First, the picture
You are looking at an island from the side.
Beige is land. Blue is the sea. This is not a map. We are looking from the side, so we can see how high the land is above the water.
Pacific Dataviz Challenge 2026
The last ten metres
This story asks a simple question: how close to the sea do people in the Pacific live? The sea has risen by about 10 centimetres. Most of these people already live less than 10 metres above the water.
The dashed line
This line is 10 metres above the sea.
Official data counts how many people live on land that is less than 10 metres above the water. That band is the whole story. Everything next is about the people who live below this line.
Marshall Islands · 2024
96 out of 100 people live this close to the sea.
Each white dot is 1 percent of everyone in the country. 96 dots sit below the 10-metre line. That is 36,129 people. 61 of them also live below 5 metres. Almost nobody lives higher up.
Tuvalu · 2024
91 out of 100 people live below 10 metres.
That is 8,740 people. 41 out of 100 live even lower: below 5 metres. On a world map Tuvalu is a speck. From the side, almost the whole country is this low.
Nauru · 2024
This island is taller rock. Most people still live low.
Nauru is not a flat ring of islands. It rises higher. Even so, 76 out of 100 people live below 10 metres.
Kiribati · 2024
74 out of 100 people. That is most of the country.
98,911 people in Kiribati live less than 10 metres above the sea. This is not a small leftover. It is the majority. The islands are already this low.
Fiji · 2024
Fiji looks high. 259,502 people still live low.
Only 28 out of 100 people in Fiji live below 10 metres. That sounds small. It is 259,502 people — more than the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Palau combined.
Kiribati · sea level · 1993 to 2023
In 30 years the sea rose 10 centimetres.
Official records for Kiribati in 2023 show the sea 10 centimetres higher than at the start of this data. In this picture the water goes up by that amount, at real size. 10 centimetres next to a 10-metre shore.
Vanuatu’s sea was 20 centimetres higher in 2023 — the most in this data. Fiji reached 20 centimetres in 2022. People were already living in the 10 metres above the water.
Kiribati · sea temperature · 1993 to 2025
The same sea is also warmer than usual.
The hottest year here is 2015: 1.1°C above the usual temperature. 2024 was 0.8°C above. 2025, the newest number, is 0.1°C above. That is the newest year, not the hottest.
The orange line is sea temperature. The middle of the chart is the usual temperature — not the bottom of the sea.
Fiji · tourists · 2024
Tourists use the same low land.
Fiji had 928,938 overnight visitors in 2024. 259,502 residents live below 10 metres. That is about 3.6 visitors for each person living on that low land.
The gold dots are those visitors. The visitors go home. The people and the shore stay.
Palau · tourists · busiest year, 2015
53 visitors for each person living below 10 metres.
Palau’s busiest year for overnight visitors was 2015: 162,000 people. By 2019 that fell to 94,000. 2020 is closed airports, not a climate number. 3,070 people live below 10 metres.
The Marshall Islands had 6,100 overnight visitors in 2019. Same low land. Far fewer tourists. Same sea.
Vanuatu · 2015
One cyclone, in one night.
Tropical Cyclone Pam hit Vanuatu. The government said the total damage was equal to 64.1% of the country’s economy that year.
People were already living close to the sea. This is what one storm cost.
The last ten metres are not a warning about tomorrow.
They are where people in the Pacific already live today.