We as Peoples Have the Right to Exist": Threatened Nations and Climate Justice (original) (raw)
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Academia Letters, 2022
This paper proposes a governance model based on realistic arrangements at the national, regional and global level for when low-lying islands become fully submerged and, therefore, the lands upon which their sovereignty and jurisdictions over maritime resources and international legal personalities are based, disappear. Support for solutions to the fate of the Pacific Islands has been heard at the UN on numerous occasions through the International Law Commission (ILC) and other fora. There is agreement that customary international law needs to address this issue. It is important, however, to assert that the distinction here is that Pacific Small Islands States (SIDS) have sovereignty and are established states under international law, a fact supported by (Jain, 2014), who argued that the creation and continuity of states are distinct legal phenomena. Recognizing and maintaining the difference between the creation and continuation of states is necessary, to prevent the uncontrolled proliferation of new states. For Pacific Island atoll nations, the immediate concern is sustaining statehood in its current form and not creating a state after extinction or ceding sovereignty to others. After all, the climate crisis is not the fault of the Pacific Islands, which contributed 0.03% of total emissions according to the IPCC but face a true existential crisis as a result of climate change. An agreement signed on 12 August 2019 reaffirmed the risk to the security of states and called for a regular agenda item on the UN Security Council to address the security implications of climate change on the survival of Pacific Island Developing States and other island nations. (PSIDS, 2019) This declaration reaffirmed the Pacific SIDS call for the United Nations Security Council to appoint a special rapporteur to produce a regular review of global, regional and national security and human rights threats as a consequence of climate change. Historically, the peoples of the Pacific have been navigators and nomads over the vast Pacific
King's Law Journal, 2019
Small island developing states are often painted in a vulnerable position. Due to similar characteristics and sustainable development challenges they are particularly susceptible to climate change, particularly those of size, geographical location, limited resources, and exposure to environmental harm and economic shocks. Despite the attention given to SIDS within the international climate regime, much remains to be done in order to give them the appropriate voice needed to have their concerns heard. This article adopts a climate justice perspective to look at how that voice can be amplified. Climate justice here refers to the discussions that incorporate broader theories of environmental justice that identifies environmental issues that affect concepts of fairness and equity. Care must be taken to avoid imposing a victim narrative onto SIDS as it weakens the suitability of climate action. In light of this, the discourse referring to SIDS should move away from focusing on vulnerability and instead concentrate on adaptation and resilience. Accordingly, steps need to be taken to empower SIDS with the right tools, knowledge, and resources necessary to address the impacts of climate change. With this in mind, adaptation and resilience are presented here as alternatives to the depressing narrative that places emphasis on a chronic vulnerability that SIDS allegedly possess. Furthermore, such approaches can embody the apparent vulnerabilities of SIDS to inform decision-making regarding the action taken to address climate change, especially in light of the circumstances of SIDS. This article suggests that a framework of climate justice can help identify, but also provide the moral groundwork that should necessitate our discussion on giving SIDS their rightful voice to speak about climate change action and particularly the action they wish to take.
Small Islands Developing States and Climate Change: An Overview of Legal and Diplomatic Strategies
Journal of Public and International Affairs, 2017
Climate change poses unprecedented challenges to Small Island Developing States (SIDS) due to their vulnerability to sea level rise. The consequences are already visible. Notably, they include costal erosion, water security, floods, and threaten biodiversity, which in turn compromises SIDS’ economic system based on fishing, tourism and sea transportation. The status quo of SIDS will inevitably deteriorate into two possible scenarios: they could turn into uninhabitable rocks, not suitable to host their population; or they could disappear, submerged by the sea. These events have never been seen before in human history and thus require ad hoc, innovative solutions. Despite the recognition of the peculiar and urgent issues affecting SIDS, the international community has limited its intervention to compensation funds for loss and damage. Nonetheless, these measures will not be enough in the long term. This paper will explore feasible solutions from the legal and political perspectives, with a particular focus on durable strategies. In the short term, the international community will have to maintain the current financial compensation measures specifically devoted to climate change adaptation infrastructures (developed under the Cancun Adaptation Framework). In the long term, financial measures have to be combined with new frameworks shaped to include this new category of people displaced by climate change consequences. Furthermore, the international community will have to consider whether SIDS will cease to exist as states in case of submersion of their territory under the sea. Could they still retain legal personality? If not, which country would host their governments and provide services to their population? In order to make these solutions efficient and durable, the paper will apply game theory (suasion game) to find how SIDS can enhance their bargaining power within the negotiations among the international community.
