At the start of November 2021, world leaders gathered in the Scottish city of Glasgow
for the 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference at the Parties, COP26.
But while climate change is an issue that affects every country on the planet,
for one group of states present at the summit the stakes couldn't be higher.
Rising sea levels threatened to wipe them off the map.
However, with a real fear that it may now be too late to stop the damage,
the question is what, if anything, can be done to save them?
Hello and welcome. If you're new to the channel, my name is James Ker-Lindsay and here I take an
informed look at international relations, conflicts and the origins of countries.
It's a fundamental premise of international law that the states can only exist with territory.
It is, after all, one of the four key elements of statehood alongside a settled population,
governance, and the ability to enter relations with other states.
Put simply, 'no land, no country'.
But what happens if a state loses its territory?
Not in a political sense, for example through invasion and occupation,
but in a very real physical sense.
In truth, no one quite knows. It's never happened. Or, at least,
it's never happened in the modern era.
However, for a small group of low-lying island states around the world
this is now becoming a very real question.
Rising sea waters threaten their existence.
For them, climate change isn't just a major challenge it's an existential threat.
Unless the tide is turned, quite literally,
these sinking states - sometimes also known as Atlantis or Drowning States - will cease
to exist as independent sovereign entities in the international system.
So, can they be saved? And what happens if they can't?
Climate change is now generally understood to pose a threat to every country on the planet.
In some cases, the challenge comes from higher temperatures, drought and desertification.
Elsewhere, more severe storms and flooding caused by rising sea levels pose the key risk.
Already, countries such as Bangladesh
and even the United States are seeing the effects on low-lying coastal regions.
And it's a situation that will certainly get worse.
According to recent estimates, under a best-case scenario climate change is
likely to see sea levels rise by a third of a meter by the end of the century.
Under the most pessimistic projections, they could rise by anything up to two and a half meters.
For four countries in particular
the effects of rising sea waters will be nothing less than catastrophic.
These are the three Pacific island states of Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, and Tuvalu,
and the Maldives - an archipelago of almost 1 200 islands lying in the Indian Ocean.
Although they are some of the smallest countries in the world in terms of inhabitants,
they nevertheless represent a combined population of around 600 000 people.
Crucially, all four are extremely low lying.
Indeed their average elevation is less than two meters, or six and a half feet, above sea level.
With an average elevation of just 1.6 meters, the Maldives, the most populous of the four states,
is in fact the world's lowest lying country.
This obviously puts them all firmly within the range of best and worst case scenario estimates.
But the situation is even more stark than these figures might suggest.
For most of them, a rise in the sea level of less than a metre
would effectively make most of their territory uninhabitable.
In the face of this threat to their very existence,
these countries have been desperately sounding the alarm for the past two decades.
One particularly high profile effort came in 2009 when the Maldives government held a
meeting underwater to highlight the threat the country faced.
And the pleas for help continue.
At the most recent annual plenary of the UN General Assembly, held in September 2021,
the leaders of all four countries again raised the fundamental threat
global climate change and rising sea levels posed to their states and inhabitants.
But while there are growing efforts to address climate change,
with waters rising at the pace they are there's now a real fear that it could well be impossible
to halt the damage before it goes too far and makes these island states uninhabitable.
This naturally raises the question of what, if anything,
can be done to prevent the extinction of these countries.
So far, there have been four broad proposals put forward.
The first approach is to focus on preserving the land that still exists.
Most obviously, this means shoring up the sea defences.
While this is already happening, it isn't always possible or effective.
Many islands have already been lost and many more are likely to follow.
To this end, a far more radical approach has been to build elevated artificial islands.
The Maldives is leading the way on this.
The flagship project is the City of Hope, which is being constructed on a
four square kilometre artificial island close to the country's capital, Malé.
Able to house up to 240,000 people,
it's surrounded by three meter high fortifications to keep out the rising waters.
But while this innovative project may yet allow the country to remain in existence for others this
may not be a realistic option, especially given the vast expense of such projects.
As a last resort, some have suggested
that some sort of placeholder, such as a lighthouse, could be built.
However, this would hardly seem to fit the definition of statehood.
This brings us to the second option being explored: the acquisition of land elsewhere.
