Climate change is increasingly more than an environmental crisis—its human dimension is fast becoming one of the defining legal and political challenges of our era. Tens of millions are already displaced by floods, droughts, and rising seas, while communities like the Torres Strait Islanders face not just the loss of land, but the severing of profound cultural and spiritual ties to place. For low-lying Pacific nations like Tuvalu, the very existence of their state may one day be reduced to legal records and collective memory. So how does international law grapple with nations that no longer have territory? And what stands between the global community’s emerging recommendations to safeguard the right to nationality and the political will to implement them? Associate Professor Radha Govil and Aashish Yadhav, both statelessness researchers from the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at the Melbourne Law School, join host Sami Shah in exploring how climate change is pushing people into statelessness — and what can be done about it.
An Asia Institute podcast. Produced and edited by profactual.com. Music by audionautix.com. Transcript forthcoming.
Image: Offloading cargo from a boat, Niutao island, Tuvalu, May, 2020. Credit: UNDP Climate.