes are not abstract. Tuvalu's exclusive economic zone covers about 900,000 square kilometres of ocean, and the fishing licences sold within it are a large share of national revenue. If statehood lapses, so does the EEZ, and one of the poorest countries in the world loses its main income at precisely the moment its people become displaced. The digital nation project is, among other things, an argument that the maritime boundaries should be fixed permanently regardless of what the coastline does.

Several states have now recognised that argument in bilateral declarations. In 2023 Australia went further, signing the Falepili Union treaty, which offers a pathway to Australian residence for 280 Tuvaluans a year and commits Australia to recognising the continuing statehood of Tuvalu regardless of sea level. It is the first treaty of its kind and it is being read very carefully in Kiribati and the Marshall Islands.

The digital nation is not a plan to move Tuvalu onto the internet. It is a legal instrument designed to keep a maritime boundary alive after the land inside it has gone.

What is actually happening on the ground

Walk the length of Funafuti — it takes about two hours, and in places you can see the ocean on one side and the lagoon on the other without turning your head — and the visible response is more physical than digital. The Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project is dredging lagoon sand to raise seven hectares of land above projected sea level, the largest such reclamation in the country's history. Borrow pits dug by American forces in 1943 to build that runway have been filled in; for decades they held stagnant water and rubbish and flooded at king tide.

The king tides are the thing to understand. Tuvalu does not flood because waves come over the edge. It floods from below — the atoll is porous coral, and at spring high tide seawater comes up through the ground, into taro pits, into gardens, into the floors of houses. There is no wall that stops this. Pulaka, the swamp taro that was a staple crop, is failing across the country because the pits it grows in have salinised.

The .tv money

There is one more piece of the story that visitors always want to hear and that Tuvaluans are slightly tired of. The country's internet domain, .tv, has been leased to commercial operators since 2000, and at points it has provided close to a tenth of government revenue — a windfall of geography as arbitrary as the one that made the country vulnerable in the first place. The deal has been renegotiated several times and the current arrangement with a major registry is worth substantially more than the original.

It is not enough to fund adaptation at the scale required, and nobody in Funafuti pretends it is. But it did pay for street lighting and it does pay for scholarships, and there is something appropriate about the digital nation project being partly funded by the one digital asset the country already had.

Going

Very few people visit Tuvalu — a few hundred leisure travellers a year, in a country that has perhaps thirty rooms. The flight from Suva runs twice a week, which means a stay of three days or ten, and there is no alternative route. You need to bring cash, because there is no ATM that takes a foreign card, and you need to accept that a delegation of aid officials can book out the entire national accommodation stock in an afternoon.

What you get for that is the least-visited country on earth, an outer-island boat schedule that runs when it runs, and an evening on the runway with a hundred people who know exactly what is coming and are getting on with it anyway. It is not a place that wants pity, and the conversation you will have is more likely to be about fishing licence negotiations than about drowning. That is the correct conversation and it is worth turning up for.