As such, there is no legal, cultural or economic precedent for what happens to a group of nationals who no longer have a physical home. “A new concept of citizenship will have to be developed internationally,” says Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School. “I have confidence that island nations will still be states throughout this century, but the next one is another question, with many uncertainties.”

Those uncertainties bring up many questions, he says. Does the submerged nation still have a seat at the UN? Does it have an exclusive economic zone, and therefore the right to control fishing and mineral exploitation in its waters? Where will its people go? What will their citizenship be? And do they have any legal rights against greenhouse gas emitters or nations?

These questions will be further complicated by the political and environmental landscape of the not-too-distant future. By the time island nations begin to actually disappear, Gerrard says, the world at large will be in crisis mode, with massive displacements occurring in low lying areas such as Bangladesh, the Nile Delta, the Mekong Delta and many other places. As such, the legal and logistical problems of small island states will not likely be a top global priority.

Refugee status

Gerrard fears that the current situation in Syria and parts of Africa, in which hundreds of thousands of people displaced by political and economic strife are desperately fleeing their homes and seeking safe haven – many of them dying in the process – is a harbinger of what is to come if the world does not prepare. “The numbers of people involved in the current crisis are one or two orders of magnitude [lower] than what would eventually be faced in a climate crisis,” he says.

While Gerrard is reluctant to predict 85 years into the future, he points out that the situation for nationals who lose their state, even now, is far from clear. While island nations are thinking about these problems, most other countries are not. There is currently no international agreement on the fate of climate-displaced people – the legal term for someone forced to flee their home because of problems caused by global warming – and no one has yet to make a successful bid for citizenship based on the effects of climate change.