Rising sea level could erase islands 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.