ABSTRACT
French Polynesia is a group of 118 South Pacific islands, scattered across an oceanic zone approximately the size of Europe (5,500,000 km2), while the total land area of the archipelago (3,600 km2) is about half the size of Corsica. Many of these islands, in the Tuamotu and Gambier archipelagos, are atolls, with a maximum altitude of less than three metres, making them potentially prone to suffer from the global climate warming and related rising sea levels. French Polynesia is a very remote place: by plane, it takes almost 24 hours to travel from Paris, 8.5 hours from Los Angeles, and 12 hours from Tokyo.
