The Future of Climate Change Is on Mauritius
Freak tornadoes, “explosions” of jellyfish, flash floods and dried up pumps.
JULY 29, 2025
These are the years of summer, the years of heat.
I read the reports, the models that show how rising sea levels will efface coastlines and cities around the world. Miami, Cairo, Mumbai, Jakarta, London. The simulations that show rising temperatures, changing rain patterns. Mauritius is too small for these models, and so our fate is hazily mapped out. Journal articles describe future conditions in “Sub-Saharan Africa.”
¶ Le Morne
My husband and I married in September 2018. We planned our wedding a year in advance. We didn’t even think about the sea, its surges, its rhythms. It was a feat of stupidity, for two people who grew up on an island surrounded by the Indian Ocean.
Two days after our wedding we watched the butter-hued moon rise above the water. A hiss as the waves drew back from the coast then thrashed against the shore, gaining ground by the minute. If we’d chosen to get married 48 hours later we wouldn’t have had a venue.
The hotel’s manicured efforts made me believe the beach was natural, unaltered: not a carefully constructed simulacra of the beach as it was 50 years ago.
We were married on a stretch of basalt rock leading out to sea, an elevated slice of shore covered in sand, garnered with thatched huts, wooden tables and a structure that served as our secular altar. Now they were all soused in brine. We walked along a stretch of coast owned by a hotel group, examining the damage. The sea stripped the plump beach of sand, laying bare the fat canvas bags underneath; the waves exposed the roots of coconut trees, gnarled, purple-black like gum disease.
I hadn’t realized then that this place had been so eroded. The hotel’s manicured efforts made me believe the beach was natural, unaltered: not a carefully constructed simulacra of the beach as it was 50 years ago. A beach perpetually injected with fillers. The waves raked the sand and threw it up elsewhere. We picked up the corpses of iridescent sea snakes, viscid sea cucumbers, threw them back into the ocean.
My friend was stricken by all these little deaths splayed on the shore. She’d marvelled at the island’s beauty when she first arrived, waded into the bathtub warmth of the sea, picked up a bleached fragment of coral and asked me what it was. In the three weeks she spent with me I felt like I was her tourist guide of disaster, of death in the making.
Before the wedding we’d gone on a brief sub marine tour of a Northern lagoon. We saw an octopus picking at the cabbage coral, red lionfish undulating in the sand, peppery bouletang and palette surgeonfish hovering by the carcass of a ship. The captain apologized for the lack of fauna we’d see today: we were still in winter and fish hadn’t migrated back to the lagoon yet, but also, and more importantly, there wasn’t much of a home for them to come back to. Instead of expanses of coral there were small mounds; the wreck of the ship provided the largest habitat.
Mauritius lost between 2 and 56 percent of its living coral cover across the lagoons from 2001 to 2016. Seventy-five percent of these animals have turned to white bone in the heat.
¶ Curepipe
March 2019, Antoine’s birthday. A few dishes lay unwashed in the sink; no water to clean them. I could already picture little insects all over them the next morning.
In the bathroom I opened the tap and hoped for water but there was nothing. The pump shrieked, the showerhead barely trickled. Even if there was water, we were too high up in the building to get any of it. We’d taken our precautions, bathing at my in-laws, but I wanted to scrub the sweat from my body again.
So we cut some more birthday cake, ate it on the balcony while watching the fires.
It was the season of cuts. We were allowed water for eight hours a day, four if supply was particularly dire. Water at sunrise and sunset, to cook, to bathe. In my town there were places where no water had flown from taps in three days. Fires marked those places now, spots of orange light in the distance.
Curepipe is the coldest, wettest region in the island. Our apartment block wasn’t built with air-conditioning units in mind. Over the past few years summer nights have involved fans, windows hinged as wide as they can go. In summer we slept naked, sweating through the bedsheet. Sometimes I’d open the bathroom door and slide onto the tiles, relatively cool on my skin. Lychee trees grow here now, unthinkable a decade ago. I’ve eaten Curepipean lychees as plump and sweet as those grown on the coast.
