How small islands are confronting existential climate threat

From erecting seawalls to selling citizenship, vulnerable small islands are taking sometimes drastic measures to protect themselves from rising seas, storms and economic devastation.

For decades now, scientists have been warning that without action to combat emissions, some low-lying islands will literally disappear beneath the waves. Many others will become uninhabitable as extreme weather increasingly batters their coastlines.

From reclaiming land from the sea to selling citizenship, the BBC looks at some of the measures already being taken to save these low-lying nations.

With sea-levels rising, one obvious response is to create new land. This has been the approach of the Maldives, a low-lying 1,200-island archipelago some 400 miles (644km) south of India.

With these natural protections destroyed or undermined, flooding risk can go up. According to one paper, most of the inhabited islands in the Maldives now exhibit an “altered-to-annihilated capacity to respond to ocean-climate pressures”. A 2023 paper found that land reclamations in the Maldives “lack a systematic approach” to anticipate sea-level rise and fail to account for local flood risk in their design and location choices.

The UN’s climate body, the IPCC, has warned that land reclamation can become “a vicious cycle” for islands. By degrading ecosystems such as reefs and mangroves, land reclamation can compromise the protection they offer to island communities, and thus actually increase their exposure and vulnerability, according to the IPCC.

Responding to these concerns, Ali Shareef, the Maldives’ special envoy for climate change, told the BBC that with 99% of the country’s territory being ocean, land scarcity remains among its most pressing challenges. “As such, reclamation has become a necessary strategy to cater the needs of our growing population and to create new economic opportunities,” he says. “However, we have regulations in place to minimise the impacts and damages.”

Shareef adds that in recent years the Maldives has placed “a strong emphasis” on nature-based solutions, including mangrove and coral reef restoration, as well as attempting to minimise the impacts of construction on shorelines.

However, he acknowledges that there are still knowledge gaps. “We recognise the critical importance of balancing development with environmental sustainability,” he says. “This has led us to integrate climate resilience and ecosystem protection into our reclamation projects. A key example is the Ras Malé eco-city, designed to be raised 3m (10ft) above sea level and powered entirely by renewable energy.”

The most common measure used on islands to protect coasts, however, are seawalls. These promise a dual benefit of preventing soil sliding away (coastal erosion) and protecting the shoreline from waves and flooding.

However, poorly constructed seawalls can collapse: on Indian Ocean islands such as Seychelles, the shorelines are “littered with broken seawalls and groynes“, according to the IPPC (groynes are protective structures which lie perpendicular to the shore). Seawalls can shift problems of shoreline erosion and lowland inundation elsewhere: in one case, a seawall erected to protect a village in Samoa was not long enough to protect all the houses, leading some families to face increasing impacts from large waves.

All this takes money, however, and where to get the rising amounts needed for such protection is not an easy challenge. Nor is sea-level rise the only climate threat to low-lying island nations. The highly disaster-vulnerable Caribbean island of Dominica is one country with an unusual, and potentially risky, strategy here.

“Our devastation is so complete that our recovery has to be total,” prime minister Roosevelt Skerrit told the UN General Assembly at the time. The situation, he said, presented a unique, if unchosen, opportunity to be an example to the world of how “an entire nation rebounds from disaster” and “can be climate resilient for the future”.

Not all this money is going into resilience, and Dominica has other sources of funds too, but the long-term viability of relying on the passport income as a strategy to increase resilience against climate change is not assured. Concern is growing internationally around such citizenship schemes, which promote visa-free travel to a number of countries as one of the main benefits to customers. In 2023, the UK withdrew visa-free travel for citizens of Dominica over security concerns about citizenship being granted to people who posed a risk to the UK. A 2023 EU Commission report concluded Dominica had issued far more passports than officially stated. The EU commission raised security concerns about the trade, proposing a suspension in its visa-free regime for countries selling citizenship.

A 2024 report from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Dominica noted that recent international scrutiny of citizenship-by-investment schemes “threatens the viability” of financial flows for post-disaster reconstruction and development.

The government of Dominica did not respond to a request for comment.

So where else can these small developing island countries get the money needed to fight climate impacts?

Many island states are becoming increasingly frustrated with slow progress at UN climate talks, especially when it comes to delivering money to support countries vulnerable to climate impacts.

