In 2013, President Tong spoke of climate-change induced sea level rise as "inevitable". "For our people to survive, then they will have to migrate. Either we can wait for the time when we have to move people en masse or we can prepare them—beginning from now ..." In New York in 2014, per ''The New Yorker'', President Tong told ''The New York Times'' that "according to the projections, within this century, the water will be higher than the highest point in our lands". In 2014, President Tong finalised the purchase of a  stretch of land on Vanua Levu, one of the larger Fiji islands, 2,000 km away. A move described by Tong as an "absolute necessity" should the nation be completely submerged under water.