Paradise nearly lost: The Bahamas facing existential rising ocean levels
As a journalist, there aren't many assignments more welcome than a trip to the Bahamas.
I came here expecting to find paradise and in many ways I did. We have watched turtles and lemon sharks basking in turquoise waters, admired the elegance of yellow-crowned night herons and shrunk from the huge turkey vultures swooping across the landscape.
But there is no escaping what this ocean nation has lost.
Don a snorkel and you will still see iridescent fish flashing between the coral.
But the rainbow colours of the reef are gone. Rising sea temperatures, the direct result of climate change, have bleached the coral, making it more susceptible to disease.
The reefs are a vital habitat for many fish species so it's not surprising that the islands' fishing community is being hard hit.
We meet Shervin Tate and his son Shervin Junior who come from generations of fisherman. They tell us how the warming ocean has forced them to head much further out to sea.
'You can see the decline - because you're not seeing a bunch of fish running up along the coast anymore. You got to go far out,' says Shervin Senior.
'And it costs you twice as much, because where you were going to spend $100 for fuel, now you spend it $200.'
He explains how the coral reefs, along with the mangroves that line the shore, are nature's own barrier against extreme weather events like storms and hurricanes. But when Hurricane Dorian hit in 2019, the strongest ever witnessed here, it destroyed more than a third of the mangrove forests on his island of Grand Bahama.
The forests are vital nurseries for young fish; so the Tates, like a number of environmentally-minded islanders we meet, give up their own time to restore them by planting new ones. When we launch our drone camera over the shoreline and see the vast empty mudflats where the mangroves once were, their backbreaking work looks like a drop in the ocean.
It would be easy to feel overwhelmed by the damage, which isn't limited to the ocean. The flood waters that rushed inland after Hurricane Dorian destroyed almost all of the island's pine forests. Thousands of trees that weren't blown over sat in seawater for days, killing their foliage. Now there are just bare trunks, reaching up to the clouds like tall black matchsticks - it's almost apocalyptic.
Reassuringly, nature is fighting back and the forest is beginning to recover. But the flooding may return before it can. Because the more frequent storms, caused by warming seas, aren't the only threat from the ocean.
Melting glacier ice, a world away from here in the Antarctic, is contributing to global sea levels rising and the Bahamas are one of the countries predicted to be hit hardest.
The islands are so flat they remind me of Holland - almost a third of the land lies less than half a metre above sea level and that's where a quarter of its population lives.
Over the next 25 years that level is predicted to rise by 32cm and by a whopping 82cm by the end of the century.
But if these islands are vulnerable, its people refuse to be. At Coral Vita, the world's first land based commercial coral farm, they are restoring the islands' damaged reefs. We watch scientists divide tiny fragments of coral, accelerating its growth by 50 times normal rates, finding strains more resilient to warming seas. But the reality is this is not just about sustainability but survival.
Abigail Alain is one of the young workers here and I ask her whether she can plan a future in the Bahamas, given the predictions around its future.
She takes a long breath before answering.
'I don't think so' she tells me.
'I'm willing to stay to the end but at the same time I'm not waiting to be killed.'
I'm impressed by how much more interested many islanders are in trying to generate solutions rather than sympathy - but if paradise is not quite lost here it's already on the edge.
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