Somewhere in New Zealand's collective economic memory is a debt it has never properly acknowledged. The phosphate that fertilised the farms that built the agricultural wealth underpinning the country's prosperity was mined, in significant part, by I-Kiribati workers on Banaba — then Ocean Island — under conditions that left them with little while the extracted wealth flowed to Wellington and London.
That nation, Kiribati, now faces existential destruction. Its 33 atolls sit an average of barely two metres above sea level across the central Pacific Ocean. Sea-level rise is not a forecast for Kiribati. It is a present reality: saltwater intrusion into freshwater lenses, storm surge flooding of inhabited islands, coastal erosion consuming land that cannot be replaced. Within decades — on current trajectories, well within the lifetimes of children born today — significant parts of Kiribati will be uninhabitable. The nation itself may need to be relocated entirely.
The Stuff interactive investigation, originally published in 2017 and recirculating with renewed urgency in 2026, documents both the historical connection and the current migration reality. It is more relevant now than when it was first published. Kiribati's situation has worsened materially in the intervening years. The Pacific climate migration conversation has intensified. And New Zealand's response — a modest Pacific Access Category quota allowing a small number of I-Kiribati to immigrate each year — has barely moved.
The Pacific Access Category currently allows approximately 75 Kiribati citizens to immigrate to New Zealand annually, through a ballot system with eligibility requirements including job offers and income thresholds. Kiribati's total population is around 119,000. The 75-person annual quota is not a climate migration policy. It is a gesture.
The irony — and it is a bitter one — is that New Zealand has a history of framing its Pacific relationships in terms of family, of the Pacific family concept that runs through New Zealand's foreign policy language. Foreign Minister Winston Peters uses the rhetoric when it is convenient. The Pacific Access Category is what the rhetoric becomes when it meets budget reality and political will.
There are practical arguments made against large-scale Pacific climate migration. Housing pressure. Integration capacity. The argument that relocating whole populations changes the cultural fabric of both sending and receiving communities in ways that must be managed carefully. These are legitimate questions. They are not, however, answers to the question of what New Zealand owes a people whose labour helped build its prosperity and whose homeland is now being destroyed by carbon emissions that New Zealand, Australia, and the developed world have disproportionately generated.
Kiribati's current President Taneti Maamau has pursued a policy of 'migration with dignity' — encouraging I-Kiribati citizens to gain skills and prepare for eventual resettlement in friendly nations, rather than waiting for emergency climate displacement. It is a dignified posture for an impossible situation. The question is whether New Zealand and Australia will respond with policy of equivalent seriousness, or whether the Pacific family will find, when the seas finally come, that the family home has a locked door.
