A joint Anzac operation to get water to Tuvalu is underway, New Zealand's Foreign Minister Murray McCully says.
The Polynesian nation of nine atolls north of Fiji, home to 11,000, is suffering from a drought thanks to the La Nina metrological phenomenon that has left the central Pacific dry and relatively cooler.
The New Zealand territory of Tokelau and Kiribati and Samoa are also suffering.
Mr McCully said a Royal Australian Air Force Globemaster C17 will fly to Christchurch on Monday to pick up a large New Zealand Army desalination unit which will be flown to Samoa.
There it will be broken down and loaded aboard New Zealand C130 Hercules aircraft and flown north to Tuvalu's capital atoll, Funafuti.
An RNZAF flight earlier this week flew smaller desalination units directly to Funafuti.
"The advice is that more capacity is needed to relieve the acute water shortage and replenish stocks," he said.
An RNZAF flight will leave Whenuapai this afternoon to deliver an advanced party to Funafuti.
"At present the two operating desalination plants at Funafuti are producing a combined volume of 43,000 litres a day. The minimum requirement for the 5300 residents is 79,500 litres a day," said Mr McCully.
"The large Army desalination equipment can produce a good volume. It will help ease the critical shortage and should provide a sufficient buffer if the dry period continues as expected," he said.
On Wednesday, a C130 flight took water containers to American Samoa to meet met with the US Coastguard buoy tender cutter Walnut.
It is now enroute to the three Tokelau atolls which have neither airports nor harbours.
Tuvalu's Funafuti has long been a poster-atoll for fears of sea level rise, but paradoxically during La Nina events the sea level around the island falls.
Funafuti's sinking and water problems today are a combination of World War II, the Internet and Tuvaluans' anxiety to join the world.
The atolls were happily remote through the first half of the 20th century, until war brought Imperial Japanese forces to Tarawa, now the capital of Kiribati, where they began building an airstrip.
US Marine Corps, ordered to seize Tarawa, secretly set up in Funafuti, 660km to the south, and began work on their own airstrip. They excavated 10 "borrow pits" in the atoll to create the runway. The pits went below sea level, permanently damaging the fresh-water lens and breaching the atoll's thin defences against the Pacific.
Tuvalu made a lot of money in the late 1990s off selling its Dot TV Internet suffix.
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They used a big chunk of the money on tar-sealing the nearly 20km of roads on Funafuti.
However, tar-sealed roads and the runway have no proper drainage, and a United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification study found, the total area of vegetation removed during the road construction project amounted to "31.73 per cent of the total land area of Tuvalu".
This has reduced vegetation and severely damaged the fresh water lens as water off the tar sealed roads now runs straight into the sea.
-Fairfax NZ
http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/south-pacific/5750210/Water-airlift-launched-for-Tuvalu
