Travellers pitch up caravans in Birmingham parks near playground and school as council battle against illegal encampments continues
Around 17 caravans and other vehicles have parked up at Parkdale Park, just off Longbridge Lane in West Heath, near Longbridge.
The temporary camp surrounds a basketball court and is yards from Albert Bradbeer Primary School.
Neighbours said the group arrived at the end of the Easter holidays.
The convoy was not as big as last year when travellers were pictured at the same site last June.
Up to 30 caravans and vehicles were spotted at the park for a number of days.
Another group of travellers have also set up a camp in one of the city's best-loved parks.
Around a dozen caravans and cars were on fields near the play area at the historic Kings Heath Park.
The park, which covers 35 acres, features a house dating back to 1832, conservatory and a refurbished pool area as well as a tea room, bowling green, plant nursery and two playgrounds.
The large convoy of vehicles was said to have driven onto the land over the weekend.
The council said there were alternative sites for travellers in the city.
A spokesman said: 'Birmingham City Council is committed to actively protecting its land and will take steps to recover this land where unauthorised encampments encroach upon it.
'The council has useable transit sites and plots for use by the Gypsy, Roma and Traveller community - which is in line with Government policy.
'Details of the Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Assessment carried out and updated in 2019 can be found on our website.'
Last month, dozens of vehicles and trailers parked-up on playing fields at nearby Swanshurst Park, in Birmingham just weeks after their last visit - prompting a local group to warn people to stay away.
Friends of Swanshurst Park, a volunteer group with an interest in caring and advocating for the park, often tend to a wildflower meadow in the area.
It said after the vehicles turned up at the end of March: 'We think it best if members of the public do not put themselves in a position in which they feel uncomfortable by working on the wildflower patch while the travellers are in close proximity.
'The notice will be served as soon as possible for them to leave but realistically, they will not be gone before the end of the week.'
The travellers also occupied the park in May and October last year forcing the council to step in again to remove them.
The council said it would liaise with communities and businesses who may be impacted by plans to introduce up to 15 temporary sites for travellers.
A pilot programme, set to begin in the summer, could see 'negotiated stopping' sites made available and would involve unused pieces of land.
They typically provide hard standing for holding caravans, a secure boundary and basic sanitary provision, while some also provide electricity.
But due to factors such as repeated vandalism and unauthorised encampments, the council's two operational transit sites have often been closed.
This comes as the number of 'illegal' traveller sites being set up across the UK is on the rise with local councils increasingly unable to remove them, a planning enforcement officer has claimed.
New planning policy announced by Labour housing secretary Angela Rayner in December will force councils to release green belt land for travellers to create permanent encampments if there is an 'unmet need'.
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I was told that a few houses had set up Starlink, Elon Musk's satellite internet connection, but it is far out of the financial reach of most locals. In a bid to counter China's overtures in the region, Japan, Australia and Taiwan, led by the United States, are working out a plan to connect several Pacific states with an undersea internet cable, but completion is years away. 'First we will have to bring the internet,' Kofe told me. 'It is not something that will happen overnight.' In 2023, the government of Tuvalu amended its constitution to note that 'the state of Tuvalu … shall remain in perpetuity in the future', irrespective 'of climate change or other causes resulting in loss to the physical territory'. Since then, Tuvalu has managed to get more than a dozen bilateral partners, including New Zealand and Australia, to formally acknowledge its permanent statehood. The idea has unanimous appeal, and acceptance, across the region, where several other countries' boundaries are similarly threatened by the climate crisis. In international law, a state is traditionally defined as an entity with four attributes: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to form relationships with other states. Submersion means Tuvalu will fail to meet the first two criteria. And with this, come other tricky questions. The sale of fishing licences contributes almost half of Tuvalu's national income – would an underwater but online Tuvalu retain these territorial rights over maritime territory? The government has taken steps, by amending its constitution and securing bilateral agreements, to secure its future sovereignty over the waters – but this may have far-reaching implications for international law, and the commonly understood meaning of statehood itself. 