High tides are already destroying homes, gardens and fresh water supplies on Papua New Guinea’s Carteret Islands, which may vanish completely beneath the waves as early as 2015. An evacuation of the Carterets’ 2,000 inhabitants to another part of Papua New Guinea has begun.

If low-lying island states such as Kiribati (population 93,000) and Tuvalu (population 10,000) follow suit, their problems will be much more complex than simply packing up and moving somewhere else. All the institutions of a modern nation state — parliaments, police, law courts, state education and healthcare — will have disappeared along with the coral atolls, sandy beaches and palm trees.

The islanders will either have to find a way to reconstitute their vanished state elsewhere, or they will have to find another state to adopt them as citizens, give them a passport and provide them with all the other forms of protection and assistance that a state exists to give its people. Alternatively they will become stateless — about as stateless as you can possibly be.

A 2005 working paper submitted to the UN commission on human rights framed the dilemma succinctly: “Whilst states are used to addressing issues of state succession, it would appear that the extinction of a state, without there being a successor, is unprecedented”. The paper then outlined a long list of awkward questions that would arise in such a scenario, most of them concerning the rights of the affected population, and who would be responsible for ensuring those rights were observed.

It will be scant consolation — but, in the event of a state sinking, its inhabitants will not be alone. UNHCR (which has a mandate for stateless people as well as for refugees) currently has an official figure of 5.8 million stateless people spread across 49 countries. However, the agency believes the true total may be closer to 15 million.

Some people end up stateless because of legislative or bureaucratic accidents — not necessarily because someone has deliberately deprived them of their national identity. Even if no state has sunk yet, millions have become stateless because the state in which they or their ancestors were born has changed shape in some abstract way: been created or divided or dissolved, decolonised, conquered or freed.

Whenever a state is modified in some such fundamental way, the issue of who is — and who is not — a citizen comes to the fore. Those who fall through the cracks during this process often have nowhere else to go.
Powerless to alter their situation, they are often pushed by the bureaucratic tide to the margins of society, where they stay vulnerable, impoverished and all too easy to ignore.

Others become stateless as an unforeseen consequence of a change in domestic legislation, or because of an incompatibility between the laws of two different states. And a sizeable minority are the victims of a more pernicious form of statelessness: the deliberate exclusion of entire groups because of some political, religious or ethnic discrimination.

But there are some currents of fresh air blowing through the strange, sad world of the stateless. There have been recent political and legislative breakthroughs for large groups of stateless people in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Nepal, and some Gulf states. Gradually more governments are realising that burying their heads in the sand when it comes to groups of stateless people on their territory is no solution.

If this trend continues, it may just be that by the time the first island state is submerged, its erstwhile inhabitants will find a world more inclined to take the necessary steps to prevent them from being forced into the shadowy global ghetto of the stateless. Arresting climate change will be a Herculean task. But preventing this particular side effect should not be beyond the collective capability of the international community.
Guardian