We watched videos of the riots on our phones. Restless young men burned tires, threw bricks and pieces of wood on the road. Armed police came and hosed down the mess. “Oh now there’s water!” said a man being filmed. “But when we want water to drink, we don’t get any!”
Most protesters took care to appear collected, respectful, dignified in front of the cameras. “We’re not bad people. We are honest, we’re just fighting for our right to water. We have children. Do they think that because we live in social housing, we aren’t human?”
They said that the water tankers brought mud water from the river. “I washed myself with it, started itching all over. Hives all over my skin. I can’t use the water to cook, it’s infested with creatures. We had to go to the supermarket and buy bottles of water, it was a blow to our budget. My children, they are going to school without having showered.” Toilets wouldn’t flush, their contents fermenting.
The fires were lit in mostly working-class neighborhoods populated by Creoles. Politicians rushed in, hoping to calm protesters, reassuring them that things would be different when they came to power.
When the government told us to go back home it was already too late. Throughout the town water rose to our knees, our thighs.
In a different suburb, Curepipeans filmed water the color of diarrhea pouring from chrome taps into chrome sinks. “We ring the authorities, we ring, we ring, no one answers. Or they make promises. And nothing happens.” The authorities said there was no water because they were replacing centennial pipes; it’s reported that over half of our water supply is lost through our piping system. “What happened to the electoral promise of water 24/7?” everyone asks.
We wait for the bursts of torrential rain between periods of drought. Reservoirs hold considerably less water than in previous years. The rains that come, later and later each season, are too sporadic and in the wrong places to be a benediction. Rainfall has decreased by 8 percent every year since the 1950s. A few summers ago someone once stole a 9,000-liter reservoir tank from a cemetery.
And when water comes it arrives with Old Testament fury.
I was 15 when torrential rains killed four people in 2008. We were warned of potential heavy rain but told that schools were open. In Curepipe, I watched from our classroom as rain submerged the grounds; watched as our paper boats coursed through the water, then were pelted into pulp by the force of the rain. When the government told us to go back home it was already too late. Throughout the town water rose to our knees, our thighs. I waited for a long time before my mother’s driver was able to collect me from school; I was lucky. Some of my friends took their chances and waded to the bus station. They saw excrement running past their legs. A girl in the north of the island crossed a bridge engulfed by a river; it was the only way she could get home. She was swept away.
¶ Moka
A standstill, on my way to work. Our island is a case study in terrible urban planning: You’ll be stuck in a traffic jam no matter which road you take, so I choose the most scenic route, always. Sugarcane fields to my left and right, indigo mountains in the distance, a jagged crescent circling the green. The sun only rose an hour ago. An elderly woman was in the back seat of the car in front of me. She stuck her arm out of the window, blocking the sun’s migraine light from her face. She kept her arm like that for 20 minutes, until we reached a bend in the road and the sun was behind her. The man in the truck behind me poured water on his hands, on his face. I blocked the sun and its heat as best as I could with the car’s visor and air-conditioning. A hive sprouted on my cheek, exposed to the light nonetheless.
Living on the west coast — or any of our coasts — without air conditioning now is impossible. The wealthy shower multiple times a day, as much as their water tanks allow.
In the car mirror I saw that plaques of discolored skin on my neck had crept up to the edges of my face. “Eczema,” my dermatologist said a month later, pointing to my cheek. “Champignons,” tapping my neck and chest. Fungus, sprouting with the sun, the heat. My mother would scrub at my neck with particular vigor when I was a child, convinced I wasn’t showering properly, that I’d neglected the washcloth. I was given two creams and though my skin remains uneven, the patches stopped spreading.
¶ Tamarin-Black River
The human body shuts down once the wet-bulb temperature exceeds 35°C in over 90 percent humidity. These temperatures aren’t unfamiliar to us.
