Climate change brings a new emergency to the Tamil homeland in Sri Lanka

~ The reporting for this piece was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center

“It is in this soil that the identity of your race is deeply rooted,” Velupillai Prabhakaran, the head of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), said in 1998, addressing the Tamil diaspora. He was referring to land in Sri Lanka’s North and East, from Kalpitiya on the island’s western shore to Trincomalee on the eastern one, that was the territory of the Jaffna Kingdom between the 14th and 17th centuries. It was for this soil, and the ability to govern it, that countless men and women would fight and die in a 26-year armed struggle between the Sri Lankan government and separatist Tamil forces. Sivagnanam Shritharan, the head of the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK), a major Tamil nationalist party, told me, “Even after the war, we are struggling to regain our sovereignty and freedom.” While that crisis festers unresolved, another has arrived: the soil that Tamils defended with their lives, and in which their identity is supposedly rooted, faces a new and different type of threat.

“It is not climate change anymore,” Nadarajah Sriskandarajah, a professor at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, told me. “It is a climate emergency.” Like many small island developing countries, Sri Lanka is a paragon of climate injustice: it is not a major carbon emitter, yet it consistently ranks among the ten most at-risk countries according to the Global Climate Risk Index. Within Sri Lanka, a 2018 World Bank study identified the Northern and Northwestern Provinces as the top climate hotspots. Jaffna, Puttalam, Mannar and Kilinochchi, all considered part of the Tamil homeland, are the four districts most likely to be impacted by the climate crisis. And these war-affected regions – the sites of long-standing ethnic discrimination and state violence – are perhaps the least well-equipped to confront it.