Sea level rise and increasingly extreme weather are among the most visible impacts of climate change. Coastal communities around Massachusetts are facing skyrocketing insurance rates, and damage to homes and infrastructure. But for the residents of some small island nations, climate change poses a threat to human rights and the very existence of their countries.
The Republic of Kiribati is a collection of 33 small islands in the Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Australia and Hawaii.
A promotional video from the country’s tourism office features white sandy beaches, blue-green ocean, and islanders singing traditional music.
But some residents of Kiribati are singing a different tune. Last year, a competition for best song about climate change yielded a winner with the refrain “The angry sea will kill us all.” The situation is similar on the Marshall Islands just to the north. Marshallese Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tony deBrum, says it’s heartbreaking to watch young people grow up fearing the ocean.
“We grew along the sides of the ocean, as I said, the edge of the sea, and there was high tide, we jumped in the water because we had a great time jumping in the high tides. Now, when the high tides come, our grandchildren run away from the shore.”
Two meters – six feet – of sea level rise is all it would take to erase Kiribati and other low-lying island nations from the map. That would be unprecedented, says Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.
Countries have disappeared all the time because of military and diplomatic actions but there is no precedent in history for a country physically disappearing.
The good news is, we’re unlikely to see that much sea rise this century. The bad news, Storlazzi says, is that repeated storm flooding will render atoll islands uninhabitable long before they’re submerged.
“When they have these over wash events, it can contaminate the fresh water lens and thus make the water undrinkable for months to years at a time, depending on the rainfall,” says Storlazzi.
Kiribati officials have already begun planning for the relocation of the nation’s 100,000 residents. Last year, Kiribati bought nearly 6,000 acres of land in Fiji. Kiribati President Anote Tong says he hopes they won’t have to use it anytime soon.
“But I think it’s just insurance,” says Tong. “It’s an investment. But what we’d like to say is that we’ve had an invitation from the Fiji government to accommodate people when and if it becomes necessary.”
But John Knox, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment, says that just finding a new place to live isn’t good enough.
“If you can’t live on your own territory and your own land, then that impacts your ability to enjoy basically your entire spectrum of human rights, severely, if not destroyed.”
What’s more, if nobody lives on the islands of Kiribati, it poses a threat to the nation’s standing under international law.
“Statehood requires four thing: Land, a population, a government, and international recognition. If any one of those is absent in theory under international law, it is no longer a state,” says Michael Gerrard.
In other words, no people, no nation. Gerrard says a few dozen permanent inhabitants could maintain a nation’s legal status and he argues island states face more pressing problems. Still, he says legal scholars are considering the possibility that island nations may be abandoned or submerged.
There is now talk of a new species called an ex-situ state, a state that would exist outside the territory where it had previously existed. But that has never happened and it would require a new species of international law.
President Anote Tong says that’s exactly what the international legal community should be considering, but he hopes a climate agreement can be reached to avert the need.
Kiribati and the Marshall Islands are what’s known as atoll islands – thin strips of sandy land that sit upon the spines of coral reefs. Geologist and oceanographer Curt Storlazzi of the U.S. Geological Survey says that makes them particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
