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Rising sea level could erase island nations from the face of Earth | A new research has suggested that the dangerous rise in sea level from anthropogenic global warming could erase some island states from the face of the Earth, but those nations could survive even without land. According to
a report in Discovery News, 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 that current international
agreements, including the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, don't
address the issue, according to international law professor Rosemary Rayfuse of
the University of New South Wales in Australia. The vast majority of scientific
investigations indicate that 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," she added. 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. One option that's been discussed
is for other nations to provide territory upon which displaced islanders could
settle. 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. |
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