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Sea Level Rise May Sink Island Nations
Island countries could soon drown underneath rising tides.
THE GIST:
* Sea level rise is already starting to flood island nations.
* There are few legal precedents for how these nations can exist without dry land.
* Island states need to act now if they want to preserve even their ocean territories.
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.
.
Island countries could soon drown underneath rising tides.
THE GIST:
* Sea level rise is already starting to flood island nations.
* There are few legal precedents for how these nations can exist without dry land.
* Island states need to act now if they want to preserve even their ocean territories.
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.
.
