Sea level rise may sink island nations
Island countries could soon drown underneath rising tides, but their people and their governments may endure
By Larry O'Hanlon | Discovery News | Feb 3, 2010
Even after rising tides engulf their lands, residents of island nations could still maintain their identity and their government "in exile." Getty Images
Sea level rise from anthropogenic global warming could erase some island states from the face of the Earth -- but those nations could survive even without land, say researchers.
Governments and people of lost islands could survive "in exile," build structures to mark their submerged territory, retain their status in the eyes of other states and await the day when their islands emerge again when global cooling drops sea levels.
The trouble is current international agreements, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, don't address the issue, said international law professor Rosemary Rayfuse of the University of New South Wales in Australia. Just what to do about the possibility of nations being lost, and how to do it, is very much on the frontiers of the legal thinking.
"From the international law perspective, it's fascinating," Rayfuse told Discovery News. "Ultimately, this is going to be a very serious problem."
According to the vast majority of scientific investigations, warming waters and the melting of polar and high-elevation ice worldwide will steadily raise sea levels. This will likely drive people off islands first by spoiling the fresh groundwater, which will kill most land plants and leave no potable water for humans and their livestock.
Low-lying island states like Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands and the Maldives are the most prominent nations threatened in this way.
"The biggest challenge is to preserve their nationality without a territory," said Lilian Yamamoto of Kanagawa University in Japan. "It is unlikely that they can still have a state without it."
Yamamoto is the lead author of a paper on the challenges facing island states in the latest issue of the journal Ocean & Coastal Management.
What seems likely, if no plans are laid to avoid it, is that people who are forced to leave their island states could become stateless. After settling in other countries, if permitted, the descendants of islanders might acquire the nationality of the countries where they were born, Yamamoto told Discovery News.
But if island states want to survive without their islands, they will need to explore new ways to do so, said Rayfuse. The first step is to establish and "grandfather-in" a legal baseline for their coastlines, in order to properly claim their Exclusive Economic Zone, in accordance with the UN Law of the Sea. After that, it gets a bit less clear.
One option that's been discussed is for other nations to provide territory upon which displaced islanders could settle. The problem with that, said Rayfuse, is that any land given would likely be of such poor quality that it would not be wanted.
Island states could also seek some kind of quasi-state status, like that of the European Union, which is not a state itself, but represents many states, Rayfuse explained.
"So these states should set up a trust fund to manage the resources (of their oceanic territories)," she said.
Another option is to get other nations to recognize the vanishing island states, despite their lost territories. However, there is a precedent for this.
The Sovereign Military Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta is an ancient religious order which ruled over the islands of Rhodes (1310–1528) and then Malta (1530–1798), until Napoleon kicked them out.
However, they have retained their status under international law, and have their own government which issues its own passports to this day.
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