'Statehood is a fiction, a legal fiction that we came up with,' says Sumudu Atapattu, the director of the Global Legal Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison law school. In this century, as the climate crisis will scramble the commonly understood meanings of nationhood and sovereignty, the world is going to have to come up with, in Atapattu's words, 'a new fiction'. Digital statehood is an attempt at this redefinition, but at this stage the details are unknown. Recent bilateral agreements with New Zealand and Australia provide residential visas to a few hundred Tuvaluans each year to move to those countries, but a far greater number of locals aspire to emigrate than the 355 who receive these visas every year. In June, when applications opened for the first time for 280 Australian visas to be allocated to Tuvaluans, more than 8,000 people applied. But at the current rate, it will take more than 30 years for everyone to leave Tuvalu, by which time Funafuti, according to government estimates, might be underwater. Grace Malie grew up in Fongafale. For high school she moved to Vaitupu, the largest atoll of Tuvalu, where just over 1,000 people live. Students from all the other islands attend Motufoua secondary school while living with local families in Vaitupu. Malie told me she learned the local dances, faatele in Tuvaluan, from all the eight inhabited islands of Tuvalu, each of which has distinct linguistic dialects and customs. Later, she went to study at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, moved back to Fongafale, and worked briefly as an assistant to Kofe. In 2023, at the age of 24, Malie visited Cop28 in Dubai as a youth delegate. 'I find it kind of hard to accept when I ask people where they are from, and they say, 'New York', and I say, 'The big city!'' she told me. 'But when I say, 'I'm from Tuvalu', they're like, 'Where?', and I say, 'In the Pacific', and they're like, 'Where?', then I say, 'You know Australia? Hawaii? Yeah. Somewhere in between there.'' Malie said that the people she was talking to probably couldn't even imagine what Tuvalu looks like. Malie appreciated how Kofe's speeches were changing that. But she was also disturbed by the image of the virtual islet where Kofe was standing in the 2022 video. 'The visuals are for people who are not living here to be able to see, and for us, it is like …' Without finishing that sentence, Malie popped her eyes and retreated into her chair behind outstretched hands. Was it scary to watch? I asked. 'Yes,' Malie said. 'It brought the reality closer to home.' I met Malie shortly after she had returned from Cop28 with her friend Tamala Pita, who was sitting with us at the restaurant of Filamona Lodge. As youth delegates, Malie and Pita told me, it was exhausting to talk about erosion, submersion, migration and weave it together with their personal experiences. 'It was emotional,' Malie said. 'You are talking about losing your home to these strangers, and you think about what you are saying, and you start crying, it is just emotionally draining.' Both Malie and Pita broke down several times during the nine days in Dubai; they consoled each other and were consoled by youth delegates from other developing nations. Both were stunned by the excessive, needless use of indoor lighting and air-conditioning. Pita said: 'There were lights on the floor of the metro station! I was like, do you really need that?' Whenever Malie is away, she is always thinking of returning. I asked her what she misses when she is travelling. 'Ohh,' she said, letting her shoulders droop. Then, with a burst of energy: 'Everything! Being able to sleep with your door open, the wind coming into the house, there is no homelessness here, there is no stress.' Many houses in Tuvalu have openings on all sides, with sloping roofs made of thatch or corrugated iron. Generally, the house is one big hall, where the family sleeps on mattresses on the floor. The bedding is rolled up and put in a corner in the morning, and the hall becomes the living room. What is it like to consider, I asked Malie, that Tuvalu might become uninhabitable in her lifetime. 'We need to convey that possibility, but we also want to try to make sure that doesn't actually happen to us,' she said. It is a difficult balance. Tuvalu is walking a fine line: to get the attention of the world, it must publicise its own disappearance, while doing everything it can to survive. The government of Tuvalu is reclaiming land on the lagoon side, with funds from the UN. That gives Malie hope. So does her religious faith. 'We always have journalists coming up and talking about these scientific facts, but then we have to remain true to our fight and our cause and our people, and we have remained resilient and remained hopeful,' she told me. 'We've said this so many times, but the motto of Tuvalu is 'Tuvalu mo te Atua', which means, Tuvalu with God.' Until recently, Tuvalu was best known for its fortuitous top-level domain – .tv. In 1995, a government office in Fongafale received a fax, informing them that Tuvalu's country code on the world wide web had been assigned. The government officials gathered around the fax, one recalled in 2019, and wondered: 'What the hell is this internet thing?' Before long, video platforms wanted URLs ending in .tv, and Tuvalu cashed in. Every streaming company running a website address that ends in .tv, from Amazon to Apple to Hulu to Twitch, pays a licensing fee. Last year, it contributed more than $10m to the country's $80m revenue. Besides the licences for tuna fishing in its territorial waters, which amount to about $35m, .tv is Tuvalu's second-largest source of income. Before it became independent in 1978, Tuvalu had been under British rule for almost a century. When independence was looming, it was important to