The Marshall Islands are a nation in the South Pacific. As a nation, it has many of the rights and privileges as do others, including a seat in the U.N. general assembly and control of surrounding waters.
The only problem: the Marshall Islands are slowly disappearing, a victim of the rising tides of global climate change. As this AP story reads: “Encroaching seas in the far Pacific are raising the salt level in the wells of the Marshall Islands. Waves threaten to cut one sliver of an island in two. ‘It’s getting worse,’ says Kaminaga Kaminaga, the tiny nation’s climate change coordinator.”
And that brings us to an existential questions: If the nation disappears, is it still a nation?
The AP story continues with the questions:
What happens if the 61,000 Marshallese must abandon their low-lying atolls? Would they still be a nation? With a U.N. seat? With control of their old fisheries and their undersea minerals? Where would they live, and how would they make a living? Who, precisely, would they and their children become?
The answers aren’t easy. It seems little in the international-law books really addresses the question of a nation’s disappearance.
So the Marshallese government has reached out for advice, initially from the Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University. The center’s director, Michael B. Gerrard, in turn has asked legal scholars worldwide to assemble at Columbia next May to provide some answers.
One place to start the hunt might be a 1951 global treaty on refugees, which provides that nations shelter those fleeing because of persecution. Thing is, the treaty does not climate change. So some advocate negotiating a new international pact obliging similar treatment for environmental refugees.
Another issue for the islanders: their economic rights. For now, they control some 800,000 square miles of ocean, an area the size of Mexico.
The tuna coursing through those waters are the Marshalls’ chief resource, exploited by selling licenses to foreign fishing fleets. “If their islands go underwater, what becomes of their fishing rights?” Gerrard asked. Potentially just as important: revenues from magnesium and other sea-floor minerals that geologists have been exploring in recent years.