Tuvalu looking at legal ways to be a state if it is submerged
reuters.com
reuters.com
Unfortunately that land is not underwater due to climate change-driven sea level rise, but due to soil erosion. They do mention this fact, however the focus of the article inexplicably remains on rising sea levels.
A factchecker might call that "missing context" (or worse).
[1]https://www.reuters.com/resizer/8doSEMId31ayO3rBn1MaCzPgW50=...
> Unfortunately that land is not underwater due to climate change-driven sea level rise, but due to soil erosion. They do mention this fact, however the focus of the article inexplicably remains on rising sea levels.
> A factchecker might call that "missing context" (or worse).
Summarizing is a thing journalists do to make things more accessible to lay readers, but that didn't work in your case, so I'll expand with common resources and research from ten seconds worth of googling.
"As global sea level rises, the action of waves at higher elevations increases the likelihood for extensive coastal erosion. " (https://toolkit.climate.gov/topics/coastal-flood-risk/coasta...)
"Sea level rise shown to drive coastal erosion" (https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1029/00EO...)
Please don't assume malice.
Of course coastal erosion is caused by wave action. However, the reason it is a problem is because of mangrove deforestation. Over half of the Pacific islands' mangroves have been rapidly destroyed by human development efforts just in the last 20 years.
Mangroves are the natural, first and best line of defense against coastal erosion. They create soil. Without either mangroves or manmade seawalls, it doesn't matter what the sea level is - the coast will erode at an unsustainable rate.
It really grinds my gears that "solving climate change" - the hardest problem to solve - is presented as a panacea for what are really more complex environmental issues which actually happen to have simpler solutions.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/912045029/climate-change-may-...
Even if logging is a concern, the mangroves wouldn't be as protective as you're implying.
Directly related reading:
"Mangroves in Tuvalu are threatened by various factors such as coastal erosion, pollution and on a long term basis the sea level rise due to global warming." (https://www.fao.org/forestry/9011-09d32b158b21752798b87b0378...)
Known at least as far back as 15 years ago: "Rising sea levels caused by global warming are posing a threat to mangroves and therefore communities in Pacific island nations, according to [the United Nations]" (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/jul/17/climatec...)
The sea level rise in question is not enough to kill mangroves and won't be for some time. One source:
>The authors determined that accretion will not keep up beyond sea-level rise of 0.27 inches per year. Rutgers University climate data scientist Erica Ashe, one of the authors, says the current global rate is 0.134 inches
https://therevelator.org/mangroves-climate-change/
On an unrelated note, I am glad that you are doing some research and hopefully learning a bit along the way.
> The sea level rise in question is not enough to kill mangroves and won't be for some time. One source:
> > The authors determined that accretion will not keep up beyond sea-level rise of 0.27 inches per year. Rutgers University climate data scientist Erica Ashe, one of the authors, says the current global rate is 0.134 inches
> https://therevelator.org/mangroves-climate-change/
> On an unrelated note, I am glad that you are doing some research and hopefully learning a bit along the way.
Please reread your own sources. Your own source concludes in the paragraph following the one you cited that:
"Based on projected rates, mangrove trees could lose their race against rising water within the next 30 years."
See a few others which may be related:
http://www.tuvalu-overview.tv/pdf/mangrove_manual.pdf
https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/11812/...
Tldr: climate change begets soil erosion, which leads to loss of land mass... which disappears islands.
Let's stop disputing the obvious just to be a contrarian. Thanks, back to work for me. Wish you the best.
Did anyone think it to be the case? That the sea levels have risen a meter already and we just haven't tuned in to the news recently enough to learn about it?
You would be suprised if you knew how many people think oceans will be boiling in 50 years
"Over four decades, there had been a net increase in land area of the islets of 73.5 ha (2.9%), although the changes are not uniform, with 74% increasing and 27% decreasing in size. The sea level at the Funafuti tide gauge has risen at 3.9 mm per year, which is approximately twice the global average."
Wealth could be preserved by seeking restitution from nations according to lifetime emissions (which has led to sea level rise), and creating a trust to manage and distribute the returns from those funds invested to citizens where ever they are. Once submerged, it’s unlikely the land has any value beyond tourism for diving yachties transiting the pacific.
By the way, what do you mean by "orbital rights"? IMHO according to the Outer Space Treaty you have only the right to the orbits you are currently actively using with your satellites and nothing more.
Galicia: the local king.
Calling the Britons "British" and Anglo-Saxons "English" is confusing... Usually those terms are used for modern Great Britain and modern English.
Tribal lands exist largely so that those resistant to integration will stay out of the way of colonizers.
