An exclusive photo essay tells the story of Ontong Java, a string of remote Pacific islands at the mercy of climate change. Without support from governments, islanders are struggling to keep their heads above water.
Image: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
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Visions from a vanishing atoll
Ontong Java in the Pacific Ocean is on the frontlines of climate change - in a rare visit, a photojournalist documented what it means for a community to face loss of its homeland due to rising tides and severe storms.
Image: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
Isolated outpost
Ontong Java islands combine to make up merely 12 square kilometers (4.6 square miles) of land that rests no more than 3 meters (10 feet) above sea level. Surrounded by the vast depths of the western Pacific Ocean, Ontong Javans have always lived at the mercy of the wind and waves - but changing climate and rising seas is making this increasingly difficult.
Image: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
Maintaining traditions
Polynesian peoples settled the islands about 2,000 years ago. Centuries-old dance routines, which include tales of powerful natural forces, form an integral part of the unique culture and identity of the local population.
Image: Displacement Solutions /Beni Knight
Close to nature
Traditionally, housing is built from coconut and pandanas trees. Today, these huts are illuminated with the modern luxury of lighting generated from solar power. The vast darkness of a nearly uncontaminated night sky is one advantage of complete isolation.
Image: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
Where will the children go?
If sea levels continue to rise at current rates, the islands will eventually be wiped off the face of the Earth. The children of Ontong Java, including 8-year-old Wilson Ayunga (pictured above), may have no other option than to relocate to higher lands elsewhere.
Image: Displacement Solutions /Beni Knight
Uncommitted government
The pristine beauty of Luaniua - one of the two permanently occupied islands in Ontong Java - becomes more obvious from above. But beneath the idyllic palm trees, a committed government is lacking. Administratively, Ontong Java is part of the Solomon Islands. Yet failure to provide healthcare, policing or consistent education is generating social problems as modernity reaches the islands.
Image: Displacement Solutions /Beni Knight
Land hewn apart
The consequences of climate change have already become obvious to the people of Ontong Java. The island of Henua Aiku has started to split in two as seawater infiltrates through its center - setting signs of a bleak future with relation to food security and erosion.
Image: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
Destructive climate change
Beyond losses caused by rising sea levels, increasingly intense and unpredictable storms and winds - due to climate change - are also taking their toll on coastlines and villages around the atoll.
Image: Displacement Solutions /Beni Knight
Faltering crops
Patron Laliana's experimental taro garden has not lived up to expectations due to salination of soil, which already lacks crucial nutrients for highly productive agriculture.
Image: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
Changing times
Sarah Abora has spent her entire life on Ontong Java. She remembers a time when there was nothing but bush where her village stands today. She also remembers when people lived beyond today's end of the island. The village has retreated, as this point has been swept away by rising tides and currents.
Image: Displacement Solutions /Beni Knight
Swept away
Where there is now a fragile finger of white sand, once was a beautiful and thriving village. Rising seas consumed about 40 homes, and a cemetery.
Image: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
No land, no culture
Without their land, Ontong Javans cannot see how they could continue their culture. To give up their islands, they believe, is to give up their identity. The culture of Ontong Java faces a dire future as the effects of climate change threaten to displace people there.
Image: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
Sprouting coconut of hope
While the likelihood of relocating the population from Ontong Java becomes ever more likely with the passage of time, people there remain hopeful that they will be able to remain on their traditional lands - which have sustained them and their culture for as long as 2,000 years.
Image: Displacement Solutions /Beni Knight
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Few people have heard of one of the world's largest atolls - Ontong Java in the Solomon Islands - but this anonymity has failed to save it from the effects of climate change.
Inaccessible by air and visited only sporadically by a supply ship, the 3,000-strong community is hoping to save its people and culture from rising tides and increasingly severe storms.
The atoll of Ontong Java is a ring of 120 islands located in the western Pacific Ocean - some 500 kilometers (311 miles) north of Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands.
One of the world's most remote landmasses, the islands span 1,400 square kilometers. They combine to make up 12 square kilometers of land that sits no more than 3 meters (10 feet) above sea level.
If sea levels continue to rise, the Ontong Java atoll will be inundatedImage: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
The people on the Ontong Java atoll have always lived at the mercy of the wind and waves - but the largely subsistence life that has served them for centuries is becoming increasingly untenable.
Over past years, islanders have been living with worsening food insecurity, severe coastal erosion and the ever-growing prospect of fleeing to an uncertain future on more elevated islands far across the sea.
Not only is the ocean encroaching through high winds and waves - bringing seawater and salt over the land - but due to rising sea levels, seawater is now bubbling through the porous coral soil. "Like the island is leaking," an atoll resident told the photojournalist.
All islands are showing signs of major erosion, to the point where some land masses have disappeared completelyImage: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
Islander Chris Keungi is 40, and the son of a former chief. Standing on the southern point of Pelau, the island he and about 600 others call home, he pointed beyond the tip of the island.
Although a village once stood there, it is hard to imagine anything other than the seawater currently flowing into the lagoon.
"When I was 10, there were a lot of houses here," Keungi said. "When I came back 10 years later, I saw a lot of changes. Soil erosion had begun to wash away most of the houses that were affected by sea rise," Keungi said.
Late June 2015, an unprecedented cyclone stormed through Ontong Java, leaving devastation in its wakeImage: Displacement Solutions /Beni Knight
Rising seas are only one of the threats facing the atoll. At the end of June 2015, Ontong Java was hit by two very large waves on the south side of the southern islands, followed immediately by wind gusts at speeds as high as 125 kilometers per hour - generated by Cyclone Raquel.
The island of Luaniua, the largest of the atoll with a permanent population of 2,000, bore the brunt of these extreme weather events, losing more than 80 structures including homes, kitchens and rest houses.
The home of Moses Paoa on Luaniua, Ontong Java, was destroyed by Cyclone RaquelImage: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
When faced with the reality of climate change, Keungi, his family and the rest of the people on the atoll have ever-fewer options. Plans to relocate the Polynesian islanders of Ontong Java to the culturally distinct Melanesian island of Malaita have failed.
People on the islands understand the growing need to move - but at the moment, most have no intention of doing so. When that day finally comes, many on the atoll would prefer to move to the island of Santa Isabel, some 300 kilometers to the south.
They see Santa Isabel as the best chance of finding a place where they can reestablish themselves, and be welcomed as new arrivals with at least some of their ancient culture and traditions intact.
The vibrant culture of Ontong Javans threatens to disappear with their islandsImage: Displacement Solutions /Beni Knight
In December, the international community will come together in Paris to thrash out a new global accord on climate change. For Pacific islands like Ontong Java, the stakes could not be higher.
If negotiations in Paris succeed, and new vigorous rules are created that dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and secure renewed funding to protect those already grappling with the effects of climate change - like Ontong Javans - the meeting may provide a future for such Pacific islanders.
Yet, if heavy emitters - including one of the Solomon Islands' closest neighbors, Australia - succeed in watering down the current text and allowing ever more fossil fuels to be exploited and burned, the 3,000 people of Ontong Java will be forced to flee the islands they have called home for generations.
Image: Displacement Solutions/Beni Knight
In June and July 2015, non-governmental organization Displacement Solutions sent photojournalist Beni Knight to Ontong Java for two months to document and record the culture, lives and opinions of the people of the atoll. DW publishes the exclusive essay and photos here.
