Dr. Bwebwenikai Takeiaki—"Bwen" to everyone who's tried to pronounce her full name more than once—meets me at a café in South Tarawa that will be underwater by 2045 according to most models, though she'd like me to know the models have been wrong before, usually in the direction of too conservative. She's drinking instant coffee that costs more than it should because everything costs more than it should on an island nation that imports 80% of what it consumes. She's just returned from her forty-third trip to the Fiji land purchase, where she coordinates cultural preservation for Kiribati's "migration with dignity" program. Before this, she was a marine biologist studying coral resilience. The irony is not lost on her.

What follows is a conversation about helping people leave their homeland, the strange bureaucracy of managed extinction, and whether telling people their island will become uninhabitable makes it happen faster.

You were studying coral reefs in 2025. How does a marine biologist end up coordinating climate relocation?

The reefs died. Not all at once—that would've been cleaner somehow. They died in this slow, patchy way where you'd have one section bleach and recover, bleach and recover, then bleach and not recover, and meanwhile the section next to it is doing fine until it isn't. I spent eight years documenting resilience and adaptation, and then I spent two years documenting collapse while pretending we were still documenting resilience.

The government started scaling up the Fiji program in 2029. We'd purchased the land back in 2014, but for fifteen years it was mostly symbolic, you know? A backup plan nobody actually planned to use. Then the 2028 king tide season put seawater in the hospital and three schools, and suddenly the backup plan became the primary plan. They needed someone who could translate scientific reality into something people could hold onto while letting go of everything else. Someone who understood what we were losing in biological terms and could maybe preserve some of it culturally.

I took the job because I was furious. I'm still furious.

Furious at climate change?

Furious at the narrative. Look, the science is clear—sea levels are rising, king tides are worse, saltwater intrusion is killing our breadfruit trees, I'm not denying physical reality. But there's this thing that happened where international climate organizations and our own government started talking about Kiribati as inevitably uninhabitable, and that narrative became its own force. Self-fulfilling prophecy doesn't quite capture it. More like we created a story about our own disappearance and then started acting it out.

You know what happens when the government buys land in Fiji for future relocation and announces it publicly? Young people start leaving immediately. Not because their house flooded—because they've been told their future is in Fiji. Businesses stop investing in infrastructure because why build for the long term on a sinking island? International aid gets framed as "helping people leave" instead of "helping people adapt."

But the physical reality is still the physical reality. The island is losing land area.

Yes. And that's the trap I live in every day.

The water is rising—I've measured it myself. Some areas are genuinely becoming unlivable. But we had options for adaptation that never got seriously funded because everyone, including us, had already accepted the story that we're climate refugees waiting to happen. Seawalls, elevated infrastructure, managed aquifer recharge to handle saltwater intrusion. Expensive, yes, but cheaper than relocating 120,000 people. We chose the narrative of dignified migration over the narrative of resilient adaptation, and now I coordinate the former while mourning the latter.

The really sick part? I'm good at this job. I've helped 847 families relocate in the past six years. I know which Fijian villages have i-Kiribati populations large enough to support new arrivals, which ones have land suitable for pulaka pits, how to navigate the tension between "host" and "relocated" communities. I know how to help people pack their lives into shipping containers in a way that feels intentional instead of desperate.

And every time I do it well, I'm reinforcing the narrative I hate.

What does the actual work look like?

Mostly it's managing expectations and grief in equal measure.

The Fiji land is... fine. It's not home, but it's fine. We have 5,460 acres on Vanua Levu—bought it from the Fijian government for $8.8 million back when that seemed like a lot of money. The land can support agriculture, there's freshwater, it's elevated enough to handle sea-level rise for the next century at least. On paper, it's a solution.

In practice, I spend a lot of time explaining to families that no, you can't recreate your village's exact layout because the topography is completely different. No, the fishing isn't the same because we're not on a lagoon. Yes, you can grow breadfruit, but it grows differently here and tastes slightly different because the soil is volcanic instead of coral-based. Yes, we're trying to preserve traditional governance structures, but Fijian law applies and that creates jurisdictional weirdness nobody's really solved.