Fiji gets a share of Tuvaluan fishing grounds, and the Tuvaluans get a place to live AND some protection for their territorial waters by a nation that is still landed.
On the other hand, both China and Taiwan spread money around in the PNA countries as a form of soft power and to get some level of looking the other way.
Probably there still few advantages to be recognized as nation. Being Tax shelter and selling domains(.tv is somewhat popular) comes to mind.
Similarly, I wonder what would happen if Tuvalu decided its laws should not recognise copyright as a concept any more. The government could run an official "legal" file-sharing site and other countries would have to decide whether to prevent their own citizens from accessing it. I imagine these other countries would lose a lot of sympathy for the people of Tuvalu if such a site were created, though.
Anyhow, I've learned to be careful about equivocating nations or cultures. Saying something like, "country X seemed just as nice as Y" might rub someone from X or Y the wrong way.
It's all thinly disguised racism, of course. But it does pose an interesting woke paradox: what if all a nation has left is its prejudice against another nation?
I believe this reveals the existence of a tree-like hierarchy (very loose) of human cultures, and I also believe it goes way lower than just the country level (all the way down to individual people). xkcd also said it a long time ago: https://xkcd.com/1095/
In context of island erosion, this poses the question of whether a nation without any territory can exist purely in opposition to another similarly situated nation (i.e. both sharing a positive history that is indistinguishable within the context of a broader society to which they've emigrated). And that creates an interesting ethical dilemma if the goal is to preserve national identity, especially one that has been "victimized" by [perpetrators of] global warming.
This is true of every state. If no one recognizes your claims, and then acts with impunity against you, you’re not a state.
> If no one recognizes your claims, and then acts with impunity against you, you’re not a state.
Ukraine only fits one.
cf Western Sahara. The international community was not interested in preserving Western Sahara as a state, and so now its entire territory is governed by Morocco, save for some tent cities in a corner of desert the Polisario Front clings to mainly because it'd be bad PR for Morocco to wipe them out.
The Republic of Minerva, was not a state, because no one cared when Tonga claimed it.
Conversely, Taiwan is a state, even with its bizarre legal status, as it has well defined borders, and de facto foreign recognition and military alliances.
Monaco remains a country, because of interference by France, and the fact that they’d be severely sanctioned by EU and the rest of their allies.
This is not always the case. There was a time when IS had control of a significant unchanging area of land (and much more contested areas too, of course) but were never accepted as a state by many (any?) others. Hence being referred to as “so-called Islamic State” most of the time in news broadcasts.
I did not say it was always the case. I said "plenty of", not "every".
Life and politics are complicated, and I left plenty of room in my original statement for nuance and counter examples, please do not remove that for me.
> There was a time when IS had control of a significant unchanging area of land
Unchanging is not the same as uncontested, and I'd argue that IS never had an "unchanging" area of land. Every square foot of IS territory was actively contested, and if you look at the map of its territory over time it moves and shifts and is full of uncontrolled pockets. The nice, clean maps of IS territory on the news were in fact simplifications for easy public consumption. The real situation on the ground was always much more fluid and complex than that. If you look at a map[0] of the actual territory that IS controlled, it is pretty far from the necessary boundaries to run a state. Put bluntly, this is a battle map, not the kind of map that you can make a state out of.
Even the areas that IS held, it did not hold for very long or very securely. Take Tikrit, for example, which IS only held from June 2014 to March 2015, with forces massing for the attack in February. It's hard to argue that a group holds "unchanging" territory when major cities are changing hands every 10 months or so. Furthermore, if an opposing force is able to mass an army outside your city and put siege to it, you are very far away from having "sufficient ability to defend their borders". Given that IS' territorial claims collapsed rather quickly, I think that assertion is pretty good.
> Hence being referred to as “so-called Islamic State” most of the time in news broadcasts.
Right, because the war was still on, IS was still trying to seize the land and fortify the borders of what they hoped would eventually be their state. If IS had won or fought the battle to a draw, I have no doubt that they would have gotten roughly the same level of international recognition that say, North Korea gets and they'd stop being "so called". But they didn't do that, so they never stopped being "so called".
Really, the counter example you should have gone for here is Haiti. Haiti unquestionably was capable of defending its borders, and in fact repelled several attempts to retake the island. It also did not get recognized for nearly 20 years by basically anyone until they agreed to reimburse France for the loss of their property, including distastefully the value of the slaves who were now free. While plenty of states get recognized once they manage to successfully hold and defend territory, not every state gets recognized that way. Sometimes other factors dominate, such as the fear of other slave holding states in recognizing the independence of a country created via a slave revolt.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State#/media/File:Near...
