WELLINGTON -- The president of the low-lying Pacific atoll nation of Kiribati said Thursday his country may already be doomed because of climate change.

President Anote Tong said communities had already been resettled and crops destroyed by seawater in some parts of the country, made up of 33 coral atolls straddling the equator.

Although scientists are still debating the extent of rising sea levels and their cause, Tong told a press conference marking World Environment Day that changes were obvious in his country of 92,000 people.

"I am not a scientist but what I know is that things are happening we did not experience in the past," Tong said.

"We may be beyond redemption, we may be at the point of no return where the emissions in the atmosphere will carry on to contribute to climate change to produce a sea-level change that in time our small low-lying islands will be submerged," he said.

"Villages that have been there over the decades, maybe a century, and now they have to be relocated."

"Where they have been living over the past few decades is no longer there, it is being eroded."

At international meetings others had argued that measures to combat climate change would hurt their countries' economic development.

"In frustration, I said, 'No, it's not an issue of economic growth, it's an issue of human survival.'"

Under the worst-case scenario, Kiribati would be submerged by the end of this century and its people would have to be resettled in other countries, he said.