The rising tide: climate change and borders

In March 2010 the minute uninhabited island of New Moore or South Talpatti vanished. Where the year before there had been a small flat island that never rose more than two meters above the sea there was now only open water.

 At the time the media was a little sensationalist. It was cited as an example, possibly the first, of a whole island being lost to the rising seas of the climate change era. In fact it was, according to Indian academic Sugata Hazra a combination of rising seas, increased monsoonal rain than had in turn increased erosion and subsidence than had combined to pull New Moore/South Talpatti below the waves. Climate change played the decisive role but it wasn’t as if the Indian Ocean jumped by two meters overnight.

 The island has been given two names above for a particular reason. It is, or was, claimed by two nations. To the Indian government, who raised their flag on it in 1981, it was New Moore. To the authorities in Bangladesh it was South Talpatti. To both it was invaluable in staking a claimed to a treasure trove of oil and gas predicted to be held beneath the ocean floor around it. The fact that climate change effectively ended this dispute and further complicated the rights to exploit any potential natural resources in the region is the most interesting aspect of the story of March 2010. The rising of the oceans driven by climate change is a scientific truth but the way this will change the very boundaries of the world and shape the politics of ownership is much less explored.

This was discussed earlier in the week in an article in The Diplomat concerning the myriad of small islands in the South China Sea often claimed by three or four separate countries. A more complex version of the situation in the Indian Ocean the territorial waters, rights for exploitation and fisheries and the history of seven different nations are tied up in various disputes over islands. It is a fairly commonly help belief among defence analysts that the increasingly tense stand offs over these islands, especially between China and Japan and North and South Korean may be the most likely cause of war in South East Asia in the immediate future. However as the article points out, some of the islands in question are so low lying they are submerged during typhoons. Those that aren’t are still only a few meters above sea level at the most and are some of the places in the world most vulnerable to sea level rises. While national pride and vast amounts of money may be at steak when claim to islands are made they may have been drowned before disputes can be resolved.

One of the islands in the Spratly Islands archipelago. Claimed by five different nations nowhere on the archipelago is higher than 4m above the sea.

 A separate issue is the loss of land already inhabited. Major sea level rise over the next century is predicted to destroy huge areas of coastal Bangladesh, reducing the size of the country drastically. More pressing than that is the potential for whole inhabited islands to vanish. Scores of tropical atolls such as Piul Island in Papua New Guinea are being washed away and year after year their inhabitants can do nothing but watch as their land noticeably shrinks. The concept of boarders and boundaries may be intrinsically human but in these cases nature is beginning to decide where countries begin and end, or even if they exist at all.