When the power grid in Black River blows people sleep on the floor. Living on the west coast — or any of our coasts — without air conditioning now is impossible. The wealthy shower multiple times a day, as much as their water tanks allow.
My fitness instructor has lived in Tamarin since she was a child. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve lived here for 40 years. The soil used to be so parched that it was cracked all over. The wind would stir up dust, like in Westerns. And now we’re seeing torrential rain that could pull the houses on the mountain down.” I told her of the videos of water pouring off the mountain, good water cascading straight into the sea since Tamarin has no reservoirs. “The salt pans were all flooded,” she replied, looking out of the window.
I read of dogs furiously digging holes in the ground to escape the 35-degree heat. Children fainting during assembly early in the morning.
¶ Cottage
“I was sitting in my kitchen, cleaning beans. I saw this great ball of fire, in the window. My eyes were blinded with light, I dropped my knife, and everything burst. Windows, wires. The ball wrecked the electric lines. It went from house to house.” The man in the video who is being interviewed tries to draw the ball with his hands. It’s like a ballet movement, or a clichéd description of a voluptuous woman. There are shots of a flooded nursery, Mickey Mouse cribs rippling in filth. Another woman says she has nothing left. She cries as she recounts her misfortunes, which have come to her in quick succession. “My husband died fifteen days ago. If the neighbors hadn’t come to rescue me I would have died in my house when the rain came in. I don’t even have fifteen cents. I just bought a bed and now it’s ruined. And I have to wait for my pension next month. I don’t know how I’m going to live. I don’t know.”
¶ Trou aux Biches
December 2019. I opened the wooden shutters of the bungalow to the sight of rain pouring down like thick white hair. The northern part of the island was at a standstill, schools closed, traffic snailing down the motorway. We swam in the lagoon, torrential rain beating on our skulls, thunder overhead. Peak holiday season, and tourists, disgusted by the weather, caught early flights back home. This was not the sunny island that had been promised.
I could smell salt, but also the fruit trees that adorned the multicolored houses on the beach; the rain must have pummelled their fruit into scent. The trees’ roots were apparent, grabbing onto the sandy grass. The crescent beach was thinning almost by the week. The owner of the bungalow we were staying in told us that he didn’t give this coast another 10 years before the sea lapped at his walls.
I think of the carbon emissions of each plane that lands here. The emissions of each of our 106 hotels. Air conditioning units struggling to cool rooms in peak season.
The United Nations Development Program said our beaches have shrunk by as much as 20 meters in the last few decades, that the loss of tourism could cost us over $100 million per year by 2060, if nothing is done to save our coastline.
December 2022. Our November rains are expected in mid-January. Our reservoirs are 3 percent full. It’s the worst drought since the early 2000s.
There’s nothing to do but swim. We listen to the radio for jellyfish warnings: “Explosion” is the word of choice experts use to describe the creatures who’ve smothered every coastline. Manifestations of a sick ocean, they spawned due to warmer temperatures, overfishing, changing weather patterns.
Today the sky is postcard-perfect, the sea devoid of jellyfish, the beach packed with tourists.
I think of the carbon emissions of each plane that lands here. The emissions of each of our 106 hotels. Air conditioning units struggling to cool rooms in peak season. Tourists pouring themselves a bath, cleansing themselves of their 12-hour flight. Ignorant that the rest of us have to live on only four to eight hours of water flowing through our taps most days in high summer. Tourists, their sunscreen-coated bodies plunging into the lagoon, leaving a film on the water, poisoning corals. Tourists, delighting in our bathwater lagoon, look it’s so crystal-clear you can see the bottom, a dead zone framed in buoys, cleansed of most of its creatures.
¶ Port Louis
January 2021: I worked here over a decade ago. I must negotiate the capital’s streets differently now, my body adjusting to this new heat. My shoes abrade my feet and my shirt is stuck to my back. I slick the sweat running from my forehead back into my ponytail. When I arrive at the National Library my feet feel like they’re sloshing in their own blood.
