I will never forget the first time I saw Vepaia. She was 16, surrounded by other youngsters from the Pacific region, and waving a placard from onboard a small catamaran sailing along the turquoise sea. “We want climate justice”, they shouted. Climate justice! A cry for livelihood that contrasted with their evident youth. They came from countries most people wouldn’t be able to locate on a map: Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Vanuatu. Short names, but harboring immense tragedies. Tiny dots on a map of the Pacific Ocean, desperately issuing a most monumental plea: they wanted to continue to exist.

I have travelled to many places where the climate crisis is felt. But Vanuatu is not just feeling it, it is hurting. Here, climate change is not a report or a chart or a debate. It is the waves that every year consume a little bit more of their land, their memories, their lives.

One morning, accompanying Vepaia on a walk along the coast, I came to understand the intimate magnitude of the disaster. She pointed to where there were once homes, now abandoned. A few steps further to the right and the landscape revealed more of the past: a complete cemetery swallowed by high tide. An archipelago fighting for its present and future, while seeing its inheritance disappear.

“These tombs are my ancestors’”, she told me.

In reality, what the islanders fear, is that this same sea also ends up prophesizing their immediate future. Vepaia is not exaggerating when she talks about displacement and loss. In Vanuatu, and a good part of the Pacific, the sea level has risen almost twice as fast as the global average, says the Pacific Community and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). How can the endangered islanders defend themselves against such fast developments? How do you prepare a community for something that never lets up?

When I asked Vepaia what this signified for her, she replied with disarming clarity: “We are climate refugees. And it is unjust, because we had nothing to do with the cause.”

Vepaia expresses herself without anger or theatrical indignation. She simply comes over as someone articulating a fact, as someone who is paying a debt they did not contract. And she is not the only one.

We later visited a school that is no longer, at least physically. Sainte Jeanne d’Arc was wiped out by a cyclone. Another onslaught, same explanation. Unicef installed giant tents so the boys and girls could continue to study. Entering was like walking inside a human parenthesis. An improvised place for childhoods lacking a better safeguard. Head teacher Claudia Hoke confessed emotionally to me that every day she arrives at the “school”, it breaks her heart. “We need help. We need the world to come to our aid.” She also is neither dramatic nor manipulative. She is, however, tired, and feels powerless.

They are the ‘climate change canaries’, as some scientists call them, small nations whose fragility warns in advance of what rising sea levels are going to do to us. If they fall first, the rest aren’t as far behind as we’d like to think.

A shining resistance has also formed here, however: a truly honorable dignity. Vepaia shows me photos of her trip to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where she and other Pacific youngsters went to demand something unprecedented: that the planet’s highest court declare that nations are responsible for preventing, mitigating and repairing the damage associated with climate change. And they achieved it! The judgment not only recognized their demand, it landed the biggest polluters in front of a very uncomfortable mirror. The problem, though, is that the verdict does not oblige them to do anything, it only appeals to the moral conscience of those endangering the existence of others. Nevertheless, what the youngsters achieved evokes in me deep admiration.

While I look at Vepaia in these photos, with her traditional dress and upright posture, I think of the extraordinary actions of this adolescent who had never left her island before and yet was able to bring about a global legal precedent. From the edge of the world, she took on the most powerful countries. And she won.

In Vanuatu, the threat is not abstract. Here, climate change is a ruined home, an improvised classroom. While I recorded my piece in front of the camera, I said, almost without thinking: “Here, climate change is not the future. It is an erased past and a painful present.”  But I am not the one living with the doubt as to whether this island will continue to exist in 2050. It is Vepaia and thousands like her, young people who have inherited a crisis produced far from their shores and whose consequences are unleashing upon them with increasing vehemence.

As we continue our walk along the beach, Vepaia stops and looks out to sea, the turquoise, postcard waters that also threaten her.

“We are fighting because we still believe we have a future,” she says to me. Yes, she is fighting because she still believes in a future. What extraordinary maturity and resilience in an adolescent, I wonder. And in so many young people like her on these islands. Far removed from the cosmetic concerns others of her age have elsewhere, she and her friends face a quandary that is simultaneously existential and unjust. They shouldn’t have to worry about a problem they didn’t help to create, but they have no alternative.

This collective of youngsters today cling to hope, but it is a lucid hope, set in experience and not complacency. They do not ask for miracles, they demand coherence. They long for survival and, farm from referring to themselves as victims, have a true faith in the rest of us, the other inhabitants of the planet yet to experience the unbridled fury of the climate, that we will react before it is too late. They appeal to a wider conscience that us humans have in common, not as a sentimental gesture, but a shared responsibility, Of course, they seek empathy, but also action. And that’s why they are shouting. With all the force of those doing so from the edge of the world, where voices tend to go unheard. It is why they cross oceans to arrive in our capitals, carrying their placards and arguments with them. Because climate justice is not going to find them; they must leave their homes to go after that justice themselves.

The story of Vepaia is not just about Vepaia, it’s the story of Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands and dozens of island nations that are today paying a disproportionate price for a problem they did not cause.

The Pacific islanders are not asking for charity, they are demanding justice. The same word Vepaia brandished on the catamaran. Because if they lose, they will not be the only ones. They will just be the first. And that, like it or not, is the nature of the real dilemma we are facing.