Island Lives, Ocean States: Sea-level Rise and Maritime Sovereignties in the Pacific

Informations

Funding country

Norway

Acronym

-

URL

-

Start date

1/1/2018

End date

12/31/2024

Budget

1,494,819 EUR

Fundings

Abstract

Hosted by the University of Bergen, the global OCEANSTATES project is a six-year interdisciplinary research effort to build understanding of crucial existential and security-related challenges caused by climate change, from the vantage point of the Pacific Islands region. In combining climate science models of sea level rise and land erosion, legal analysis of maritime law, state sovereignty, and citizenship, and fieldwork-based analysis and interpretation of diplomatic events and documents from anthropology and other social sciences, OCEANSTATES addresses a poorly understood but urgent issue: In the Pacific, whose island people contribute the least to global warming but face its most severe effects, sea-level rise (of up to three times the world average) creates a situation in which entire countries risk the partial or total loss of their land and sea territories. This situation, never in documented history experienced by humanity, challenges human and political security throughout the Pacific, and particularly in low-lying atoll nations. As sovereign states, Pacific Island countries control vast ocean areas as Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) extending 200 nautical miles from land, which enables those states to claim an identity in global political arenas as Big Ocean States and to build strong economies from valuable marine resources. To understand the effects of sea level rise on this unique condition, OCEANSTATES researchers are present (physically and/or digitally) on the beaches and in the towns of the Pacific Islands, across the world in national, regional, and global meetings on ocean governance and climate change, among diplomats at the United Nations, in oceanographic and meteorological laboratories, and in repositories of legal documents. Initial reviews by the project indicated that global legal institutions, in particular the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), were ill-prepared for processes through which the ocean of a state would seem to be transformed into sea beyond legal ownership - Mare Nullius - as baselines of 200-mile zones disappear under rising water. Yet, findings from the project's legal experts and the team’s continuous monitoring of diplomatic scenes suggest that the earlier dominating view in legal doctrine, that maritime boundaries are vulnerable to rising sea levels or other geographical changes, is increasingly, and rapidly, challenged by new developments in interpretation of the Law of the Sea, but without necessarily a demand for changing UNCLOS itself. Furthermore, the Pacific Islands Forum strongly stated in a 2021 Declaration that the maritime boundaries of Pacific states once registered under UNCLOS are legally fixed, not to be changed by sea level rise. Such narratives are also manifested locally across the Pacific, in the form of grassroot activism among youth groups and organizations that shape narratives and priorities in the lead-up to different diplomatic events of global scales. With limited physical fieldwork conducted due to COVID-19, the anthropology team of OCEANSTATES participated during 2020-2021 in more than one hundred digital meetings and webinars to follow the unfolding of narratives about climate change, sea level rise, displacement, maritime law, and notions of citizenship. These insights have been supplemented with contributions from political science on questions of state sovereignty and loss of land. By closely following meetings at the United Nations, which under the pandemic have been streamed regularly, it has been possible to record, document and analyse in ethnographic detail the development of prominent diplomatic positions taken by the island (and ocean) states of the Pacific concerning sea level rise and the security of maritime boundaries, and mirrored in legal debates. The OCEANSTATES PI's familiarity with the UN diplomatic scene facilitated continuous informal discussions with Pacific UN representatives on these matters throughout 2020-2021, despite lockdown and travel restrictions. This analysis, as well as the presence in 2022 of OCEANSTATES researchers at several high-level global ocean meetings, indicates a significant oncoming move in global diplomatic discussions towards a certain prominence for recent Pacific Islands positions on the international legal permanence of maritime boundaries once registered, sea-level rise notwithstanding. At the local Pacific level, anthropological findings of the project include an MA thesis from 2021 that documents how the ocean provides coastal communities in the Pacific with a buffer of resilience, as maritime resources have been creatively used as subsistence to relieve economic tensions instigated by the pandemic. Meanwhile, the project’s PhD candidate in anthropology conducts ground-breaking field research on Pacific ocean activism and how these local action fields relate to global arenas.