Homesickness is the loss of the home you left. But what if the house you leave? When your birthplace literally disappears under your feet, washed away by the ocean. Perhaps we should call this emotional mirror image of homesickness landsick.
The scientific term for this feeling is solastalgia, a variation on nostalgia, introduced by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2005. He also calls it “homesickness while at home.” It describes the feelings of loss and sadness when a familiar place changes dramatically or even disappears completely. Including the mourning for something that is still there, but of which you know it will be irrevocably lost. It is a form of pre-traumatic stress that is often used to describe the response to climate change.
The small island states in the Pacific Ocean are threatened like no other by sea level rise. Countries such as Tuvalu, the second smallest member state of the United Nations. With around eleven thousand inhabitants spread across a chain of nine atolls spanning almost 700 kilometres, the total area of Tuvalu is only 26 square kilometers – about the size of Schiermonnikoog. The sea level has already risen by 15 cm in the past thirty years and another 20 cm will rise in the next thirty years, while the land is on average less than two meters high. Studies predict that half of the capital will be regularly flooded by 2050 and about 95 percent of the country by 2100.
Tuvalu is not alone. The Solomon Islands have already lost six islands and six others have shrunk significantly. The capital of Kiribati is struggling with severe coastal erosion. An important airport in the Marshall Islands regularly floods during heavy storms. For the residents of these vulnerable islands, climate change is not an abstract phenomenon but an urgent danger. Of course they don’t sit still. People are trying to reclaim land from the sea, artificially raise beach walls and move crops to safer grounds.
The most acute danger is not the washing away of land but the salinization of groundwater. The seawater creeps further and further up through the porous coral bottoms. This silent killer not only threatens the only source of drinking water, but also affects agriculture. This undermines food security and makes islands completely dependent on imports for food and drinks.
The ultimate solution is also already taking place: migration. Internally to safer islands within the group and externally to the mainland. When Australia launched the first round of a visa lottery in 2025 under a special treaty with Tuvalu, 90 percent of the population participated. The water is literally and figuratively on their lips.
Shrinking islands are also losing their rights to fishing and mineral resources
What exactly does it mean if your land is there, but has become uninhabitable and is even under water? Will you continue to exist as a nation? This is something that is being fought over in international law. According to the usual interpretation, the various maritime zones, such as the territorial sea and the exclusive economic zone, ‘breathe’ with a changing coastline. The Netherlands makes grateful use of this when we add another piece of land to our territory. But what if that coastline shrinks or even disappears completely? For the shrinking islands it means that they also lose their rights to fishing and mineral resources. And that they even completely cease to exist as a nation state.
The Pacific island states argue that their existence should not depend on climate change. After all, the international law of the sea was established when there was no rapidly rising ocean. They want to maintain their maritime borders, their economic zones and ultimately their right to exist, including membership of the United Nations, even if the country is completely underwater.
But a legal victory does not take away the acute pain. You cannot live in a maritime zone or build your house on fishing rights. There is a big difference between formal survival and being a physical home. It is precisely in that gap that the pain of landsickness lies.
For the inhabitants of the Pacific Islands, the word solastalgia is inadequate. For them, their country is not an environment that you appreciate or miss. It is the place where your ancestors are buried and with which you are physically and spiritually connected. In the Maori language the word means whenua simultaneously ‘land’ and ‘placenta’. Your existence is intertwined with the island. If one part disappears, it’s like losing an arm or a family member. Your home is not a cherished place to long for, but a cosmic reality, including your ancestors, the ocean and the stars you navigate.
These indigenous peoples see the earth as a conversation partner, not as a backdrop. But at climate summits, others often speak about their fate. Their own words and local knowledge usually do not reach the meeting rooms. It was an exception that Pacific scientists were recently able to share their insights with the United Nations during the annual science forum. The painful irony is that the peoples who have contributed least to climate change are suffering the most from it. And that Western science does not even have the right words to describe their sadness.
Landwee comes in different degrees. You don’t have to travel to the other side of the world for it. It could be the small sadness of a butterfly that no longer flutters around or the song of a bird that no longer sounds. But also the unbearable sadness of a people who see their entire world washed away, including their past, identity and future.
