 I'm Christina from Uproxx and I came to the beautiful island nation of Palao to experience one of the few untouched countries on Earth. I quickly and tragically discovered most people may never get the chance to see it. The sad reality is they could be underwater in mere decades. It's a remote island nation of 20,000 people and hundreds of rock islands. Palao is quite unique because of its geographical isolation. It sits on a ridge where hundreds and hundreds of miles from the closest large land mass, whether it be Indonesia or the Philippines. Diving here is world-class. A lot of people rate it best in the world. The water was super clear, it was amazing, it was like a space walk. Coral here is some of the healthiest in the world, the amount of coral. Hundreds and hundreds of sharks. Different species of fish, it's like the highest anywhere in the world that you can go. Of all the places I've traveled to, this is by far the most beautiful, but Palao is in trouble. We are living on the front line of climate change. The president of Palao has been one of the pioneers when it comes to fighting climate change, so we sat down with him to find out why it was so important to him to act. Sea level rise is already destroying our low-lying atolls and our crops, our home land. The chemistry of the ocean is changing. Weather patterns here are getting pretty crazy. Palao rarely even saw typhoons at all, but in just two years, two super typhoons have hit. And it just decimated the reefs on the east side. What used to be some of the most pristine and spectacular reefs have just gone. People have this apathetic feeling that we're worried about it when the time comes, but actually it's already too late to just talk about it. Our children will not inherit the same world that we grew up in. It's changed, but I think the question now is, can we create a world for them that is habitable? It's not a matter of whether we believe it or not, it's happening. And of course we don't want to leave, this is our homeland. Rising waters around the globe have already swallowed up other Pacific islands, forcing residents there to flee. When we think about that possibility happening to us, it scares us. This eco-minded community is single-handedly doing more to fight global warming than the US, the country 17,000 times its size and population. Palao has done a lot and has a long established history of preserving their marine environments, going back hundreds, even thousands of years. So they're really at the forefront of conservation, if you will, for the oceans. Palao has decided to take a step forward and create a marine sanctuary with our entire exclusive economic zone. They've also established a no-fishing zone in 80% of their water, protecting an area larger than the state of California. Climate change is going to affect everyone, not just the ocean. We're going to see different weather patterns, we're going to see longer warm periods, a melting of the glaciers, we're going to see species disappear. What we hope is that the world will take notice and make similar commitments. We have to be more proactive, we have to deal with it as a global community. Because only then can we address it. Some say we've already gone over the tipping point, some say that we can slow the rate of change down and the Paris agreements and everything that have recently happened. We have to try it, we don't try. It's our, my children, it's your children, it's the children of the future that are going to feel all the impacts of it. For more information on how you can get involved in preserving our oceans, visit Nat Geo's Pristine Seas Project and Uproxx.com.