Climate change, bodies and diplomacy: Performing watery futures in Tuvalu

Abstract

Climate change is one of the key foci of critical geopolitics in the twenty‐first century, with a proliferation of scholarship considering the international conferences, imaginaries, and securitisations of the climate crisis. Since 2019, Tuvalu has been using human bodies submerged in water – including diplomats, children, and politicians ‐ within its diplomacy to draw attention to the severity of the climate crisis. By examining contemporary Tuvaluan climate diplomacy, this article advocates for a greater engagement with feminist geopolitics to interrogate the embodied practices of climate diplomacy. It draws upon fieldwork conducted in the South Pacific in 2018 and 2019 including at the 50th Pacific Island Forum in Tuvalu. Firstly, this article explores the 2019 visit of the Secretary General of the United Nations to Tuvalu ‐ arguing the photoshoot of him wearing a formal suit in the lagoon connected the imaginary of Tuvalu as a ‘sinking island’ to a wider international community. Secondly, it considers the use of Tuvaluan schoolchildren playing in the water during the 50th Pacific Island Forum. It argues this constituted a vital territorial conjuncture that drew attention to Australia's inaction on climate change and the risk to Tuvalu's future from the rise of sea level. Thirdly, it considers the body of Simon Kofe, Foreign Minister of Tuvalu, during his addresses to COP26 and COP27 from firstly the lagoon in Funafuti and then the metaverse, to examine the shifting narratives of Tuvalu's future within its climate diplomacy. This article argues that climate diplomacy is a deeply embodied practice and human geography scholarship must be more attentive to the geopolitical work that bodies do within climate diplomacy to understand the temporalities and spatialities of diplomacy better.