To get to the city center I use an underpass, which now closes at the merest sign of torrential rain. You can’t walk through here without remembering the flash floods on March 30, 2013; Port Louis was flooded within minutes, water tumbled down the mountains that flank the city, sparing only the tops of palm trees. Eleven people died, six in this tunnel. They couldn’t leave fast enough, the rails and tiled staircase were too slippery for their hands and feet once the water poured in.
“When will we have drains? When we’re dead!” say men and women across the island. Videos of people removing water from their shops with buckets, throwing the water back into the road that’s become a river.
January 2024: The underpass is flooded. Roads across the capital are submerged, cars crash into each other as they are carried downstream. Passengers trapped in a car film the taupe waves rolling in from Bell Village; in horror, they capture the moment a bloated body rushes past them.
People all over the country wonder why the infrastructure around Port Louis hasn’t been modified to cope with torrential rainfall; why, after 10 years in power and countless grandiose infrastructure projects, the government has effectively left the nation’s capital to rot.
¶ Chitrakoot
The island sometimes turns to sepia at sunset, and in the jaundice light I like to think that I can predict the intensity of the thunderstorms to come. Schools are regularly closed, houses are flooded, people say they’re too scared to sleep. “We have to elevate our beds on bricks. I don’t know what to do anymore,” people say on the radio. “I’ve lost everything, again.” Our water drainage and waste-water management systems are a mess, though serious work has begun over the past couple of years to fix them. Still, progress is slow. “When will we have drains? When we’re dead!” say men and women across the island. Videos of people removing water from their shops with buckets, throwing the water back into the road that’s become a river.
Torrents pummel the vulnerable hillside village of Cottage almost every year. “When the big rain falls you hear a sound, like the house is cracking from beneath the earth, and then water rushes in,” a man said on the news. “I know that we can’t live here anymore, but I don’t have a choice.” An image of another man, naked from the chest up, pressed against a large gate by a river of mud. Beyond the gate there’s a floating coagulation of detritus.
¶ Sebastopol
The occasional aberration forms in the air. Freak tornadoes uproot electric poles, whip wires into a maelstrom, rip tin roofs from homes, and once shattered an entire village. I saved one photo of a kitchen post-devastation on my laptop: upturned plastic chairs, burst pipes, glass fragments. A singular bitter gourd on the ground, pale green on the red floor, like an omen. There’s a common phrase used here to refer to difficult times, the times when we were poor. Letan margoz. Bitter gourd times. I’ve heard this phrase often in the last few years: during the height of the COVID pandemic and after, now, in the heat of the cost-of-living crisis.
¶ Bambous-Black River Gorges
There were only four Mauritius kestrels in 1974; they are endemic to Mauritius, and were, at the time, the most endangered bird of prey in the world. Colonialism had quite a lot to do with their decline, practically from the moment the Dutch set foot here in the early 18th century: the colonists shrivelled our forests, brought rats on their boats. Three hundred or so years later — after the French and English colonial administrations had their go, pillaging the environment; after they’d driven species to extinction; after Mauritius claimed its independence and multiple economic booms and further, consequential ecological devastation — the kestrels were left with almost no homes. By 2009, however, they’d flourished to around 600 individuals, thanks to the work of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation and other organizations. They are beautiful animals, though I’ve never seen one in the wild before. Their fluffy white breasts are spotted with brown, as if they’d been dotted over with a thick brush. We have 1 percent of our natural forests left and they live there, up in the Bambous mountains and in the Black River Gorges National Park.
There is nothing remotely positive about the Meteorological Office’s predictions on cyclone formation in our region.
