When the Land Goes Under: Climate Displacement and the Sovereignty Crisis Facing Kiribati, Tuvalu, and the Low-Lying Pacific

In November 2023, Tuvalu and Australia signed the Falepili Union — a bilateral treaty under which Australia agreed to admit Tuvaluans as migrants under a new visa pathway in exchange for Tuvalu granting Australia veto power over its security partnerships with third countries. The agreement was described by Canberra as a landmark act of climate solidarity; it was described by critics — including Pacific legal scholars and regional sovereignty advocates — as the formalisation of a protectorate, in which a disappearing nation traded its foreign policy independence for the right to relocate its population to Australian soil. The distinction matters. One is a humanitarian commitment. The other is, in Teresia Teaiwa's framing, the continuation of colonial administration by other means.

Climate displacement in the Pacific is not a future scenario. It is a present reality that is accelerating. The IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, published across 2021-2022, projected that sea levels in the tropical Pacific would rise by 0.3 to 1.0 metres by 2100 under moderate emissions scenarios, with worst-case scenarios projecting higher ranges that would render significant portions of Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, Tokelau, and the Maldives uninhabitable well before mid-century. The physical science is not contested. What is contested — and almost entirely absent from mainstream diplomatic and security discourse — is the question of what happens to statehood, sovereignty, and the legal personality of nations when the territory that underpins their recognition under international law ceases to exist above the waterline.

The Statehood Problem

International law, as codified in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, defines statehood through four criteria: a permanent population, a defined territory, an effective government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states. All four of these criteria are threatened by sea-level rise in different ways, and international law has no settled answer to the question of what happens when a recognised state loses its physical territory. Kiribati and Tuvalu are parties to the United Nations Charter and members of the UN General Assembly. Their membership does not expire if their atolls are inundated — but the legal basis for that membership becomes increasingly contested as their habitability declines.

Kiribati's government under President Taneti Maamau has pursued a strategy of purchasing land in Fiji — approximately 5,000 acres on Vanua Levu — as a hedge against complete territorial loss. The Fijian land purchase, announced in 2014 and expanded subsequently, provides a physical backup territory for the I-Kiribati people, but does not resolve the sovereignty question: Kiribati's territory would remain formally the atolls of the Gilbert, Phoenix, and Line Islands groups, not the purchased Fijian land. The government-in-exile model — a state that retains legal personality while operating from a different physical base — has precedent in wartime Europe but has never been tested in the context of permanent territorial submersion.

The Hauʻofa Dimension: Who Owns the Ocean?

Epeli Hauʻofa's sea-of-islands framework offers a different entry point to the sovereignty question. If Pacific peoples have always understood their world as constituted primarily by ocean rather than land — if the atolls are meeting points rather than boundaries — then the legal framework derived from European terrestrial sovereignty concepts is itself a colonial imposition that may not be the most useful tool for addressing the climate crisis. Hauʻofa's reimagining of Oceania as a maritime world suggests that sovereignty, for Pacific peoples, might be rooted in the ocean itself rather than in the land that sits above it.

This is not merely philosophical speculation. Several Pacific Island governments have raised the question of whether their exclusive economic zones — which extend 200 nautical miles from their territorial baselines — should be treated as permanent maritime sovereignty regardless of changes to the land territory from which those baselines were originally calculated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has acknowledged the legal complexity; so has the UN International Law Commission. There is no settled answer, but the question has real implications. Kiribati's EEZ alone covers approximately 3.5 million square kilometres of Pacific Ocean — an area containing significant tuna fisheries, deep-sea mineral deposits, and strategic maritime transit routes. If Kiribati's land disappears but its EEZ is treated as dissolved alongside it, those resources become available to other states, including Australia, the United States, China, and Japan.

The Emissions Responsibility Gap

The emissions that are causing Pacific climate displacement were not produced by Pacific Island states. The combined greenhouse gas emissions of all fourteen Pacific Islands Forum members amount to a fraction of one percent of global annual emissions. The emissions that are inundating Kiribati were produced — and continue to be produced — primarily by the industrial economies: the United States, China, the European Union, Russia, India, and Australia. Australia, which shares Pacific Island geography and positions itself as the primary external partner of the Pacific Islands Forum, is one of the world's largest per-capita emitters and the world's largest coal exporter. The coalition between Australia's role as Pacific security partner and its role as carbon exporter is one of the central contradictions of Pacific climate politics.

The Guardian reported on 18 April 2026 that Australian government data shows coal mine emissions increasing under the Albanese government's climate policy framework — a result driven by the use of carbon offsets that allow mines to claim net-zero compliance while continuing to expand production. This is the structural contradiction that Greg Fry's Pacific-way scholarship and Teresia Teaiwa's decolonial framework both identify: Australia positions itself as a partner in Pacific climate resilience while its domestic political economy systematically prevents the emissions reductions that Pacific survival requires. The Falepili Union offers Tuvaluans Australian residency; it does not offer them a commitment to the emissions reductions that would make relocation unnecessary.

Joseph Stiglitz's analysis of how globalisation's benefits and costs are distributed applies directly to climate displacement. The economic model that produced Australian coal wealth — and the LNG exports that, as Bloomberg's tanker-tracking data shows, are being rerouted around the Hormuz closure in April 2026 — generated profits that flow overwhelmingly to Australian corporations and their international shareholders. The costs of that model — rising seas, intensifying cyclones, coral bleaching, freshwater contamination from salt intrusion — are borne overwhelmingly by Pacific Island peoples who neither produced the emissions nor captured the profits.

What Solidarity Would Actually Look Like

The Falepili Union model — migration rights in exchange for security alignment — is likely to become a template as climate displacement accelerates. Australia has already been in preliminary discussions with other Pacific Island governments about analogous arrangements. New Zealand's Pacific Access Category visa scheme predates the climate crisis but is now explicitly framed as a climate adaptation mechanism. The institutional logic of these arrangements is that wealthy countries absorb displaced Pacific populations while retaining the right to define the terms of absorption — including, in the Falepili case, veto power over the displaced nation's foreign policy choices.

A solidarity model grounded in decolonial principles would look different. It would begin with binding emissions reduction commitments commensurate with historical responsibility — not net-zero pledges built on offset mechanisms that allow coal mine expansion. It would fund adaptation at the scale that Pacific Island governments have requested in successive Pacific Islands Forum communiqués: billions of dollars annually for seawall construction, freshwater infrastructure, agricultural adaptation, and community relocation support. It would respect the sovereign right of Pacific Island governments to form their own security partnerships without Australian veto, recognising that the condition attached to the Falepili Union violates the principle of sovereign equality that Pacific states have fought for since independence.

And it would treat the question of submerged statehood — the novel legal problem that Kiribati and Tuvalu face — as a matter requiring urgent multilateral resolution through the United Nations system, with Pacific Island states in the lead rather than at the receiving end of a solution designed by the international legal establishment.

Monexus covers climate displacement as a sovereignty and justice story, because framing it as a "migration" story obscures who is responsible and who is owed.