East of Australia and north of New Zealand lies Tuvalu, a constellation of nine low-lying coral islands scattered across the Pacific Ocean. None rises more than a few metres above sea level, yet they sustain more than 10,000 people, along with a rich cultural life shaped by food traditions, faith, art, and close-knit community ties. Despite its small size, Tuvalu now stands at the forefront of one of the most urgent global debates of our time: climate change.
Climate change is threatening the very foundations of Tuvaluan identity. As sea levels rise, they push steadily inland across islands that offer no higher ground to retreat to. The country is, in the most literal sense of the word, disappearing. Sandbag walls line the shores in an attempt to hold back the ocean, yet flooding persists and temporary defences cannot withstand a permanent rise in sea levels.
The consequences are no longer abstract. Many Tuvaluans have begun emigrating to Australia under the 2023 Falepili Union treaty, which provides up to 280 permanent residence visas annually in recognition of the existential threat facing the nation. What emerges is not voluntary migration, but forced displacement; climate refugees in the truest sense.
This raises a deeper legal question. Under the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, statehood requires four criteria: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states.
If territory physically disappears and a population disperses, what remains of the state? In strictly traditional terms of international law, Tuvalu may exist a little less with each wave. The reason that Tuvalu may disappear as a state is not the fault of its leaders or people. Instead, it symbolises the accumulated impact of the constant, unsustainable abuse of our world and resources. Climate change is driven by fossil fuels, carbon dioxide, and greenhouse gas emissions, as well as deforestation and overconsumption. These issues manifest in disastrous effects, including rising global temperatures, increased health risks, poverty, displacement, food scarcity, and extreme weather events. However, perhaps the most pressing is rising sea levels, which are gradually and relentlessly eating away at the shores of many coastal nations. Tuvalu is one of its first fatalities.
The Tuvaluan government is far from a silent victim. At COP27 in 2022, it announced that Tuvalu would become the world’s first digital nation: a twenty-first-century response to a twenty-first-century problem. The plan was bold: digitally recreate its territory, archive its history and culture, and transition governmental functions into virtual space, declaring itself “the first digital government”. In this vision, digital space becomes political space—a new site of sovereignty capable of sustaining statehood even if physical territory is lost.
By COP28, this was no longer just rhetoric. Tuvalu announced it had upgraded communications infrastructure through new submarine cables to enable cloud governance, and had begun developing a blockchain-based digital ID system to safely digitise everything from passports, to elections, to deaths and marriages, keeping its diaspora informed, organised and empowered.
But sovereignty is also personal. Using laser technology, Tuvalu has created a highly realistic 3D LiDAR scan of its islands, capturing many of the intricacies of the unique landscape that may soon be washed away. Perhaps most inspiringly, the Tuvaluan government has invited its citizens to contribute treasured personal cultural items to be documented and uploaded to a digital archive to create a “living record” of their culture that cannot be washed away.
Most radically, Tuvalu amended its constitution to declare that the state shall endure in perpetuity, regardless of territorial loss due to climate change. Twenty-five states have formally acknowledged its continued sovereignty. It is clear that the Tuvaluan government isn’t ready to let its history, culture and identity sink with the island, so it begs the question: What can Tuvalu actually do?
What happens when a core element of statehood disappears remains unsettled in international law: there is no agreed doctrine governing the extinction or preservation of a state whose territory becomes uninhabitable.
Some proposals attempt to preserve physical territory. One option is artificial land reclamation, as explored by the Maldives in response to rising sea levels. Another approach is leasing or purchasing land from another state, as seen when Kiribati acquired 5,500 acres of land in Fiji to combat its own physical vulnerabilities. More experimental ideas include floating or mobile states. These are self-sufficient, independent and eco-friendly nations atop large, buoyant platforms; an artificial landmass upon which people and governments exercise sovereignty. However, beyond the obvious expense, the legal classification of these alternatives is still underdeveloped and contested, and it is unclear whether they would actually satisfy the criteria of the Montevideo Convention.
A more legally grounded proposal concerns the preservation of maritime zones. Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), maritime entitlements are measured from a state’s baselines along its natural shore. These generate territorial seas, exclusive economic zones, and continental shelf rights. If those baselines shift as sea levels rise, maritime zones would contract. Yet some scholars argue that existing maritime boundaries should be fixed and not withdrawn as coastlines recede. If preserved, these zones could prevent a submerged state’s waters from reverting to the unowned high seas, potentially allowing a sinking state to retain jurisdictional space consistent with the Montevideo criteria. In the Pacific, this approach has gained traction. Through extensive treaty practice and coordination within the Pacific Islands Forum, island states have sought to lock in their maritime boundaries irrespective of changing shorelines. In this sense, sovereignty becomes anchored not to land, but to recognised maritime frontiers codified through treaties. However, this solution depends heavily on treaty recognition and continued political support. Withdrawal or non-recognition by other states could destabilise such arrangements, rendering sovereignty precarious.
In a more passive progression, Tuvalu may instead evolve into what some scholars describe as a “deterritorialised state”, a continuing subject of international law no longer anchored to inhabitable land, but to maritime rights and governmental continuity. But Tuvalu is not passive. Through its digital transformation, it has made clear that symbolic recognition is not enough; it demands a concrete and legally coherent solution. Tuvalu has had to be independent and innovative in solving a universal problem that has quite literally washed up on its shores.
There is no perfect solution. The tides will continue to crawl up the shores, and international law will continue to debate, hesitate, and ponder. Faced with this legal gap, Tuvalu refuses to disappear quietly.
Tuvalu is engraving its land into data, its culture into archives, and its sovereignty into the cloud.
In doing so, Tuvaluans aren’t waiting for the law to be their saviour; they are forcing the law to confront a future it was never designed to imagine. As the engine of climate change, the international community owes Tuvalu this new conception of sovereignty while it waits for international law to catch up.
Written by Jessica Hall, Edited by Raleigh Kuipers
Photo Credit: “A beach at Funafuti atoll, Tuvalu, on a sunny day” by Stefan Lins (uploaded March 2000) on Wikimedia Commons.
