For many years people have been acquainted with the word "refugee." Though it usually brings to mind wars, genocide and ethnic cleansing, more and more often it has been linked to climate change and natural disasters. We may now be entering the age of the "environmental refugee."

For the last 15 years, Shuichi Endo, 46, has been fighting a hard battle to protect a tiny nation from being wiped out by rising sea levels. Tuvalu is located in the South Pacific near Fiji. Its 10,000 inhabitants make it the second-smallest country population-wise. The nine island group that comprise this small archipelago — only 5 meters above the sea level at its highest point — faces the danger of being swallowed up by the ocean if sea levels continue to rise due to climate change.

Until his fateful encounter with the country, Endo used to work as an architect with a major company. "What I really wanted to do was to design environment-friendly buildings," he says. "Unfortunately, in the 1990s, the environment was the last thing big companies had in mind. That was very frustrating. Then in 1992, the first Earth Summit was held in Rio, and at that venue the name Tuvalu began to circulate. At the time, nobody had heard about these islands, so much so that I couldn't even find a map of the country in Japan.