Climate justice, small island developing states & cultural loss
This contribution looks at those Small Island Developing States that are doomed to disappear due to anthropogenic climate change. The citizens of these states will not only lose their physical homeland but also their social structure and cultural community. The focus here is on cultural loss. While its subjective importance is easy to grasp, it is harder to see cultural loss as a matter of justice. This paper first presents an account of why cultural loss is often seen as merely unfortunate but not unjust. Against these worries, the paper argues that we have a right that no one threatens our social bases of self-respect and that societal cultures are one important base of self-respect. The discussion concludes that anthropogenic climate change affects peoples ’ rights with regard to the cultural dimension and that therefore adaptation efforts ought to protect the social bases of self-respect of those climate refugees whose physical, political, and cultural existence is threatened by our inability to keep emissions below safe levels.
Tides of Climate Change: Protecting the Natural Wealth Rights of Disappearing States
Sustainability Law & Policy eJournal, 2018
Worldwide there are approximately 60 states for which sea level rise is an existential threat. Described as “sinking island states,�? low-lying ocean nations are battling with challenges no other state has ever experienced. From a legal perspective, for the first time in human history, law must address the legal consequences of state extinction. One aspect of this new phenomenon is the question what is to happen to the natural resources rights of a state that no longer exists. Much of the discussion surrounding this question is taking place in the abstract, such that scholars assume that complete loss of territory entails loss of statehood and therefore loss of rights to natural wealth. In this article I argue that we cannot assume what needs to be proven–that if there is no territory there is no state and therefore, no rights to natural wealth. To determine the impact of any legal event on legal rights, one must answer a series of questions pertaining to the nature of the rights, t...
International law has thus far proven limited as a tool for securing environmental justice for those marginalized by the international order. This essay reviews two recent publications that respond to the disproportionate effects of global environmental crisis on the marginalized within the framework of international law. It suggests that while both texts are important works of scholarship, each leaves an impression that international law, at least as we know it, is inadequate to the task of framing meaningful responses not only to the disproportionate effects of environmental crisis on the marginalized, but to that crisis itself. It is argued that the difficulty in utilizing international environmental law as a means of addressing problems of global environmental degradation may be better conceived not as a weakness in international environmental law per se, but as a symptom of the severance of human and natural environment that undergirds the logic of international law. Acknowledgment of the relationship between foundational concepts of international law and environmental exploitation invites sober consideration of the limits of international law as a framework for generating responses to global environmental crisis, and its disproportionate effect on the marginalized.
University of Hawai'i Law Review, 2013
Despite their clear and significant vulnerability to climate change, small island developing states have not had the opportunity to pursue in earnest a remedy for the impacts of that change. All small island developing states face significant challenges to their economic well-being and the availability of basic resources-including food and water. Some face the loss of habitability of their entire territory. Identifying and implementing adequate repair will be difficult enough. After at least two decades of knowledge of these impacts, however, small island developing states still face the equally difficult task of just getting their claims heard. This is not for want of trying. Indeed, there has been extensive research and scholarship as well as abbreviated attempts in international fora to hold large emitters accountable. These have not been effective. Further, the latest attempt to clarify the legal responsibility of the largest emitters has been met with threats of reprisal by those large emitters. This kind of intimidation, coupled with a weak international legal regime at base, delays justice for small island developing states. In this article, Professor Burkett explores the failure of the legal regime to provide adequate process and substantive remedy for small island developing states-either through the absence of viable legal theories, capacity constraints, or uneven power dynamics in the international arena-or all three. She argues, however, that the costs of pursuing these claims-and other novel approaches she outlines in the article-are dwarfed by the costs to small island communities of unabated climate impacts. In surveying the possible claims and introducing new approaches, Professor Burkett attempts to respond to a striking and persistent (if unsurprising) justice paradox: the current international legal regime forecloses any reasonable attempts at a remedy for victims of climate change who are the most vulnerable and the least responsible.