Recent data, however, indicates that their numbers have started to plummet again to something like 200-300 individuals, and climate change is partly responsible for their decline. Changing rainfall patterns are hurting their breeding and feeding habits. “Geckos are the kestrel’s prime food source. When it rains, geckos hide, and the bird’s visibility is reduced. If the rain only occurs for a few hours, it would still be manageable. But when you have continuous days of high rainfall, it means parents aren’t able to find food for their young,” explains Dr Vikash Tatayah, the Conservation Director of the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation.
Similarly, laying eggs is directly related to rainfall patterns in July and September. If there’s a lot of rain in August, the kestrels lay later on — but, in biology, the earlier you nest, the better you fare. On top of this, the rainfall in December correlates to the number of birds who will fledge. A very wet end-of-year is bad news. Then the birds have to face the cyclone season, from January to March; the chance of a kestrel surviving its first birthday depends on the number of cyclones hitting the island in this period. Even if the kestrel survives, if a female hasn’t been well-fed as a chick, she’ll be able to lay less eggs as an adult.
¶ Round Island
There is nothing remotely positive about the Meteorological Office’s predictions on cyclone formation in our region. Though there is “no convincing signal in an increase in the number of storms,” “there is an increasing trend in the number of storms reaching tropical cyclone strength … The anticipated rapid or even explosive intensification of tropical storms has asserted itself,” writes the ministry of environment in July 2023.
Off the northern coast of Mauritius there’s a place no humans are allowed to visit, except those working for the foundation. A dome-like mound of rock, a sanctuary for endemic and supra-rare animals across most phyla. An islet that has never been contaminated by rodents, an act of exceptional grace. The islet’s called Round Island, the bird the Round Island petrel, a species that breeds here for three to four years before travelling the world. This petrel is a hybrid animal, birthed from three different species (Trindade, Kermadec, Herald) — “and possibly a fourth species, too,” adds Tatayah — which makes it unique in the world.
They are also vulnerable. Seabird populations across the world are in decline, the second most threatened group of birds after parrots. Changing sea temperatures are fatal; among other things, they alter the migratory patterns of fish.
If fish are difficult to find and aren’t plentiful — if the food source shifts an extra 200 kilometers, say, and an adult petrel therefore has to fly 800 km for food — the journey takes longer, and will affect the chick’s growth. Several feeding spells like this and the chicks will die or fledge when they’re still underdeveloped. Its chances of surviving before returning to breed on Round Island as an adult are severely compromised, and we have stats to prove it. We’ve charted the flight patterns of ringed chicks and adults in El Niño years. Birds who hatched in an El Niño year did not survive, or didn’t survive into adulthood.
Cyclones, again, exacerbate the problem. “When cyclone Dina hit the island in 2002, it killed all of the chicks and 71 percent of the eggs. We’ve seen that weaker cyclones pose less of a problem, but if cyclones get more intense, the birds are at great risk.”
¶ In Government
There isn’t a single member of the government or the opposition who denies the existence of climate change. Successive prime ministers have pleaded to the supposed first world, urging them to reduce their emissions for all our sakes. And yet.
Mauritius’ power lies in the sea, the 2.3 million square km under our jurisdiction. We “co-manage” an additional 396,000 square km with the Republic of Seychelles. The government describes our seas as an “untapped reservoir.” “A major pillar for economic development.”
(Sometimes I think about the people employed to write about our environment in this way. Mauritians raised on, raised by, the lagoon, longing for family picnics on the beach on the weekends like the rest of us. Fiber mats, a stereo, a ravanne, djembe, biryani, roast chicken sandwiches. Adults shielding their eyes underneath filao trees, looking on at their children and grandchildren playing in the sea.)
On December 7, 2021 our government passed the Offshore Petroleum Bill. It had been introduced to parliament in October and had been stamped with a “certificate of urgency.” A new department — helmed entirely by the prime minister’s office — was appointed to act as the regulatory body for petroleum activities in our waters. It will issue permits, negotiate agreements, facilitate the conduct of petroleum activities. The bill aims to be so comprehensive in the department’s scope that there’s a clause stating it will “do such other things as may be necessary for the proper conduct of petroleum activities.” Vague diction to enable less-than-transparent activities.
