FIJI: The Heat's Not Just Political.

"THE POLITICAL CLIMATE IS HEATING UP AND HEADING TOWARDS A REAL FRENZY," a man in Suva, the small third world capitol of Fiji told me the week before the country's Indian prime minister was taken hostage by Fijian nationalists and the military declared martial law. Ironically, while ethnic tensions continue to seethe, it's global climate change that represents the greatest threat to Fiji's future.

Thanks to 19th century British colonial policies that brought Indian laborers in to work the sugar fields of western Viti Levu, the country's main island, Fiji today is roughly 51 percent indigenous Fijian, 44 percent Indo-Fijian and five percent interested observer. While Fijians tend to work in the tourism industry and Indians make up most of the 23,000 families raising sugar, both of these primary industries are now threatened by climate change.

Fiji's director of environment, Epeli Nasome, is dressed conservatively in a white short sleeve shirt and brown business skirt or Sulu Vakataga. He has a neat graying mustache, glasses and the cautious manner of bureaucrats throughout the world, which makes what he has to say all the more disturbing.

"We can feel a change already in our weather system here, with longer droughts that impact our western division [on the main island of Viti Levu]," he tells me. "We're having more rain, more rainy seasons with higher rainfall. Flooding has spread to the western side of the island, which is normally known as the dryer part. Reoccurring coral bleaching [in the spring of 2000] is a new area of concern, and is on a more extensive scale than we've ever seen before."

During my first dive in Fiji, I notice the reef looks like a recent snow storm has passed over it: About a third of the corals are bleached, and some of the staghorn and other branching corals are wedding cake white. The worst-hit area is Beqa Lagoon south of Viti Levu, one of the most popular dive sites in Fiji, which has suffered over 80 percent potentially lethal bleaching as a result of a huge pool of warm water first spotted by U.S. satellites.

The owner of the Jean-Michel Cousteau resort on the island of Vanua Levu has also begun complaining about the state of the road into his upscale retreat, claiming it's in such bad shape visitors may not want to return to Fiji (if rioting and armed hostage taking doesn't drive them away first). While promising to improve the road, the Public Works Minister points out this has been one of the rainiest years ever, and bad for roads throughout the islands. Two weeks earlier, Labasa, the main town on Vanua Levu had flooded. In January of 1999, the cities of Nadi, Ba and Lautoka in the western sugar-growing region of Viti Levu also suffered major flooding. This followed an eight-month drought that devastated the sugar industry.

"Seasonal shifts are becoming more extreme," Janita Pahalad, manager of climate services for the Fiji Meteorological Service tells me. "Another problem is that with global warming, night-time temperatures are increasing, but the sugar industry needs low night-time temperatures to increase the sucrose content of the cane."

Pahalad has written a report suggesting that rising sea levels from global warming are also leading to increased salt water intrusion into water tables. That changes the pH level of low-lying sugar fields, which can drastically reduce their productivity.

On Fiji's low-lying islands, salt water intrusion can come from above as well as below. On Moturki, a small island not far off eastern Viti Levu, a 1999 storm surge crossed over the island, ruining the islanders' crops and salinating their fresh water. The 900 residents had to get their fresh water shipped in for eight months.

"In a village in [the northern island of] Laucala, they're complaining that they're drinking seawater. The whole [western] Yasawa island group has a huge [salt water intrusion] problem," explains Robert Matau, a large bearded man with a round face and skeptical brown eyes. He is a former reporter with the Fiji Times and now senior sub-editor at the Post. "Newsrooms neglect the environmental story," he tells me. "What made global warming real for me was when I returned to Kadavu [an island group south of Viti Levu] to pay my respects to my great-grandfather in 1992 and found his grave half in the ocean. Then, in 1997, a cyclone and tidal wave washed away the road, jetty and much of the area's shoreline. Now in my mother's village of Muani they're moving five houses inland and trying to build a coral seawall. Two weeks ago the island's main village of Tavuki flooded. If you're on an island with no mountain slope, I believe you have to start thinking seriously about moving."

Still, Fiji is not in as bad a state as the low-lying Pacific island nations of Kiribati, the Marshalls and Tuvalu, which may literally be subsumed by rising sea-levels due to fossil-fuel driven climate change. There are already diplomatic discussions underway about where to resettle the environmental refugees.

"If something is a survival issue, then it is a human right," Dr. Shaista Shameem, an attorney and director of the newly formed Fiji Human Rights Commission, told me. She had been thinking about the links between political and cultural rights, the environment and the law, but that was before May's government-declared State of Emergency.

While on Taveuni, I visited the Wairiki Catholic Mission, walking down a dirt road past crumbling seawalls and a few uprooted coconut palms to a shallow rocky beach that has eroded away in recent years. A bunch of young Fijian kids were playing in the water until they spotted me taking pictures and came running over to pose and shyly tell me their names and ages. With the growing tensions in the capital about to explode into violence, I couldn't help but wonder about their future, torn between ethnic conflict and rising seas. CONTACT: Fiji Ministry of Information, [phone]-700, www.fiji.gov.fj/core/about.html.

DAVID HELVARG is an investigative journalist and author of the forthcoming book Blue Frontier: The Fight to Save America's Living Seas (W. H. Freeman).