Tuvaluans to not be merged with the Gilbert islands, which became Kiribati. Tito Isala, a septuagenarian with curly white hair, who was part of the committee that negotiated the terms of independence in the 1970s and lived with his wife a few houses down the road from my lodge, told me that Kiribati, which has a surface area of 300 sq miles, would have 'swallowed little Tuvalu'. They decided to become an independent country comprising nine atolls, eight of which were inhabited, and adopted the name Tuvalu, which in Tuvaluan means eight standing together. Today, Fongafale, on its less than one sq mile of land, houses more than 6,000 people, and offers them few services. There was no ATM in the country until a few months ago. There are no barbershops; people cut their own hair or wait till their next visit to Fiji. A small garden run by a Taiwanese aid agency is the only source of fresh produce. A bag of vegetables can be bought once or twice a week, at $13 each. Locals catch fish in the lagoon, which is the only source of fresh meat in the country besides pork; neither is available in plenty. The population is sustained by imported food. A supermarket, a warehouse really, near the north end of the airstrip, accounts for more than 70% of the country's imports. It sells butter manufactured in California, Japanese washing machines, and sofas of unspecified origins; this is also where everyone buys vegetables, grain and meat. Sacks of rice are piled in one corner. Imported, processed food has disturbed the diet. A quarter of Tuvalu's population has diabetes. Tuvalu, according to the UN, is among the world's least-developed countries. On the northern end of Fongafale, just before the point where Kofe made his famous address, there is a huge garbage dump – among the tallest structures on the island – which sometimes combusts spontaneously. On the southern end is a rusted warship, and the stony beach is covered in broken glass and plastic bottles, torn clothes and washed-up Blundstone boots. People who live here feel deeply connected to the place, but even they concede that to see how beautiful Tuvalu is, one must get out of Fongafale, and go to the outer islands. 'Too many people live here, that's the problem,' Lotoala, the motel owner, said to me. One evening in the balcony next to my room, I asked Lotoala what he thought about the threat posed by the climate crisis to Tuvalu. 'Do you mean that the islands might drown?' he asked me. When I said yes, he responded: 'I don't think it will happen.' With a boyish, confessional smile, he added: 'People don't like you when you say that. But I don't think it will happen.' He knew that when the tides run high, around March every year, water seeps through the ground in Fongafale. 'But it only happens at that one place,' he said. 'It has been happening there since I was a kid.' Lotoala believes that it will be 'hundreds' of years before the islands are fully submerged, but he knows that it will become increasingly difficult to continue to live here. 'This is what I tell my children: you have to think about moving, about being flexible, you have to have that mindset, you should not get stuck here.' The idea of submersion is not convincing to all the locals. They have seen the erosion of Fongafale before their eyes and are acutely aware of the changing climate, but at the same time, they have also seen atolls grow and gain ground. Tito Isala dismissed all talk of a digital future with a wave of his hand: 'It is defeatist, hopeless.' Nor was he excited about the idea of Tuvaluans settling on foreign shores. 'We do not want to relocate,' he said. 'Where are we going to go? New Zealand?' Isala said. 'How do they treat the Māori?' He gave me another hypothetical. 'America? Who wants to deal with their Trumps and Bidens?' Isala opened an iron chest in his living room and pulled out a large, laminated, navigational map of Funafuti. He unrolled it on the top of the trunk. 'The islets make the shape of a human face in profile; we are here, at the back of the head,' he said, pointing to Fongafale. 'Here we have lost land.' Then he pointed to the chin on the map, at an islet of Funafuti called Motuloa. 'Motuloa has grown its landmass,' Isala said. The local understanding of the adaptability of the atolls is backed up by some scientific data. When Malie had told me submersion 'is a possibility', she wasn't simply dismissing the projections of sea level rise by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. 'The signs are very clear, especially from the IPCC reports,' Malie said. 'But then you have other science, which is uncertain, which says it [submersion] might happen, it might not happen.' This 'other science' is mainly based on the work of Paul Kench, a coastal geomorphologist who has studied shoreline changes in the Maldives, Fiji, the Marshall Islands, the Great Barrier Reef, Kiribati and Tuvalu. Kench studied coastal changes and physical geography of islands at the University of Auckland, then did his PhD at the University of New South Wales, where his dissertation was on atolls in the Indian Ocean. When we spoke on Zoom, Kench was in Singapore, where he is a professor in the department of geography at the National University. Kench has amassed a significant body of work to show that rising sea level does not necessarily mean the submersion of low-lying atolls. The projections of Tuvalu's disappearance assume that atoll islands are static structures. Kench's work shows that they are instead dynamic entities that are