I read books that trace the contours of my lifeline. The statistics that predict our future, that suggest the manner of our deaths, the stages and degrees at which our bodies will gradually shut down.
There’s no suggestion of an independent body, of audited actions. All the money from our petroleum activities will be stored in a “fund” under the control of the ministry of finance. The department is also protected from all liabilities, civil or criminal, that could be incurred “in respect of any act done or omitted in good faith.” If an officer of the department “disclose[s] any matter which came to his knowledge” while working, they risk a fine of MUR 100,000 [roughly $2,200] and imprisonment with a two-year maximum sentence.
Rumors have abounded that there was petrol in our seas since I was a child. When the bill was read out to parliament the prime minister confirmed that four sites have been identified by CGG Services SAS, a French multinational geoscience technology services company. Two of the sites may be the Saya de Malha Bank and an area to the north of Agaléga. Saya de Malha supports the world’s largest seagrass meadow, and is one of the ocean’s biggest carbon sinks.
¶ In My Body
I read books written mostly by white men in supremely rich countries on how to think about climate disaster. Some concepts I understand in my body: global warming as a hyperobject, heat like honey glistening all over my skin, so viscous that showering won’t remove the stickiness.
I read books that trace the contours of my lifeline. The statistics that predict our future, that suggest the manner of our deaths, the stages and degrees at which our bodies will gradually shut down.
“Recently, researchers estimated that by 2050 as many as 150 million people in the developing world will be at risk of protein deficiency as the result of nutrient collapse,” writes David Wallace-Wells in The Uninhabitable Earth. “138 million could suffer from a deficiency of zinc, essential to healthy pregnancies; and 1.4 billion could face a dramatic decline in dietary iron — pointing to a possible epidemic of anaemia.” I’m already borderline anaemic, like many women in my country and their mothers. In the ministry of health’s Health Statistics Report 2021, 38 percent of all Mauritian women who received antenatal care in public hospitals were reported as anaemic.
“Sudden rainfall shocks — both deluges and their opposite, droughts — can devastate agricultural communities economically, but also produce what scientists call, with understatement, “nutritional deficiencies” in foetuses and infants, writes Wallace Wells.
Between a quarter and a half of all those exposed to extreme weather events will experience them as an ongoing negative shock to their mental health … Climate affects both the onset and the severity of depression … Heat waves bring waves of other things, too: mood disorders, anxiety disorders, dementia … Heat death is among the cruellest punishments to a human body … First comes “heat exhaustion” … profuse sweating, nausea, headache … Water won’t help, your core temperature rising as your body sends blood outward to the skin, hoping desperately to cool it down. The skin often reddens; internal organs begin to fail.
Consultants believe we’ll cross the 1.5°C mark here in 2030. In the summer of 2024, our temperatures were already 2°C to 3°C higher than average.
¶ Endnote
I’ve come back to this essay at the end of January 2025. Our summer rains, which historically have arrived in early November, still haven’t fallen. Our country’s economy is now so weak that if the government were offered an opportunity to mine our underwater petrol reserves, it would probably take it. In America, a felon, a man accused of sexual assault, has become president once again. He has promised to take drilling and fracking to new heights. In the days before and after he took his oath, Los Angeles burned. Here, our reservoirs are near-empty. Our cyclones are named from a predefined list validated for our area. Member countries contribute to the list, such as Mozambique, Réunion and Zimbabwe. I propose that we review the system: we make a list of individual politicians and CEOs of companies who have done the most harm, name our ecological catastrophes after them. Hurricane Trump. The Darren Woods Fire. The Wael Sawan Flood.
This piece was originally published in the essay collection Portrait of an Island on Fire (Fitzcarraldo Editions, June 2025).
✺ Published in “Issue 30: Fever” of The Dial
