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The Story of the Disappearing Beaches

It’s probably time for me to introduce myself, right?

Hi, my name is Mikaela! I’m a climate justice activist, and I was born on a small Caribbean island called Jamaica, but I now live in a seaside city in England. Growing up, I had no clue what a climate justice activist was, but I had a sense of what the word justice meant. I knew when I saw something unfair, either close to my home or in the wider world. And I cared about making those unfair things fair. Like many of us, I wanted to make the world a better place.

Lots of this came from understanding that as a Black woman in the United Kingdom and as a descendant of enslaved people, so many who came before me had fought for the freedoms I had and built the world I lived in.

I grew up feeling a little guilty that I got to live a reasonably safe and free life while so many people who came before me died fighting for this. I wanted to honor their sacrifices. I wanted to do the best I could with the freedoms and privileges I had been given. Maybe this is a feeling you’ve had too.

I’d talk to anyone who would listen about issues that had caught my heart’s attention. I’d give talks in school assemblies about the importance of donating blood, the harm and inequality women experience all over the world, the impact of our diets on animals and the climate crisis, and much, much more.

I’d organize friends to volunteer with me to chop wood, fold clothes, and cook food to support displaced people—sometimes called refugees—on the France–UK border. And in the background, I was studying to become a doctor.

I was told over and over that if I wanted to help people and I was good at school, being a doctor was the best way to go. Since I didn’t grow up around “activists,” becoming a doctor seemed like the only real chance I had to “make a difference.”

In school, concepts like human rights and oppression were often presented as a kind of “done deal.” Like, “Oh, a long time ago people fought and won, so now we are all set.” Rather than continuing to learn about and fight injustice, we were told to be grateful we were now free. So I studied as hard as I could and got into medical school. I wanted to work on search-and-rescue ships in the Mediterranean Sea, to help prevent the drowning of refugees as they make their journey to Europe.

But when I got to medical school, something changed in me. I began to feel deeply aware of the huge impact of the climate crisis. I grew afraid for my future, and about the present-day conditions for billions of people across the world.

So I started turning my fear into action. I started meeting people—activists—who felt the same way I did, and we began working together. We organized rallies and occupations of government buildings; we challenged powerful oil companies and politicians; we planned campaigns to call out governments that weren’t doing enough; we used social media to raise awareness and bring more people on board; and we even took the UK government to court. It was in these spaces that my understanding of climate justice grew.

It felt so exciting. I could see the power we all have to change things. It was like if you don’t know you need glasses, and then you try on your friend’s pair and can see so much clearer and farther than before. I could see a better future, I could feel it, and I believed that we could build it. It changed the entire direction of my life.

Climate justice is an idea we will explore deeply in this book. For now, though, all you need to understand is something I learned when I was younger: We can’t just keep sticking a Band-Aid on the wounds of this world. Maybe a Band-Aid will stop the bleeding for a bit, but the wounds are deep and wide. We must treat them and heal them, rather than just patching them up.

But how do we do that? How do we heal our wounds instead of slapping a Band-Aid on them? How do we confront the climate crisis and make a world where no one has to risk drowning in the sea while journeying to find a safe home? That is what this book is about. That is what we will explore together. And the first step is working out how—and why—the world has these wounds in the first place.

My Disappearing Beach

I was born on a small island called Jamaica.

You’ve probably sung the lyric “Every little thing is gonna be all right” by the famous Jamaican musician Bob Marley. Or perhaps you’ve seen our athletes—some of the fastest people in the world—win gold medals at the Olympic Games. You might be Jamaican yourself, or you might have vacationed on the white sandy beaches and warm seas there. For such a small island, the impact we have had on the world is huge. But this same island might not be around forever.

When I was a child, my parents and grandparents often took me to Hellshire Beach. I remember running around on the sand, swimming in the crystal clear sea, laughing a lot with my grandma and my cousins, and eating fried plantains and festivals (pieces of fried dough) in the colorful restaurants that sit on stilts. When we moved from Jamaica to the UK, it was these memories of Hellshire Beach that helped connect me to my homeland. They kept me warm in the colder climate where I was raised.

Years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, when we all had to stay home to keep each other safe, I decided to move back to my birth island to reconnect with my heritage and my family. My granddad in Jamaica had recently passed away, and I was grieving the time I’d lost with him. And I wanted to deepen my relationship with my wonderful and hilarious grandma.

As soon as I landed in Jamaica and settled into my new home overlooking the turquoise sea, I called Grandma on FaceTime. I told her how excited I was to see her and to return to Hellshire together.

Her face fell into sadness. “Mikaela,” she said, “that beach has almost disappeared.”

My stomach sank. How could this be true?

I was devastated with what I found. Where there had once been an expanse of sand, the water was lapping ever closer to the restaurants on stilts. My memories and my connection to my birthland were being washed away too.

My grandmother lives only about a ten-minute drive from Hellshire. And many communities live right on the shore. I started to wonder: How much longer will she be safe? At this point, I had been a climate justice campaigner for many years, so I understood the gravity of Hellshire’s disappearance.

Maybe you’ve heard similar stories: of beaches eroding, of hurricanes becoming more powerful, or of sea levels getting higher. If you haven’t, that’s okay. Let’s get into it together!

So what’s happening?

The world is getting hotter. And when temperatures increase over time, more water than usual evaporates from rivers, seas, lakes, and oceans. The extra water ends up in the atmosphere in the form of gas. This gas in turn traps heat in the air, increasing temperatures even more.

