Valiente's mother is Panamanian, but his father is Kuna, an autonomous people with origins in present-day Colombia who live in an archipelago of over 300 islands off of Panama's Caribbean coast. Growing up, Valiente, now 27, would spend about three months a year living with his father's parents on their native island—a world he describes as deeply "communal"—and the rest of his time on the mainland.

Beyond the realities of climate-related disaster lies a more technical problem: The definition of "refugee" in international law does not offer explicit guarantees, such as legal protection and social rights, to people whose situations would otherwise offer them the label "climate refugees." The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) acknowledges the realities of coastal communities like the Kuna, but in light of the legal complexities of the term "refugee," the agency chooses to use the phrase "persons displaced in the context of climate change."

"You can imagine if you were on one of those little islands during a storm in which waves were six, seven, or 10 feet high or greater, the island would be extremely vulnerable," Larsen told me. "People would have to leave."

The islands already experience a sea level rise of about three millimeters, according to Matthew Larsen, director of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. But an increased vulnerability to storms will push the Kuna off the islands before the archipelago slips completely underwater.

The region, known as Kuna Yala to residents, and as the San Blas Islands to the thousands of tourists who visit each year, looks like paradise. But the islands have a creeping expiration date. By 2050, the 50,000 people currently living in the archipelago could be counted among the millions of "climate refugees" expected to surge across the globe.

Whether or not international law is ready, though, climate refugees are coming. For many, it is a question of if, not when.

In September 2016, Panama ratified the Paris Agreement , the United Nations' climate change treaty that aims to keep temperature rise below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels. The country, which is roughly the size of Los Angeles and home to some 3,700,000 people, established efforts to deal with the effects of climate change in March 2015, reshaping the National Environment Authority into the Ministry of Environment in an effort to give the government greater authority in environmental issues.

Aresio Valiente López, Diwigdi Valiente's father and the environmental lawyer for the Kuna, said that the Kuna are more or less on their own. He has spent the last 15 years working to create laws that protect the environment here and autotomize the Indigenous peoples.

"How do you explain to these people that they have to move because of something that they didn't cause?"

"My generation," Valiente told me, "we have grown up listening about climate change all the time…I was always thinking somebody was working to solve it. But then I realized that nobody was working on it, especially in Panama, with the Kuna people."

Larsen called the Kuna's move inevitable—and indeed, for Kuna of Valiente's age, it's a familiar story. Today, Valiente lives in Panama City, where he works for the Ministry of Finance in addition to being an Indigenous climate change activist.

But Larsen points out that the Panamanian government, as well as most of the world's countries , face overwhelming costs when it comes to climate change. The Kuna will likely receive little outside assistance as they face the destruction of storms and relocate to the mainland simply because of the task's astronomical costs, López and Larsen noted.

The Ministry of Environment has been working with the Kuna's congress since 2007 to assess the region's physical, socioeconomic and biotic vulnerabilities, according to Rosilena Lindo, the ministry's climate change director. This year, Lindo said in a translated written statement, the agency is hoping to focus on developing a National Adaptation Plan that emphasizes priority areas, including Kuna Yala, as the coastal nation works to respond to rising tides.

"What we're likely to see happen is tragedies like Hurricane Katrina when it hit New Orleans: almost 2,000 people died in the Gulf Coast, thousands were displaced, about a quarter of the population of New Orleans never came back after the evacuation," he noted. "If one of the most developed countries in the world, the United States, can't do better than that, then imagine what a country with limited means will have to do."

"Most countries—the US, Panama, you name it—are not going to be able to be proactive in adapting, for the most part," Larsen said. Miami is already spending hundreds of millions of dollars to raise roads and install water pumps to fight off increasing sea levels.

Larsen expects that people will end up having to move on their own without significant government support due to the "astronomical" costs.

The Kuna have had territories on the mainland since their 1925 fight for independence, but land alone is not the solution. Valiente points out that the Kuna will eventually need funds to transport entire communities off the island and set up new water supplies, electricity and sewage systems. Additionally, the Kuna still on the island tend to speak only their native tongue, a barrier to employment on the Spanish-speaking mainland. And of course, no funds will make up for the potential loss of cultural heritage.

"How do you explain to these people that they have to move because of something that they didn't cause?" Valiente said. "And who should be responsible for funding these movements?"

The Kuna people aren't alone. They are among other populations, from Canada to the South Pacific, forced to look for land elsewhere.

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In 2014, Kiribati, an island state in the Pacific, purchased several thousand acres of land on neighboring Fiji for agriculture, as rising sea levels depleted freshwater sources that fed the nation's crops. As Motherboard reported in 2015, that land might have to serve as a relocation space for the nation's entire population.