Once a tropical paradise on Earth, the world’s smallest island nation of Nauru has been transformed into an uninhabitable moonscape of craters and abandoned strip mines across most of its eight square miles. It is one of the Pacific Small Island Developing States, which include Fiji, Tonga, and Papua New Guinea, scattered amid the world’s biggest ocean; many of the islands are low-lying atolls, threatened by the prospect of being swallowed by rising Pacific waters as climate change advances.
Nauru was once a source of rich deposits of phosphate-laden fertilizer—fossilized droppings that piled up over millennia on this seabird stopover. By the time Nauru achieved independence from Australia in 1968, its 11,000 inhabitants were among the richest people on Earth, with a $50,000 (US) per capita GDP, second only to Saudi Arabia’s.
