Between the Global and Local: Making Sense of Climate Change in the Lakshadweep Archipelago

The 2004 tsunami changed everything in Lakshadweep.

On the surface, there was barely a ripple. The nearshore waters were a sheet of calm as they always were in December. The earthquake in Banda Aceh was too distant to disturb the sleep of people in Lakshadweep. And when the tsunami waves radiated out across the Indian Ocean, the hulking mass of the Indian subcontinent absorbed most of its energy. Sitting in India’s protective shadow, life in Lakshadweep coasted along. A few early-morning fishers, out fishing tuna in deeper waters, felt a brief churning of the sea. It lasted a moment, and the waters were calm again. Barely a ripple. No loss of life. No fishing boats destroyed. Not a coconut tree felled.

Yet, for many in Lakshadweep, the tsunami was a bellwether event, a signpost signalling a marked change in the archipelago’s environmental trajectory. Post-tsunami, fish catch became more unpredictable because, as some fishers say, currents across the Indian Ocean changed, taking abundant schools of skipjack tuna with them. The shifting currents drove some fish deeper, tantalisingly out of reach. The monsoons became choppier. The traditional almanacs the elders used to read the winds were increasingly unreliable. For an event that took place 2,500 kilometres away nearly two decades ago, the penumbra of the tsunami continues to shroud the lives of Lakshadweep today.

My story of Lakshadweep is very different. It goes roughly like this: Since 1996, I have returned to these atolls each year to dive their reefs. From this vantage point, a few metres below the water’s surface, I have witnessed my own change markers. Over the last few decades, Lakshadweep has experienced a series of dramatic, system-wide collapses, not in the form of seismic waves but existentially threatening nonetheless. Every so often since 1998, a large body of unusually warm waters pours in from the Pacific, and the waters around Lakshadweep rise alarmingly in El Niños of enormous proportions. For reef-building coral, this is too much. Corals thrive because of an old evolutionary relationship — between the coral animal and a photosynthetic dinoflagellate that produces most of its food. This partnership breaks down with heat stress, and the dinoflagellate leaves and the coral bleaches ghostly white. Many corals are unable to feed adequately alone, and in time, most die of starvation. In 1998, as El Niño spread across Lakshadweep, I recorded with disbelief the dying of the reef. Within a few weeks, large tracts of reefs were dead, and in a few months, all that was left of once-vibrant coral were brown, algal-covered stands. As a marine biologist, this was the clearest signature of climate change I would ever document. As a person who loved the reef, this dead reefscape made me sick to the stomach.

1998. 2010. 2016. Each time, before the reef could completely recover, another pulsing blob would extend its amorphous arms across the oceans, unstoppable, invisible, carrying silent white death. The complex reef architecture was coming apart, and the species that depended on it struggled to cope. Each time I looked, the reef was ever so slightly more depauperate, until now, 25 years later, the reef is a shadow of itself. Climate change is claiming its victims.

My concern at first was for the threatened reef ecology. The slow drain of its diversity. The increasing simplification of its ecosystems. The arrested state of its recovery. The unravelling of its ecological functions. Yet, there was something more at stake here than mere ecology. Because, with the declining reef, the geology of the atoll was itself coming apart. Perched on ancient submarine volcanoes in the Indian Ocean, Lakshadweep atolls are mere sandbanks sitting in shallow lagoons, walled with living aragonite. As geological curiosities go, they are elegant but slight. The islands rise a few metres above the ocean, and were it not for the reef, they would vanish in a few harsh monsoons. So now, as the reef crumbles with every El Niño, the threats to these islands are not merely ecological they are existential. What is at stake is the very existence of the islands and the 70,000+ people that call them home.

When I talk now about Lakshadweep, it is in the language of precarity. These atolls are poster children of climate vulnerability. If some predictions hold, sea level rise could give the islands another century before they are unliveable. However, in that time, increasingly intense storms could cause untold loss of life and infrastructure. Ocean warming could kill its reef. With increasingly acidic waters, the structure of coral could become more fragile to storms. With storms no longer attenuated by the crumbling reef, large waves could overtop the island, resulting in coastal loss and, perhaps more critically, the salination of fresh groundwater. All these interacting forces could mean that a once-thriving archipelago could become rapidly uninhabitable even faster than the comparatively sedate rising sea level.

These are my fears for Lakshadweep. Yet when I speak to my island friends about change, it is the tsunami they bring up most often. Climate change, in contrast, has an invisibility cloak draped around it. Surely, I think, they should know better. Surely, the elders who have seen and heard more, who have had the time to think through cause and effect over decades of experience, surely they would see the true markers of change. Yet, speaking with the revered Kunhi Kunhi Malmi a year before he passed during the dark pandemic days, climate change was not his concern. He was the keeper of an ancient knowledge of winds, seas, and stars. He had a sophisticated understanding of longitudes and seasons, of the movement of the sands, of freshwater flux beneath the island and where wells could be dug. He had witnessed change alright. The islands were becoming hotter since when he was young, and the land was sinking. He wasn’t so sure of the tsunami as a cause, although he could not discount it. It’s all this construction, he insisted. Too many people. Too many houses. Too many roads. With all this concrete, of course it is going to heat up. With all this weight, how can our little island hold up? Climate change? He did not mention it once.