constantly transforming themselves, even gaining landmass. Using data from aerial images going back to the second world war, Kench showed that in the past four decades, while sea level rose in Tuvalu twice as fast the global average, total land area slightly increased, by 2.9%. The greatest gains were made by the islands of Vaitupu and Nanumaga. Fongafale itself had gained 4.6 hectares in the past four decades, even as the locals were watching both tips of the islet being eroded before their eyes. In 2018, Kench published another paper with two other researchers, which is the most comprehensive analysis of Tuvalu's coastal changes. The paper showed that 73 of the 101 islets analysed had accreted surface area amounting to 80.7 hectares. The remaining 28 had eroded, losing 7.24 hectares in total. These changes happen through a combination of factors. The reef is continuing to produce sediment, Kench told me, and the waves are continuing to deposit crusts of reef that break away from the vast rim. Kench's work has been used by conservative thinktanks and climate change deniers – or what Kench refers to as 'that idiotic part of society' – to raise doubts about sea level rise. 'You can't control it,' Kench said, with the weariness of a man who has for years been dealing with such misinformation. 'You can't control what those maniacs do.' Kench does not dispute that sea levels are rising and that this is a result of human-made climate breakdown. But he maintains that when it comes to atoll islands, 'a lot of the gloom and doom scenarios are based on emotive, or intuitive, reasoning.' When I asked Kofe about Kench's work, he said that the government finds it 'inconclusive'. Kench can appreciate the tricky spot Tuvalu finds itself in, but he feels his work could have been used differently. 'We got a lot of criticism,' he said, 'because it didn't really show what they wanted it to.' The government of Tuvalu accused him, Kench told me, 'of undermining Tuvalu's international negotiations'. He was surprised by the vehemence of the reaction. 'They could have said, 'We are going be living here in our country, but our lands are changing around us in ways that we are only starting to understand, and we are going to need a lot of help.'' But that does not make for, Kench admitted, 'a sexy headline'. Kench emphasised to me that he was not an expert on habitability. 'Land is only one part of that metric,' he told me. 'I stick to my lane.' But he is astonished by how little attention has been given to the physical islands amid the rising sea. 'Over the last 30 years, agencies have been very happy to spend hundreds of millions [of dollars] in measuring sea level rise,' Kench said. 'But they've spent zero on actually measuring the thing that they keep saying is going to disappear because of sea level rise.' I went to see Fualifeke, a tiny islet at the top of the forehead on Isala's map, which has gone through a strange mutation over the past few decades. While its shore had been severely eroded on the lagoon side, it had gained almost the same amount of ground on the sea side. Getting to the outer islets is not easy. There are no boats waiting in the lagoon to ferry you about. A day before the trip, I had to find someone with a boat and then hope for good weather. Lotoala set it up. But on the day we were supposed to leave, he told me that though we had the boat, the man who had promised to take us couldn't be found. We decided to go for a few hours anyway. It was a burning hot afternoon, though the temperature was only 30C. It was not the sticky heat of New Delhi, where I lived for a decade in summer temperatures of over 40C, but equally sapping. Sun shone in a blue sky; clouds streaked the horizon. We poured water on the aluminium surface of the boat for a few minutes before sitting down. There was no padding on the seats, and the bare surface would have scalded the skin. When we were done dousing, Lotoala sat on the bow, his cousin at the stern. I was joined in the middle by the students from Hong Kong and Krishna, the Indian sexologist. The lagoon water was comparatively placid, but our small boat was soon seesawing as it moved across patches of emerald and cobalt water. When frigate birds flew by the boat, my co-passengers hooted with excitement. When we reached the islet after about half an hour, there was one house, a few hundred coconut trees and a dazzling bank made up of what looked like white gravel, but turned out to be tiny, pearly bits of coral reef. We swam in some shallow patches of water but only for a few minutes. The heat was exhausting. I saw the Hong Kong students clamber out of the warm water, squinting. The bleached reef was impossible to stand on without footwear. We all walked into the trees to find sand and shade. Everyone took long breaths and drank from a tank that collected rainwater. Lotoala climbed a sloping trunk with a big knife and tossed down green coconuts. Each of us had many coconuts. We poured cool, sweet water into our mouths, then cut them open to scrape out the flesh inside. We sat down, facing the sea, and Lotoala happily pointed out where the shape of the island had changed. He said that the area covered by chip stones in front of us was not there until a few years ago. 'It just happens,' he said, enjoying the incomprehension on my face. The previous day, we had talked about the projections of Tuvalu's submersion: 'I don't know if it will,' he said. 