This would be used to settle the population of the
country and has already been openly suggested by several of the states.
For example, Kiribati purchased land in Fiji, which is currently used for farming.
While it seems like a potential solution, it carries several significant problems.
For a start, while a country may be willing to sell land to other states,
it's not going to allow that state to assume sovereignty over the purchased territory.
Nor is it going to allow large-scale immigration.
Perhaps with this in mind, the idea has had little wider support.
Indeed, it received short shrift from Australia and New Zealand when it was raised by Tuvalu.
However, this may well change as the possibility of extinction becomes more likely.
A third, more radical, suggestion would be for the disappearing states
to pursue a merger with another country; perhaps as a federation or confederation.
In return for accommodating its population, the idea is that the disappearing state would
bring its claim to territorial waters and exclusive wider economic zones to the table.
This has potentially been given a boost by a recent agreement amongst several of the states in
question to allow them to preserve their current territorial boundaries even if they do disappear.
The problem is that the legal situation would by no means be certain.
It could quite possibly be challenged, either legally or militarily, by other states.
Again, it seems unlikely that any country would be willing to go down this path.
The fourth and most radical idea has been to try to 'de-territorialize' the concept of statehood.
In effect, the countries will continue to exist even without land.
While this is certainly an interesting idea,
and there could well be a moral argument to support it, it would be hard to see it happening.
It would, for a start, mean changing a fundamental principle of international law.
And then there'd be all sorts of practical questions, such as
where would their governments be based?
How would the legitimacy of those governments be guaranteed?
And how long could they feasibly continue to exist as entities on paper only?
Some have suggested that the Sovereign Order of Malta,
often regarded as a state without territory, could be a model.
However, as I explained in another video,
while the Order has an international legal personality, it certainly isn't a country.
So, if, in the worst case scenario, the countries were to sink beneath the rising waves,
what happens then?
In truth, we just don't know.
But it raises some very important legal political and humanitarian questions.
First and foremost, what would happen to the inhabitants of these countries?
We are already starting to see more and more people having to pick up and leave their homes
as the waters start to rise, often to another country.
But there's been little discussion about the population as a whole.
Some states have started to recognize the issue .
For instance, in 2017 New Zealand announced a scheme to provide 100 visas a year
to Pacific islanders affected by climate change.
However, the plan was quickly abandoned as people wanted steps to address the problem,
not escape it.
That said, as things evolve, the idea could well need to be revisited on a far larger scale.
But the problem goes far further than this. There are broader questions.
What will be the status of these people?
Will they be offered citizenship when they settle?
Could they retain their citizenship of countries that no longer exist?
But, even more worryingly, these several hundred thousands will be
just a fraction of the many tens of millions of others around the
world projected to be forced from their homes in the decades ahead.
Climate change refugees will be a huge issue for the international community in the 21st century.
Then there is the question about what happens to the countries themselves.
If it's a tenet of international law that a state requires territory, and that can't be changed,
what happens to those countries when they finally disappear beneath the waves?
This is an extremely complex problem.
As the Prime Minister of Tuvalu asked the most recent meeting of the UN General Assembly,
would his country remain a member of the UN if it's finally submerged?
The answer is no one knows.
It isn't addressed in the UN Charter
and it certainly hasn't been discussed in any formal way by the member states.
But there are also all sorts of other questions about what
would happen to the assets of the countries.
These include deposits in banks, investments and even property holdings abroad.
And this doesn't even touch on the intangible
cultural assets that will be lost as people are forced away from their homelands.
Languages and history will be lost.
The question of climate change is quite clearly the key issue of our age.
However, while every country will be affected in one way or another,
and to a greater or lesser degree, for a select group of countries it really does
threaten their very existence as sovereign states on the world map.
The problem is that there are a few good options available to them.
While land reclamation is one route, it may not be feasible.
The trouble is that the other options are insufficient to keep the states alive
or untested as legal concepts.
The same applies if they can't be saved.
At present, it's unclear what will happen to their inhabitants their status or their assets.
Ultimately, these countries don't just face questions about how to manage the
challenges of climate change, they face the challenge of securing their very existence.
I hope you found that interesting. If so, here are some more videos that you might find useful.
Thanks so much for watching and see you in the next video.