When speaking of global warming much is made of fears that rising sea levels will swallow island nations.
However, a study of Pacific Islands over the past 60 years shows many are fighting back against climate change by actually increasing in land area.
The study offers hope to thousands of low-lying Pacific islands, whose fate has been one of the most pressing issues for policy-makers dealing with the ramifications of climate change.
Aerial photographs and high resolution satellite images of 27 islands taken since the 1950s found only four islands had decreased in land area - despite sea level rises of about 12cm - and most of those were uninhabited.
The studies have shown that, in tiny Tuvalu, the low-lying group whose fate transfixed the world's media at the Copenhagen climate conference last year, seven islands grew. This study did not include Tuvalu's most populous island.
In Kiribati, the three most populous islands, Betio, Bairiki and Nanikai, each grew between 12.5 and 30 per cent over 60 years.
Paul Kench of Auckland University's School of Environment, who co-authored the study with Fiji's Arthur Webb, said the study suggested the islands had a natural ability to respond to rising seas by accumulating coral debris from the reefs that typically surround them.
"It has long been thought that as the sea level goes up, islands will sit there and drown. But they won't," he said in an article published in New Scientist magazine.
For decades islanders had feared their only escape from rising seas would be to move to Australia or New Zealand but this study by the Auckland University School of Environment offers hope to thousands of low-lying Pacific islands, whose fate has been one of the most pressing issues for policy-makers dealing with the ramifications of climate change.
"What we are saying to island-dwellers is that now there is a slightly better prognosis, that you will have land," Dr Kench said. But he added: "We are not trying to undersell the fact that you have quite serious environmental challenges ahead of you."