In Bikenibeu, on South Tarawa, the offices of Kiribati's Ministry of Environment, Lands and Agricultural Development sit on ground that nowhere rises higher than four meters above the Pacific Ocean. This is the working altitude of Nenenteiti Teariki-Ruatau's mandate as Director of the Environment and Conservation Division: a nation of thirty-three low-lying atolls, none of them more than a swell away from the sea that sustains and threatens them in the same breath. "Without strong leadership, there can be no clear path forward, no community buy-in, and no political will", she says. "Resilience; of our environment, land, sea, and the air we breathe, is essential to ensure our islands remain livable": for the key technical adviser she had become, being a nation at all, in Kiribati's case, is a condition that has to be actively maintained rather than assumed.
Leadership as the first line of defense
For Nenenteiti, the capacity to endure is not a program line; it is the precondition for a livable archipelago, and for the human capital the country will need in its worst-case scenarios, she argues. Decisions must align environmental, climate and biodiversity safeguards with Kiribati's local and national economies, because they are the foundations of the country's future capital. The technologies needed to make ecosystems able to withstand sea-level rise are often too costly for the government to sustain alone, which is why she insists that "investments in seaward defenses, Nature-based Solutions, and data-driven planning are not just financial decisions; they are investments in survival and a future".
The price of staying above water
The numbers behind that ambition are unforgiving. The Kiribati Adaptation Program, backed by the Global Environment Facility, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, has channeled US$ 5.5 million into water security, mangrove replanting and disaster risk reduction. The government has now secured GEF-8 Star, its largest project of this kind to date: a US$ 20–24 million initiative funded by the GEF with the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), selected as the GOK GEF Implementing Agency (GEF IA), to build state-of-the-environment data systems and strengthen ongoing GOK’s atolls environment and agro-biodiversity and livestock resilience related initiatives.
Data that belongs at home first
That is where the Kiwa Initiative enters her account, not as a donor relationship but as a repair to a structural weakness. "Kiribati often struggles to access the data needed to justify budget for environmental resilience", she says. Kiwa's 2024 mission with O2 Metocean, and the coastal buibui, brush barriers built with local hands against storm surge, have initiated towards closing that gap. But Nenenteiti is exacting about what closing it should mean: information must first prove its worth inside Kiribati before it travels outward as a regional case study. ECD, as a GOK Division’s annual monitoring reports, she notes, have not yet met the evidentiary standards required to contribute to the IPCC chapters in the IPCC AR assessment cycle reporting; a critical gap that urgently needs to be addressed with adequate additional financial and technical assistance.
What two decades on the seawall have taught her
Not every experiment has produced a clean answer. Two decades of combining seawalls with mangrove planting on South Tarawa produced mixed results: one causeway now floods at every calm high tide, and a stretch protected by hard defenses alone is cracking under ordinary swells. But one seawall has held — built on land reclaimed from the sea and, for the first time in Kiribati, designed under environmental licence conditions that wrote nature-based criteria directly into the permit. It has stood since the early 2000s, storms included. Nenenteiti wants that same rigor applied everywhere else: a proper scientific accounting of why one structure holds and another doesn't, before more of the coastline disappears underwater.
The choice to stay
Asked what message she would carry into COP31, Nenenteiti does not lead with targets. She leads with the freedom to remain. "The choice to stay in our islands should be a free will, she says, but that choice is increasingly influenced by what happens within our region, and internationally". Culture, identity, heritage; what she wants the next generation spared from having to negotiate rest on one practical condition: funding that matches the technical urgency. "We need actions, we need support, but above all, we need the funding to help our case build, to become resilient, to live forever on our islands".
