Tuvalu's National Digital Twin — AI-Assisted Mapping of a Vanishing Coastline

In September 2023, Tuvalu's Department of Lands and Survey, working with the Office of the Prime Minister, joined the Pacific Community's Digital Earth Pacific programme and partnered with nonprofit PLACE and Esri to build a national digital twin of the 26 km² archipelago.

The programme aims to map Tuvalu's coastline and built environment to support climate adaptation and land administration, with the wider Digital Earth Pacific programme explicitly designed for replication across 27 Pacific countries and territories.

In early 2024, eVTOL drone flights over Funafuti captured over 1,000 geotagged images and nearly 40 ground control points across two atolls. Machine-learning feature extraction identified more than 200 solar-panel installations on existing housing stock, and change-detection comparing 2019 and 2024 imagery flagged considerable coastline change at the southern tip of the atoll. A true orthophoto was delivered within one week of data collection. Privacy safeguards included masking faces and vehicle plates in street-level imagery.

The data-collection phase was provided at no cost to the government through PLACE's partnership model. Fiji's Ministry of Lands is already an active user of the wider Digital Earth Pacific platform.

No source publishes cost-benefit, accuracy or adoption figures specific to Tuvalu, and coverage describes the current scope as limited to Funafuti and select atolls, with nationwide completion framed as a future goal rather than an accomplished fact.