Most people have never heard of Tokelau. Three tiny atolls in the middle of the Pacific, about 1,400 people, a total land area smaller than many suburbs. No airport. You get there by boat, and the trip takes over a day.
And in 2012 this place did something no country on earth had done before.
First in the world
Before 2012, Tokelau ran on diesel. Generators shipped fuel across the ocean at huge cost, the power cut out for hours every day, and the fumes were the biggest source of pollution on the atolls. Electricity was a thing you had for maybe fifteen hours out of twenty-four.
Then they changed it completely. In October 2012, Tokelau switched on solar systems across all three atolls, Atafu, Nukunonu and Fakaofo, and became the first place in the world to power itself almost entirely from the sun. Around four thousand panels and banks of batteries now generate more electricity than the whole nation uses.
One of the smallest, most remote communities on the planet did what the biggest, richest nations still argue about doing. Quietly. First.
The part that should make you angry
Here is why this is not a feel-good story.
Tokelau did almost nothing to cause climate change. Its share of the world's emissions is close to nothing. And yet Tokelau is one of the places most likely to be destroyed by it. The highest point on those atolls is only a few metres above the sea.
The seas are rising because of everyone else. In 2011 a long drought forced Tokelau to import drinking water for the first time in its history. They have had to build sea walls against storm floods. The country that fixed its own footprint before anyone else is being drowned by the countries that would not fix theirs.
Tokelau's own leaders have said it plainly: they stand to lose the most of any nation on earth, so they led by example and asked the world to follow. The world mostly has not.
What Tokelau actually is
Behind the headline is a Polynesian people with their own language, their own way of life, and one of the strongest communal systems in the Pacific.
Land and work are shared. Decisions are made together, atoll by atoll. In a world that treats isolation as a weakness, Tokelau turned it into self-reliance, the kind of tight, everyone-has-a-role community that a lot of bigger places lost a long time ago. The same navigation knowledge that first brought people to these atolls, reading stars and swells and currents, is part of that inheritance.
This is not an empty postcard. It is home to families who have kept a culture alive on a few square kilometres of coral for centuries.
Why Tokelau is on an NK blog
One Family. Many Islands. Tokelau is one of the smallest islands in that sentence, and one of the most quietly remarkable.
It should be known for two things. That it led the entire world on something that mattered. And that it may be among the first of us the world allows to disappear. Both of those are true at once, and neither should be a footnote.
If your people are Tokelauan, this is your history, and it is a proud one.
One Family. Many Islands.
Solar milestone from BBC News and Power Technology. Sea-level threat and 2011 drought from Solar Choice and Common Dreams.
