77

Since the late 1990s, rising sea levels in the Torres Islands, which are situated at the northern end of the Vanuatu archipelago, has been a concern for local and international communities. In 2004, the village of Lateu on the island of Tegua was moved several hundred meters with the assistance of the Vanuatu Government and Canadian aid. On the international stage, these villagers became history’s “first climate refugees,” and were presented as victims of global warming. Our study focuses on two villages on two different islands in the group, where coastal morphology has undergone changes over the last 12 years, a phenomenon attributed to global warming and its corollary, rising sea levels. This paper presents an analysis of the geophysical and eustatic data explaining the relative variation in the sea level. While global warming is a factor in rising sea levels, it does not play the dominant role attributed to it in the Torres Islands floods. In fact, tectonic movements, both sudden (earthquakes) or slower interseismic (between earthquakes) ones, plus temporary changes in sea level in the Pacific basin, connected for example to the El Niño/La Niña Southern Oscillation, are the main reasons for the rapidly rising waters observed over the 1997–2009 period. The Torres Islands are a sparsely populated group of islands whose demographic vicissitudes have greatly influenced the current distribution of inhabitants. Although most Torres Islanders now live near the coast, this was not always the case, and they are more sensitive to environmental changes in the coastlines than when they lived further inland. Furthermore, their beliefs, in certain supernatural powers able to control the natural elements, remain in the background of their acquired Christian values, which themselves are not particularly oriented toward modernizing the islanders’ perception of environmental threats.