You also cannot defend a patch of ocean without some land, at least with current technology. War ships require quite a bit of time in dry dock for fueling, refit, and rearmament. And that's before we consider the subpar fighting capability that crews without shore leave would provide.
No, they'd still need to buy or borrow some land, even if they had the hardware to run a moderate navy.
Most likely this will be treated like when a country invades and destroys another: .TV will cease to exist and its citizens will be absorbed in other States.
3m is just around 9ft. And we are talking about less than 12000 people living in about 25sq.km of land. It would be trivial to increase the height of the land by a couple of metres.
So, trade could bring wood, materials, solar, desalinaton. If done slowly, over years, as parts submerge, it wouldn't be a massive outlay at once.
I agree.. not cheap, but individual citizens have to buy building materials currently, their new houses would just be on stilts.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_Military_Order_of_Ma...
UN Observer status is most often used to discuss the status of states like Palestines but it has less of an implication of being a sovereign "state" than people think.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_General_Assembl...
The only somewhat comparable thing afaik is the Holy See, but that at least has sovereignty over some land (the vatican).
[1] although this status is sometimes questioned
Tuvalu won't be submerged for centuries even in the worst case scenarios.
They will have incrementally increasing problems from it decade by decade. But that press release will not go anywhere.
I’m sure they were completely shocked by their carefully staged and promoted photo op.
[1] https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/dispatches-from-t...
The only motivation any other country has to preserve the EEZ of Tuvalu is to prevent Chinese fishermen from overfishing that part of the ocean into a dead zone, or Chinese excavators drilling all the oil/minerals out of the seabed. So they should play up that aspect, and then they may attract the necessary investment to make a big enough pile of sand at the right coordinates.
The largest bulk carriers manage about 400,000 DWT.
So, about 1000 trips of the largest around... ignoring the logistical and ecological challenges of procuring that much material and using it to raise the island in a durable way.
I hope the math for how much it costs isn’t so low as to be sad to fix this problem in the wrong way.
Why not give the cost of that operation to every Tuvaluan, along with a promise that they and their family can emigrate to a country of their choosing?
But more importantly than the amount you need to raise the islands: 26 sq km * 1 meter probably doesn't raise the islands anywhere close to 1 meter, because of:
* Early losses from erosion and compaction
* The angle of repose around the islands (you can't just build the island straight up 1 meter).
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28%28srt%2829%29*1000...
A) the container ships could tolerate containers full of dirt and rock (nope-- each of these 2-TEU containers would weigh 100 tonnes... compare to gross tonnage of ~200000 tonnes and you're only moving 2000 such containers in a load),
B) the containers themselves could safely tolerate this much mass & weight (nope),
and
B) raising the island 1 meter is enough (probably nope).
But as long as people were doing the container ship math, I figured I'd point out the problems with it.
Note you're using 29 vs. the grandparent's 26, too.
When this idea has developed to maturity, it is not inconceivable that states can be virtual, territoryless, and still represents a sizeable demography, collects tax and manages assets, and provides laws and order for that group.
Tuvalu is an island with a population of around 11,000 people and its highest point is just 4.5m (15 ft) above sea level. Since 1993, sea levels have risen about 0.5cm (0.2 inches) per year, according to a 2011 Australian government report.
So they're talking about something that might happen in 900 years, if current trends hold (and we all know that all trends noted by the best scientists of 13th century totally proved to be accurate). And yet the article treats it as a problem that needs to be discussed right now, complete with a picture of an official standing knee-deep in water, and descriptions of how old people prepare to "go down with the land" (they must not be that old if they plan to live for several hundreds of years longer...)
This looks like cheap theatrics using real events to present scenarios which aren't relevant and probably won't be anytime worth talking about. I mean, there's surely coastal erosion problem but not from the 0.5cm per year thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Funafuti
https://tuvalu-data.sprep.org/system/files/Rapport_de_leve_C...
- Drilling explorations at Funafuti from 1896 to 1898 resulted in 340 m long cores comprising shallow-water carbonates. Subsequent analysis of the drill cores suggests a subsidence rate for Funafuti of approximately 30 m/Ma [30 metres per million año/year].
- report on a refraction line in Nukufetau lagoon, concluding that volcanics are capped by approximately 760 m of limestones.
The pdf has great information.
So now the plan is just 'improvise, adapt and overcome'.
I've become fairly patient with climate deniers over the years since it is both a difficult to imagine idea and contains serious amounts of existential dread, making it very hard to reason about. Because of the latter I don't know anyone, climate scientists and myself included, that aren't in some way climate change deniers.