When warmer, water-filled air meets colder air, the water becomes liquid again and falls as heavy rain or storms. In some parts of the world, this isn’t a big problem yet. But in tropical areas like the Caribbean—where Jamaica is situated—when these storms are really big and have very strong winds, we refer to them as hurricanes. Hurricanes are so powerful that they can rip up the earth, topple trees, and destroy buildings. They are super-dangerous, putting people’s lives and homes at risk.

Climate change is making powerful storms happen more often and with greater intensity. It was hurricanes that damaged the shores of Hellshire Beach. They have overwhelmed humanmade and natural defenses, like stone barriers and vegetation. These defenses don’t work as they should anymore and can no longer keep the water from erasing our beach.

To make things harder, global sea levels are rising at the same time temperatures are. When gigantic icebergs and glaciers melt, all that extra water pours right into the sea. And when too much ice melts too quickly, all that extra water flows onto our islands, covering people’s homes and all the land they exist on.

This isn’t some idea about the far-out future: It’s happening today. And not just in Jamaica.

My Friend’s Disappearing Beach

I have a friend named Kato Ewekia, who lives in Tuvalu, a small island nation in the South Pacific. An alarming amount of Tuvalu has already disappeared underwater due to rising sea levels.

When Kato was growing up, like me with Hellshire, he had a favorite beach. It was covered with soft sand, perfect for a game of tag, racing his friends, or a game called Funny (which he told me is a variation of tag, but where there are two teams—one tagging people and the other stacking cans to spell funny). This beach brought Kato and his friends so much joy.

When he was eight years old, his parents took him and his brother to Fiji for three years. When they returned home to Tuvalu, eleven-year-old Kato, now into rugby, asked his friends if they could all go play on the beach again. One friend said to him, “Kato, that beach is gone.” In the short time he’d been away, a big tropical storm had stolen it from the people of Tuvalu.

Kato looked for somewhere else they could play rugby, but the only beach he could find now was covered with rocks that hurt them when they fell. He kept searching for a sandier one, but they had all been submerged by water. So they learned to play on the rocky beach. They learned to deal with the pain the rocks left on their bodies.

Kato then left for Fiji with his parents for another three years. When he returned, even the rocky beach was gone! The sea was moving farther and farther in, claiming more and more of his memories, his favorite places, and his ability to play and have fun with his friends. Since rugby wasn’t possible anymore, he thought he would spend his free time fishing instead—that with all that water, fishing would be okay. Kato’s uncle was a fisherman, and Kato loved spending time on the ocean with him.

But, just like it ruined rugby, the climate crisis ruined fishing for him too.

In the same way surface and air temperatures have increased due to the climate crisis, water temperatures have too. The sea is now much warmer than it should be. On fishing trips, Kato noticed they were having to go out farther and farther to deeper and deeper waters, because the fish had moved to find cooler waters. Fishing was an essential food source for Tuvalu, but now when Tuvaluan fishermen would go fishing for tuna, they would have to go so far that they couldn’t even see the islands anymore.

This made these trips far scarier, since the risk of getting caught in more dangerous waters was higher, and finding their way back to the island was far more difficult. Some of Kato’s friends disappeared while fishing. Some were finally found, but far too many didn’t make it home and were never seen again. Like the beaches, they were swallowed by the warming, growing ocean. Their lives were stolen by the climate crisis.

Sea-level rise was impacting every aspect of Tuvalu. It wasn’t just that places to play and find joy were being taken away. It wasn’t just that the ability to fish for food was becoming more difficult. The ability to grow food was disappearing.

As the sea level kept increasing, the amount of salt in the soil became too high. It used to be that once a year there would be a very high tide, referred to as a king’s tide. This high tide could cause flooding and damage to crops. But now, Kato says, “Every high tide is like a king’s tide.” Because of this, it’s become impossible for Tuvaluans to depend on crops for food. So now they have to depend on imported food from grocery stores.

This food is unhealthy and extremely expensive. Because Tuvalu is so remote, it’s hard to ship products from overseas. Most food that makes it there has spent months in freezer containers in ships coming from Australia and Fiji; it’s not fresh at all by the time it arrives. And as lots of this food is preserved and highly processed, it causes dangerous health conditions like diabetes and high blood pressure. But Kato says that they have “no choice,” that “it’s the only food to survive on.”

You might already be thinking that this is shocking. But I was even more taken aback when Kato told me about a very strong tropical storm in 2015, known as Cyclone Pam. The whipping winds and waves generated by the massive cyclone were more than Tuvalu could take. The effect on people living there was immense: Almost half the population was displaced from their homes. Remaining essential food sources—from crops to livestock—were killed, and drinking water was contaminated.

And it wasn’t just the living who were impacted. “The waves brought all the bones of our ancestors out from the ground,” Kato told me, explaining how horrifying it was. “They were put there to rest their souls, and the waves brought them up and took their headstones.” Even Tuvalu’s dead were not safe from the climate crisis.

Since Cyclone Pam, Kato has been afraid, he says, and “living day by day hoping that home does not disappear.” He has no idea how much longer home will be there.

But Kato does not let fear control him. In the face of all of this loss, he refuses to give up.

Through social media, he saw young people like himself all over the world taking to the streets, striking from school, calling out big companies, and demanding real climate action. He didn’t know much about activism, but he did know he wanted to save his home. Scientists were predicting Tuvalu would be gone in ten to fifteen years if adequate climate action was not taken.

After appearing in a documentary about the impacts of sea-level rise, Kato connected with young people in Mexico who had started a climate justice campaign called Saving Tuvalu. Kato was worried his English wasn’t good enough, but he joined the group anyway.

This crucial step took him to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland—more commonly known as COP26—in 2021. He was the first Tuvaluan youth to attend a UN climate conference, and that’s where he and I first met. Since then, Kato has traveled across the world to raise awareness of the impacts of the climate crisis on Tuvalu.