Business as Usual Vocabulary and Expressions Tuvalu pique evacuation marine ecosystem Kiribati latch on t

Business as Usual
   I first came to Tuvalu ten years ago, my interest piqued by news reports suggesting (and sometimes stating outright)that the islands were doomed. Journalists had latched on to countries such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Maldives as the environmental hard-luck stories of the new millennium.
   These postcard paradises had become poster children for a planetary crisis, with their inhabitants cast as the world’s first climate refugees. "Tuvalu Sinks Today—The Rest of Us Tomorrow?" was a typical headline.
   A prominent environmental campaigner had declared that Tuvalu’s leaders had " conceded defeat in their battle with the rising sea, announcing that they will abandon their homeland. " A similar claim was made in Al Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth.
   "The evacuation and shutting down of a nation has begun," reported the British Guardian newspaper.
   That islands like Tuvalu face an intensifying barrage of climate impacts is not in doubt.
   Besides the damage inflicted by sea-level rise itself—coastal erosion, surface flooding, and saltwater intrusion into soil and groundwater—they will suffer from increasingly frequent and severe weather extremes (droughts and cyclones)and die-offs of their coral reefs through ocean warming and acidification, leading to potential collapse of marine ecosystems that provide food and livelihoods for island dwellers.
   But from what I could see, it was business as usual in Funafuti ten years ago. Government staff were about to move into a brand-new building overlooking the lagoon. The country’s first cell-phone tower had just been erected. Tuvalu was enjoying a windfall profit from the sale of its "dot tv" Internet suffix. Tuvaluans seemed in no hurry to evacuate their supposedly disappearing homeland.
   In November 2014, armed with Kench’s findings, I returned to Tuvalu to see whether anything had changed. The first thing I noticed was that Fongafale was even more crowded than before. According to the 2012 census, Fongafale’s population had increased by 1, 500 since my earlier visit, to more than 6, 000. So much for the shutting down of a nation.