And then there's the cultural stuff that breaks my heart. We're trying to relocate entire communities together to preserve social bonds, but that only works if everyone from a village agrees to move at the same time, which they never do. So you get these fractured migrations where half a village moves in 2033, a quarter moves in 2035, and the last quarter is still in Kiribati in 2037 waiting for... I don't know what they're waiting for. A miracle? For the narrative to be wrong?

The research suggests these relocations often create secondary migration pressures. Are you seeing that?

Oh, constantly.

We moved the entire village of Vunidogoloa in the first wave—about 150 people—and within two years, thirty of them had moved again, most to Suva. The land we gave them was fine for subsistence agriculture, but there's no cash economy, no jobs for young people, no secondary school nearby. So the teenagers leave, then the young adults leave to find work, and suddenly you've relocated a village that's aging and shrinking and losing the exact social cohesion we were trying to preserve.

And then there's the tension with Fijian communities nearby. We try to do all the consultation, follow all the protocols, but you're still asking indigenous Fijian communities to accept permanent i-Kiribati settlements on traditional land. Sometimes it works beautifully—there's genuine solidarity, shared meals, intermarriage. Sometimes it's a simmering resentment that explodes over water rights or land boundaries or which community gets priority access to the one good road.

You mentioned earlier that you still think adaptation in Kiribati was possible. What would that have looked like?

Expensive and unglamorous.

The Dutch have been doing it for centuries—you build barriers, you elevate critical infrastructure, you manage your aquifers, you accept that some low-lying areas become tidal zones and you work around that. Would it save every atoll? No. Would it keep the nation viable as a homeland for most of the population for another century while we figured out longer-term solutions? Probably.

But here's the thing—adaptation doesn't generate international sympathy the way climate migration does. "Small island nation fights to survive" is a less compelling narrative than "climate refugees forced to abandon their homeland." We got more international funding for relocation programs than we ever got for adaptation infrastructure. The money followed the narrative.

I think about this a lot: if we'd committed to adaptation in 2020 with the same resources we've put into managed migration, would we still be having this conversation? Or would I still be studying coral reefs and watching my nieces grow up in the village where I grew up?

How do you explain this work to your family?

[long pause]

My mother won't speak to me about it. She's 71, still living in the house where she raised us, same house my grandmother lived in. She's watched me help dozens of families pack up and leave, and she sees it as... I don't know, collaboration with inevitability? She thinks I'm helping to kill our nation by making it easy to leave.

My sister moved to the Fiji settlement in 2034 with her three kids. She thanks me constantly for making the transition smooth, for helping her find a house near other families from our island, for connecting her kids with i-Kiribati teachers. She thinks I'm doing sacred work, preserving what can be preserved.

They're both right. That's the part that keeps me up at night.

What do you wish someone had told you in 2025?

That the story we tell about climate change shapes the climate change we get.

Not the physics—the physics is what it is. But the human response, the policy choices, the resource allocation, the individual decisions about whether to stay or go, all of that is shaped by narrative. And once a narrative takes hold, especially a narrative with moral weight like "climate refugees" or "uninhabitable islands," it becomes incredibly hard to challenge without sounding like you're denying reality.

I wish someone had told me that you can acknowledge physical reality while rejecting the inevitability narrative. That "the island is losing land" and "the nation must cease to exist" are not the same statement. That managed migration might be necessary for some communities while being premature for others, and that distinguishing between the two requires more nuance than we gave it.

Mostly I wish someone had told me that I'd become complicit in the thing I was fighting against, and that I'd have to live with that complexity instead of resolving it.

Do you think you'll relocate eventually?

[laughs bitterly]

I've been asking myself that since I took this job. I have a house waiting for me in the Fiji settlement—comes with the position, actually. I've furnished it, I know my neighbors, I've planted breadfruit trees that are already bearing fruit. But I keep coming back here. I keep living in South Tarawa in a house that's three feet above sea level and floods during king tides.

Or maybe I've just spent so long helping other people leave that I've forgotten how to leave myself.

Ask me again in 2040. If I'm still here, you'll have your answer.