'You can never be sure about nature.' On our way back, no one spoke a word, the heat had drained us. I could easily recognise Fongafale from miles away, with a dark trail of smoke rising from the garbage dump, into the blue sky. When we came back to the lodge, Lotoala told me that when he was growing up, the heat wasn't this bad. He was wagging his finger at the airstrip, which was baking under the sun without a patch of shade. 'We used to play there in the afternoons.' The heat is worse on Fongafale than perhaps any other islet of Funafuti, he said, primarily because of the airstrip: no other atoll has so great an area of asphalt exposed to the sun. Everyone complains passionately about the rising temperature. When I took a walk one afternoon, the heat pinned me down within minutes and seemed to rise out of the ground. The sun was directly above, shadows were small, and Fongafale had the look of a ghost town. People had receded indoors. Hapless tourists stood by the side of the road waving at the occasional passing moped, requesting a lift to their accommodation. When I crossed the white-hot airstrip, where Lotoala used to kick a football at this hour, I wondered if the rubber soles of my sandals were sticking to the ground. In the restaurant at the lodge, Lotoala found me gulping down water and sweating profusely. He laughed heartily when I explained, and said: 'Boss, you do not take a walk at 2pm!' The heat, Lotoala believes, might make it impossible to live in Funafuti long before water takes over the land. His mother, sitting nearby, nodded in agreement. I had arrived in Tuvalu at the time of a national election, hoping to find the usual ferment around the time of voting. But the election means a lull in Fongafale. The ferry to the outer islands wasn't running, the government building was empty, and there were no rallies or speeches. Tuvalu has no political parties. The cabinet is made up of two representatives from each of the eight inhabited islands, who vote for a prime minister among them. All candidates had returned to the islands, and the sofas in the lobby of the government building, which has decent internet, were occupied by kids spending their afternoons playing games on their smartphones. While voting was ongoing at different community halls in Fongafale, a group of young men were downing cans of Filipino beer in a yard by a small house. I joined them. They were a boisterous bunch, who had attended high school or university in New Zealand and Australia. When I told them I was from India, they wanted to know how to pronounce the names of some Indian cricketers who had recently toured Auckland and Sydney. It delighted them that I could name the cricket grounds in those cities; one of them, who had studied in Brisbane, broke out in a little dance when I said: 'the Gabba!' With glazed eyes, they told me about the tall buildings, the glittering streets, the nightlife. Everything about those cities gladdened them and they spoke of their time there with longing and excitement. They wanted to go back, but they weren't sure how. Unlike Lotoala, who runs his own lodge, or Grace, who works with the government, these men, like many others in Tuvalu, hear the siren song of the great cities of Oceania, which present them with opportunities for a life that is not accessible to them in Fongafale. This yearning exhibits itself in the thousands of people who apply each year for the Pacific Access Category visa which has granted 75 Tuvaluans residential rights in New Zealand each year since 2019. In 2023, Tuvalu signed the Falepili Union treaty with Australia, which stipulated 'a special human mobility pathway for citizens of Tuvalu' to migrate to Australia and millions of dollars in aid; in exchange, Tuvalu must consult on defence and security matters before engaging with other nations. When signed, in November 2023, the treaty was seen as an overture by the United States to counter China's investments in the Pacific states, like Vanuatu. But the part of the treaty that most concerned locals was that Australia will award 280 Tuvaluans residential visas every year through a ballot system, and the beneficiaries will receive the same health, education, housing, and employment rights enjoyed by Australian citizens. Additionally, Tuvaluans will retain the ability to return to their home country. It has been publicised as a 'climate visa' by the international press, but the reasons for the widespread appeal of immigration are also economic. When I called Lotoala in August, he told me that he wasn't among the Tuvaluans who had applied for the Australian visa, but he wasn't surprised that every third person in Tuvalu wants to 'have this opportunity'. 'I have a business,' he told me. 'I can work here and feed my family and live a comfortable life. But maybe 1% of people here, 100 families, can afford such a life. What we earn is not what normal people earn. Most people have no way to make money. Most work you can find pays A$5 per hour.' Lotoala mentioned that over the past months, tourists from the US and Europe have expressed to him their shock at the prices of daily essentials in the shops. 'Even we feel the pressure every now and then,' he added. 'Life here can get very tough.' Lotoala said that more and more people are feeling 'stuck' in Tuvalu. Moving to Australia, or New Zealand for that matter, seems like a way out. 'If I didn't have a business, I'd take my family to Australia, find a job and level up from there,' he said. 'It is like a new opportunity, to build a new life.' Listen to our podcasts here and sign up to the long read weekly email here.
