Among them: If a country disappears, is it still a country? Does it keep its seat at the United Nations? Who controls its offshore mineral rights? Its shipping lanes? Its fish?

And if entire populations are forced to relocate — as could be the case with citizens of the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and other small island states facing extinction — what citizenship, if any, can those displaced people claim?

Until recently, such questions of sovereignty and human rights have been the domain of a scattered group of lawyers and academics. But now the Republic of the Marshall Islands — a Micronesian nation of 29 low-lying coral atolls in the North Pacific — is campaigning to stockpile a body of knowledge it hopes will turn international attention to vulnerable countries’ plights.

“At the current negotiating sessions and climate change meetings, nobody is truly addressing the legal and human rights effects of climate change,” said Phillip Muller, the Marshall Islands’ ambassador to the United Nations.

“If the Marshall Islands ceases to exist, are we still going to own the sea resources? Are we still going to be asked for permission to fish? What are the rights that we will have? And we are also mindful that we may need to relocate. We’re hoping it will never happen, but we have to be ready. There are a lot of issues we need to know the answer to and be able to tell our citizens what is happening,” he said.

Frustrated by the dearth of answers to the questions he was posing, Muller said, Marshall Islands leaders contacted Columbia Law School. Michael Gerrard, who leads the law school’s Center for Climate Change Law, picked up the challenge and issued a call for papers.

Theoretical questions become real

Gerrard, who is arranging a conference sponsored by Columbia University’s Earth Institute next year, said that when he began reaching out to scholars, he realized most were working in isolation from one another. And, he said, some of the most ticklish legal questions facing small island nations have been understudied — because until recently, the notion of a country’s extinction has been largely theoretical.

“The prospect of a nation drowning is so horrific that it’s hard to imagine,” Gerrard said. Moreover, he added, until just a few years ago, it was difficult to have a conversation in the international community about how countries might adapt to climate change.

“There was a concern that it would divert focus from mitigation. But now people recognize that even with the most aggressive imaginable mitigation measures, the climate situation will get worse before it gets better, and we have to begin making serious preparation,” he said.

The plight of refugees is the most emotional of the looming questions. Deciding where to relocate citizens is just the beginning for a disappearing nation. Still unanswered: What will the political status of those displaced people be? Will they assimilate into the culture and economy of their new host country, or will they retain a separate identity?

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that rising sea levels, saltwater intrusion and accelerated coastal erosion could lead to as many as 200 million environmentally induced migrants worldwide by 2050.

The Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea could be some of the world’s first climate “refugees.” The land is expected to be under water by 2015, and Papua New Guinea’s mission to the United Nations has already announced it would evacuate the approximately 2,000 islanders to Bougainville Island — about a four-hour boat ride away.

Maldives wants a fund of last resort

Meanwhile, in the Maldives, President Mohamed Nasheed declared upon entering office that he would create a sovereign fund — something of a last-resort insurance policy — in the event that the country’s 305,000 citizens would require relocation. The fund fell victim to budget shortfalls, but Maldivian officials have said it had the desired effect of raising awareness in the international community.

And while environmental migration is not a new phenomenon, the projected scale of human movement over a short period of time is unprecedented. But, noted University of New South Wales professor Jane McAdam, “there is at present no internationally agreed definition of what it means to be an environmental ‘migrant,’ ‘refugee,’ or ‘displaced person,’ and consequently, no agreed label for those affected.”

Edward Cameron, former senior adviser to the government of the Maldives, added: “We see at the moment how many people are on the move in Pakistan.” While the floods devastating that country have been displacing millions internally, Cameron asked, “What if they were on the move across an international border? They certainly wouldn’t have refugee status.”

But while questions abound over the status and rights of displaced persons, experts say that field of study is burgeoning compared to the study of sovereign rights of vulnerable countries.

McAdam, who has looked at the question of whether a disappeared nation could retain its U.N. seat, noted that there is no automatic triggering mechanism that “undoes” a state.

“Certainly states have ceased to exist in the past, but it’s through occupation, war, state secession,” McAdam said. The closest thing to an extinct nation would be a government in exile. Yet even that assumes the government will eventually return to its territory — something climate change may make impossible.

“There’s precedent for other things that we can draw on, but … there’s no self-executing formula for deciding when a country doesn’t exist anymore,” she said.

Cleo Paskal, associate fellow at Chatham House and author of “Global Warring: How Environmental, Economic and Political Crises Will Redraw the World Map,” said one of her top worries is the fate of countries’ maritime exclusive economic zones.