For years this dissonance has disturbed me. How could a people whose very future was at stake not engage with the sheer magnitude of the crisis at hand? How could they go about their daily life so blithely, preferring to ascribe nebulous change to a phantom force that barely touched them, rather than acknowledging the global catastrophe that swirls so self-evidently, so menacingly around them? Could it be that I was seeing this wrong? If reality is merely collectively constructed, should I give up climate change as a cause for concern?

It is possible that I am the wrong person to resolve this disconnect. As a marine scientist, I spend most of my time staring at a reef through blinkered lenses of tempered glass. Back on land, I stare at spreadsheets, confronting the numbers I see against simplified models of the ecosystem. Based on the results of this confrontation, I draw lines on a graph, and depending on which way the lines move, I make pronouncements about the reef, the future of Lakshadweep, and its meaning for the world at large. Through this process, my half-baked training, my dimming vision, my flailing statistical skills, the collective knowledge of my intellectual peers, my own basic beliefs, all serve to blinker further the stories I tell about Lakshadweep. For the quarter century since I witnessed that first great dying reef, I have been looking for a clear global signature of change scrawled on this little backwater to add to the global signatures my compatriots were finding in far-flung waters from the Great Barrier Reef, the Caribbean, Chagos, Kenya, everywhere they looked. The hope was that if we compiled these signatures at scales spanning the globe, we would build an incontrovertible argument for the reality of climate change and its impacts on the planet. The reef was the canary in the climate change coal mine, and it was dying in spectacular fashion. Like the thawing of the tundra and the melting of the glaciers, the dying coral reef was one more undeniable proof that climate change was with us, was real, and that our ecosystems were not coping. This has been a particularly powerful global enterprise in scientific storytelling and has become the essential frame around which I build my narratives of Lakshadweep and its precarious future.

But there is nothing global in the change Lakshadweep experiences. Life here proceeds at a still-human scale in space and time. These are not the scales at which climate change operates. As an all-pervading, planet-sized energy, climate change is invisible to the women gleaning octopus and cowries in the intertidal zone during the spring low while their accompanying children torture fish in the tidal pools. As slow-rising waters and a string of episodic heat waves and storms, climate change does not disturb the seasons of the fisher chasing skipjack tuna in the open ocean, so he can boil and dry it on the shore to make a profit before the monsoons make the seas too rough to fish. Climate change, at human scales, creeps slowly and spreads too vastly. Its sheer inhuman magnitude makes climate change not merely invisible to the people of Lakshadweep, it makes it unreal. It belongs to the realm of the fabulous, where distant, bedraggled polar bears stare accusingly at us as they perch on vanishing floes. At that distance, as a fable told of a faraway place called Earth, climate change exists. In contrast, the occasional heat wave, the dying coral, the crumbling reef, these are not portents of a larger global force. These are just things that happen in our backyard, surely.

On December 2nd, 2017, Cyclone Ockhi, a powerful and unseasonal cyclone hit Lakshadweep. Gale-force winds of more than 130 km/hr tore through the islands, ripping up coconut palms and damaging homes on her eastern fronts. Fishing boats broke from their moorings and shattered on the shore. Breakwaters were breached and jetties collapsed. The damage on the reef was equally devastating. Large blocks of coral were ripped out by the waves and flung onto the lagoon. In Kavaratti, so much dead coral accumulated on the reef crest that the eastern lagoon dried up entirely until people cleared away the coral to let the sea back in. It was several days before calm returned. Thankfully, for all its violent atmospheric posturing, the cyclone did not claim a single life in Lakshadweep.

The cyclone lasted less than a week. Yet, Ockhi represented an important shift in the way people in Lakshadweep respond to change. Ockhi made glaringly real the increasingly erratic nature of the weather. Cyclone Ockhi has become the new tsunami. Now, when the environment is spoken of in Lakshadweep, it is discussed in relation to the cyclone. It signposts a clear before from an after. I sometimes hear whispers of climate change entering these narratives.

Between the tsunami and the cyclone, I have realised a few important lessons about how we make sense of change in the real world, away from data, models, graphs and received wisdom. Flashy environmental catastrophes (even phantom ones) stand in as visible placeholders of larger, more gradual forms of change. They are essential plot points in our ecological storytelling. They make visible the self-evident. And they make local the effect of the global. As climate scientists, we have largely failed to recognise this. Our task, we have always believed, was to speak of a universal ecology using generalisable science to make a pressing case for global change. But in lived experience, there is no such thing. In lived experience, there is only the fact that I need to cast my nets deeper to catch fish, that the water near the helipad is now too salty to drink, and that I cannot rely anymore on my almanac to predict the wind. Every region has its own particular ecological dialect that speaks richly of what it feels to live in that geography and to have experienced change from that unique locus. To talk to the people of Lakshadweep about all I have experienced on their reefs and all I fear this could mean for their atolls, I will have to learn this vernacular ecology. I will need to make the crumbling of the reef as immediate as Ockhi and yes, as real as the 2004 tsunami. Because global change does not exist. All change is local.