Co-sponsored by the Columbia Law School and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the conference will be held on campus from March 23 to 25, according to Gregory Wannier, deputy director and fellow at Columbia Law School.
Wannier said participants will try to address legal questions arising from the impacts of global climate change, particularly rising sea levels, on small island nations.
He said their goal is “to build and strengthen bridges between academic expertise and avenues of political response.”
“Although there are inevitable inaccuracies in any climate-related prediction, the consensus is that without any remediating activity the Marshall Islands and other low-lying island nations around the world could become uninhabitable in a matter of decades — a serious security risk which can no longer be ignored,” according to the narrative summary of the conference.
“Sea level rise will be particularly acute in the Pacific and other island regions where increased intensity and severity of weather patterns, including “King Tide” events, may overwhelm domestic infrastructure and water supplies, as well as local ecosystems,” it added.
Marine resources such as local coral reef species are in danger of being extinct which could also potentially undermine the physical stability of the islands.
The future of inhabitants in many of these threatened island nations who could be displaced is another issue up for discussion during the conference.
“If permanent communities are forced to move elsewhere, however unacceptable such a scenario may be, unprecedented questions arise under customary international law about the legal status of both the nations and their citizens. Specifically, can a deterritorialized state maintain sovereignty in international law if its citizens live exclusively within another country’s borders, and how does this change if the land is completely submerged versus merely becoming uninhabitable?” the summary paper further said.
If an island-nation is deterritorialized due to climate change the issue of access to secondary citizenship in any new destination would also be discussed during the conference.
The impact of climate change on the islands Exclusive Economic Zones or EEZs will also be tackled.
“As currently set by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), EEZs extend 200 nautical miles from the shore. However, the Convention is not clear regarding permanent boundaries, and so, from one perspective, traditionally EEZs would recede along with the coast if sea levels rose,” Wannier explained.
“Several scholars have suggested alternatives to this, which include agreeing to freeze baselines (at current shore extent) or set exact EEZ boundaries, artificially propping up coastlines, reinterpreting UNCLOS, and in certain conditions entering bilateral agreements. This problem is particularly severe for small islands, because substantial marine territory — as much as 40,000 square nautical miles — could be threatened with the submersion of a single island, and because the potential loss of sovereignty could also affect their rights to maintain any marine territory,” he added.
