If the Land Disappears

There is a question that international law has never had to answer before.

What happens to a country when it sinks beneath the sea?

Not metaphorically. Not as a warning. Literally. When the land that a nation was built on, that its people have lived on for three thousand years, that its sovereignty is grounded in, disappears under rising waters, what then?

This is not a hypothetical question for the Pacific. It is a question with a deadline.

The science is settled. Global sea levels are rising. They are rising faster in the Pacific than the global average, roughly three to four millimetres per year in the central Pacific, and in some locations considerably faster due to local land subsidence and ocean current patterns.

For low-lying atoll nations, Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, the question is not whether their territory will become uninhabitable. It is when.

Kiribati's highest point is less than three metres above sea level. The Marshall Islands average less than two metres. Tuvalu's main island, Funafuti, is already experiencing regular tidal flooding that did not occur a generation ago. Salt water intrudes into freshwater lenses. Crops fail. Infrastructure is undermined.

Fiji is not an atoll nation. Its main islands, Viti Levu, have mountains and elevation. Fiji will not disappear beneath the ocean.

But Fiji has three hundred and thirty islands. Many of them are low-lying. Many of them are already losing land. And Fiji is constitutionally, economically and culturally bound to the Pacific nations that face the most existential threat.

What happens to Tuvalu is not someone else's problem. It is Fiji's problem.

Here is what international law currently says, and does not say.

A state, under international law, requires four things. A permanent population. A defined territory. An effective government. And the capacity to enter into relations with other states.

The second requirement, defined territory, is the problem.

If a low-lying atoll nation loses its land to sea level rise, does it cease to be a state? Does it lose its seat at the United Nations? Does it lose its Exclusive Economic Zone, the vast area of ocean, rich in fish and minerals and potentially seabed resources, that surrounds its territory?

International law does not have a clear answer. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea was written in nineteen eighty-two. Climate change was not the drafters' primary concern. The baselines used to calculate Exclusive Economic Zones were designed for stable coastlines. They were not designed for coastlines that disappear.

In twenty twenty-one, the Pacific Islands Forum adopted the Declaration on Preserving Maritime Zones in the Face of Climate Change-related Sea-Level Rise. It was a historic statement. Forum member states agreed that their maritime zones, once established, should not be reduced as a result of climate change-related sea level rise, regardless of changes to their baselines.

It was a declaration. It was not binding international law. It was an assertion, a claim that existing rules should be applied differently in the face of climate change. Whether the rest of the world agrees is a different question.

Tuvalu has taken the most dramatic step among nations in response to this legal uncertainty.

In twenty twenty-three, Tuvalu signed the Falepili Union with Australia, a bilateral agreement under which Australia provides a pathway to residency for Tuvaluan citizens, and Tuvalu agrees to consult Australia on matters of defence and security.

The agreement is remarkable for what it implies. Tuvalu is preparing for the possibility that its people may need to live elsewhere. Australia is preparing to receive them.

But the agreement also preserves something. Tuvalu's government has stated explicitly that it intends to maintain its statehood, its government, its sovereignty, its international legal personality, even if its physical territory becomes uninhabitable. A state without land. A government in exile, not from political persecution, but from rising seas.

Can that work? Can a nation exist without territory?

International law has no precedent. The Holy See, the Vatican, is sometimes cited as an example of a state with a minimal territorial footprint. But the Vatican has territory. It has walls, buildings, and a physical address.

A submerged atoll has none of those things.

For Fiji, this raises questions that go beyond sympathy for neighbours.

Fiji has submitted to international climate negotiations as a Pacific small island state. It held the Presidency of COP twenty-three in Bonn in twenty seventeen. It has been one of the most vocal advocates for climate finance, for loss and damage, for the recognition that the countries least responsible for climate change are bearing its greatest costs.

The Pacific Resilience Facility, ratified unanimously by Fiji's Parliament on the thirtieth of April, twenty twenty-six, is one tangible response. It will fund seawalls, drainage systems, disaster preparedness, and coastal adaptation. It is a grants facility, not a loans facility. It recognises that small island states should not go into debt to survive a crisis they did not create.

But seawalls and drainage systems address the symptoms. They do not address the underlying legal question.

If Kiribati loses its land, what happens to its Exclusive Economic Zone? That zone covers approximately three and a half million square kilometres of ocean, an area larger than India. It contains some of the world's most productive tuna fisheries. The revenue from fishing licences is a significant portion of Kiribati's national income.

If the land disappears and the maritime zone goes with it, who inherits those fisheries? The nearest large states, Australia, the United States, and China, all have interests in the answer.

This is not only a humanitarian question. It is a geopolitical question. And it is one the Pacific has not yet won.

There is a philosophical dimension to this that the legal frameworks have not caught up with.

The people of Tuvalu, of Kiribati, of the Marshall Islands, their connection to their islands is not simply residential. It is ancestral, spiritual, constitutional. The land is not just where they live. It is who they are. It is embedded in their languages, their songs, their kinship systems, and their understanding of themselves as a people.

What does it mean to lose that? Not just the physical land, but the relationship to place that gives a people its identity?

There is no legal framework for that loss. There is no compensation mechanism. There is no international tribunal that can restore what rising seas take.

The loss and damage framework, agreed at COP twenty-seven in Sharm el-Sheikh and operationalised at COP twenty-eight in Dubai, is a beginning. It acknowledges, for the first time in international climate negotiations, that some losses cannot be adapted to. That some damage is permanent. The countries that caused the climate crisis owe something to the countries that are paying the price.

But the fund is undercapitalised. The commitments are voluntary. And the amounts pledged bear no relationship to the scale of what is being lost.

COP thirty-one will be held in Antalya, Turkey, in November twenty twenty-six. Australia holds the Presidency of the negotiations.

The Pacific will arrive in Antalya with the same arguments it has been making for thirty years. The science is clear. The injustice is clear. The legal gaps are clear. The funding is inadequate.

Whether the world listens is, as it has always been, a question of political will rather than evidence.

What has changed is the urgency. The water is not coming. In some places, it is already here.

For Fiji, the question is not abstract. Section twenty-eight of the twenty-thirteen Constitution protects iTaukei land ownership. Section twenty-nine protects lessees' rights. Both provisions assume the land exists.

What happens to constitutional land rights when the land itself disappears?

It is a question the Constitutional Review Commission has not been asked to answer. But as Fiji watches its Pacific neighbours prepare for a future without territory, it is a question that belongs in the conversation about what kind of constitution this country needs, and what it needs to protect.

If the land disappears, what are we left with?

Each other. And the law we build together.