The only possible pathway to dramatically reduced carbon intensity in our economy is the potential of physical resource limitations, not intentional human action. If you study the way energy impacts our civilization (highly recommend Smil's "Energy and Civilization"), it's fairly obvious, if not hard to swallow, that we cannot reduce carbon emissions radically enough in a short enough time span without also destroying the global economy. Destroying the economy today to mitigate the worse case scenarios is risk that even right now no sane person earnestly wants to take.
That destruction, on the timeline somewhere in the next 100 years, is inevitable anyway, but nobody really wants to suffer now when the more extreme suffering we're putting off might be in 20 or even 60 years.
This is really the heart of the problem: the immediate cost of addressing climate change has always seemed too high given the perceived uncertainty of outcomes. In 1950 it would have been fantastically easier to put a cap on carbon emissions than today, but the real threat of climate change was more than a lifetime away, and seemed ludicrous to even most educated people.
But today, meeting the emissions goals required would make the pandemic seem like black Friday as far as economic activity goes. And at the same time, while we know the impact of climate change will be bad, we still don't really know how much we'll each live through and how bad it will be immediately. Maybe we'll see the AMOC shutdown in our lifetimes and Europe will suffer massive crop failure and starvation... and maybe it will just get unlivably hot at the equator, and people from the American Southwest will have to move to the Northeast.
As many have pointed out, the pandemic is basically a toy problem version of climate change. In order to really prevent the pandemic we would have had to globally shut down the economy for a few months, much like China did. The problem is if we did that and prevented the pandemic, our world today would remain an imagined counterfactual that would not be perceived as worth the harm by the majority. We completely failed to address pandemic, and we will completely fail to address climate change. We'll find out what that means.
Solar Geoengineering is something that could be considered. It is underfunded these days but we should do a better job of studying & modeling it’s effects if we ever hope to deploy it. Heck I think these island nations should deploy geoengineering techniques today. Albeit that last statement is partially in jest because the technology isn’t there yet. (It could have downstream consequences in the rest of the world, but clearly the rest of the world has geoengineered the climate using fossil fuels. These nations deserve a chance to protect their homes even if the method is drastic.)
There are profitable solutions out there today and many have a potential to scale. Paul Hawken has done some great work recently describing them and calculating their contribution potential (https://drawdown.org and https://regeneration.org)
I consider myself sane, and I would take that option.
Then again, I also resent that the banks were bailed out during the gfc, for fear of "destroying the economy".
What does destroying the economy mean? The factories would still stand. The knowledge, science still exist.
We will probably geoengineer local solutions so that the human race is not in any real danger of extinction but it won't be the nice high-flyin good times we have now.
Climate change is a real problem for them. But in terms of the cold calculus of global impact, the fate of Tuvalu is relatively minor.
If you really believe what you say, then go and act. A time of great crisis is also a time of great opportunity.
People like you trying to push the responsibility on the individual is why humanity will go extinct.
tldr - if you really believed in a climate crisis you'd be acting differently.
If 80% of people took precautions to keep from getting covid, and 20% went out and lived their life, the decision of the 80% to stay inside was irrelevant because the 20% would keep the virus in circulation.
If 80% of people stop buying fossil fuels, and 20% of people buy 500% more fossil fuels because the price is falling...
Yes, but it's rude to talk about it. Like not mentioning politics at Thanksgiving dinner so we can pretend we all agree...
> Kofe said he delivered the video address, scheduled to be aired at COP26 on Tuesday, in a place that used to be dry land, adding that Tuvalu was seeing a lot of coastal erosion.
Coastal erosion, not climate change, not rising sea levels.
>According to the IPCC, sea level rise caused by climate change will increase coastal erosion worldwide, significantly changing the coasts and low-lying coastal areas.
Interesting.
My point is that there’s no reason to think that the land Tuvalu has lost has anything to do with climate change. Pretending otherwise is pure theater.
That's 14 cm of elevation on sea level alone.
Coastal erosion can be mitigated, but I don't think Tuvalu has the resources to build and deploy the required amount of breakwaters required to protect the island themselves. Climate change is something that has to be addressed at a global level.
edit: math correction
I'd try to convince you, but well, I think it'd be a waste of my energy, and I don't care enough to spend that energy for yet another idiot roaming the world thinking "It's all a giant conspiracy!". Besides, you've heard it all and you know you won't be fooled.
And when people take things that were not caused by climate change, point at them and scream “LOOK, CLIMATE CHANGE,” they’re not doing any favors for the rationality cause.