A key focus for COP29 was for countries to agree on a promised new target for climate finance going forwards, with many developing countries pushing for at least $1.3tn (£1.03tn) and small island states pushing for $39bn (£31bn) within this specifically for them. In the final hours of the conference, Aosis temporarily walked out of the finance talks. Speaking just after COP29 concluded in late November 2024, Michai Roberts, lead negotiator on finance for Aosis, told the BBC that other countries were “laughing at them” for asking for larger sums of money to help them tackle climate change. “The size of the damage to our economies [from climate change] outweighs any sort of per capita calculation of how much money we’re getting,” he said, adding that Aosis has always been “pragmatic” in the UN talks.

In a statement, Marshall Islands climate envoy Tina Stege said the conference had seen “the very worst of political opportunism”. “We are leaving with a small portion of the funding climate-vulnerable countries urgently need,” she said. “It isn’t nearly enough, but it’s a start.”

In August 2024, Papua New Guinea’s prime minister James Marape announced the country was pulling out of COP29 as a “protest at the big nations” with large carbon footprints for their “lack of support” to climate victims and forest and ocean nations.

“Our economy needs money yet we are preserving trees as the lungs of the Earth, whilst industrialised nations keep on emitting,” Marape said. “You have not paid for any conservation.”

But climate advocates have warned a move to stop attending such talks could have the opposite effect, isolating the country from climate discussions and weakening its ability to access climate finance. And in the end, Papua New Guinea did send a delegation, although Marape did not attend. From Papua New Guinea, he urged “genuine action on preserving the world’s rainforests”, adding that he hopes rainforest nations will have a stronger voice at next year’s COP30 in Brazil.

Other islands frustrated with the lack of movement on climate finance have been taking a different tack. Barbados prime minister Mia Mottley has become a well known name at climate talks due to her campaign to reform international finance, especially with regards to debt cancellation and restructuring, to help vulnerable countries better afford measures to cut emissions, adapt to climate change and deal with climate disasters.

At an opening speech at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, in November 2024, Mottley urged delegates to loosen the “economic noose of tightening fiscal space” by delivering “urgently needed financial reforms”. She called for developed countries and carbon producers to boost climate money without increasing debt in “already burdened” developing countries using global levies on stock and bond trades, shipping and fossil fuel extraction.

A higher frequency of climate disasters is just one reason why many are urging a rethink on how money is lent to poorer countries. And Mottley is not the only leader calling for a step change on debt when it comes to climate impacts. A joint letter signed by the prime ministers of Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada in July 2024 outlined this need following the “horrific devastation wrought by Hurricane Beryl” on small island economies.

Addressed to the UK government, the letter called for immediate debt cancellation in all three countries and a “Marshall Plan” for small island states, in reference to the US programme of support to postwar Europe in the late 1940s.

“Many small islands are struggling with insupportable debt burdens caused not by fiscal profligacy, but the elevated cost of repeated rebuilding after intensifying climate-related shocks for which they bear no responsibility,” the letter read.

“Rich and big countries are largely responsible for accumulated emissions, and most able to evade their debilitating consequences. So they owe it to small islands to drastically change this palpably unfair and inequitable settlement.”

Some small island states are now taking to international courts as another avenue to push richer countries to act on emissions and deliver climate finance, including the requests for money to cover the loss and damage from climate impacts, long a topic of fierce tension at climate talks.

Other court rulings brought about by islands have already been given. In September 2022, eight Torres Strait Islander people won a legal action against Australia at the UN’s Human Rights Committee for climate-induced damages to their ancestral lands. It was the first legal action brought, and won, by climate-vulnerable inhabitants of low-lying islands against a nation state.

Some islands are acknowledging, though, that there are some places that no amount of money will be able to save. In Fiji, an archipelago of more than 300 islands where dozens of coastal villages may soon be underwater, for example, the government has begun a careful village relocation programme. One local community has mandated that young adults building their family home should do so up-slope from the existing village, which is regularly flooded, to allow it to slowly transition away from danger.

At a high level UN meeting in September 2024, small-island states issued a joint declaration affirming their right to retain statehood, sovereignty and UN membership, regardless of the course of sea level rise. Fiame Naomi Mata’afa, prime minister of Samoa and chair of Aosis, said in a release that island states have “stayed firm” for over 20 years and that “our states, maritime zones, and rights remain intact under international law, no matter the rising seas: we are here to stay”.

There may always be a way to keep something of the islands set to be lost to climate change. But few are ready to give up the fight for their territories to remain as real, liveable islands for their citizens.

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