Those areas where countries have exclusive rights to the resources are measured from coastlines or offshore islands. But, Paskal noted, the laws assume the coastlines won’t change or disappear. That’s already happening.

Laws assume coastlines are a constant

“Any country with a coastline or offshore islands that are being used to anchor claims need to start thinking about if that coastline or offshore island is affected, and what will that do to the exclusive economic zone claims?” she said. “The core issue is that we have written our laws, regulations, subsidies on the assumption that the environment is a constant, and it isn’t.”

Moreover, as Paskal noted in a recent blog post, countries that take in climate “refugees” might make a case for governing the former nation’s maritime zone — something she described as a “very lucrative and geopolitically touchy proposition.”

Meanwhile, Paskal and others warn that well before a country disappears under rising waters, it will face less provocative but deeply vexing problems.

“On your way down, before your country disappears, you’ve got desalination problems, agriculture problems, import problems. You might lose your fresh water; your land might start to degrade because of saltwater intrusion,” Paskal said.

Cameron said threatened nations need answers to the vexing legal questions of land, water and migration for their own sakes as well as to send a signal to developed countries stalling on climate change action that “if you don’t come up with a response, we’re going to start looking at legal options.” But more broadly, he said, the international community needs to start viewing climate change through the lens of human rights.

“What we’re trying to do in this debate is take an old issue, which is climate change, and make people look at it in a completely different way … as a human and social issue instead of an ecological issue,” he said. “Climate change is not about polar bears; it’s about people, and human rights helps us to understand it as a human issue.”

Source: Climate Wire

Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

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Source: EJF on YouTube

(AFP) October 18, 2009 – MALE – Maldivian President Mohamed Nasheed, who staged the world’s first underwater cabinet meeting at the weekend, is emerging as the global stuntman in the battle against climate change.

Nasheed, 42, dived with his cabinet to the sea bottom Saturday in an effort to press December’s UN summit in Copenhagen to cap carbon emissions that cause global warming, threatening low-lying nations such as the Maldives.

“We should come out of Copenhagen with a deal that will ensure that everyone will survive,” said the president as he bobbed in the shimmering Indian Ocean after the meeting.

A presidential aide said the event, to highlight the threat facing the resort paradise — which scientists warn could be submerged by rising sea levels by the century’s end, was Nasheed’s idea.

He said a New York-based environmental group had wanted the president to hold a banner underwater to push for cuts in global greenhouse gas emissions.

But Nasheed, the youngest leader in South Asia, went one better, with the 30-minute meeting intended to highlight a potentially watery future for the 1,192 coral islands that make up the Maldives.

It was only the latest in a series of eye-catching public relations moves by Nasheed, a former journalist, to focus the spotlight on climate change and how it could affect the archipelago, known as an idyllic getaway for the rich.

The president stunned the world last year when he announced he wanted to buy a new homeland to relocate the population of the Maldives in the event that damage from rising sea levels became too great.

The announcement had a major impact in India, Sri Lanka and Australia — all potential destinations cited by Nasheed for what could be some of the world’s first environmental refugees.

Nasheed has also been photographed at a submerged desk off the sandy white beaches of the Maldives.

The environmental activism of Nasheed, who came to power last year, follows efforts by his predecessor, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, to highlight the nation’s predicament.

“Gayoom had been a very vocal campaigner so there is a political compulsion for Nasheed to keep the Maldives at the forefront of the global warming issue,” said Ibrahim Ismail, for many years an independent member of parliament.

Gayoom, described by opponents as autocratic, ruled the islands unchallenged between 1978 and 2008 and repeatedly threw Nasheed in jail over a period of six years.

As a political activist, Nasheed was at one point an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience.

Educated in Sri Lanka and Britain, the president, a father of two young daughters and holder of a degree in maritime engineering, built a pro-democracy movement with local and foreign support, winning the country’s first multi-party elections a year ago.

His latest dive in scuba gear was preceded by interviews to foreign television networks to talk about what he called his “sinking feeling.”

Ismail said Nasheed’s underwater cabinet meeting had little impact locally in a country whose 300,000 Sunni Muslim population was more preoccupied with immediate bread and butter issues.

“I think this is a good action as far as publicity is concerned. Not locally, but internationally,” Ismail said.

Nasheed announced last month the Maldives had no money to pay for him to attend the Copenhagen summit, but Denmark has said it will fund him as his participation is considered essential.

Source: AFP