Small Island States and the Paris Agreement

Islands predominated in the Paris COP negotiations.[1] From metaphor to moral compass to declarations of kinship—like President Obama’s the small island developing states’ vulnerability, dignity, and ambitions served as a rudder. Among other significant provisions discussed below, the response of the Agreement and the decision text—the latter a supporting though not legally binding document—and to demands for capacity building and efficient, simplified procedures for accessing financial resources directly addressed small islands’ concerns. And so the closing movements of the meetings offered congratulatory and hortatory words from island representatives, including a spontaneous, harmonized chorus of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds stressing the refrain, “Every little thing is gonna be alright."[2] Small island states representatives are, however, clear-eyed about the potential of the Paris Agreement and understand that it is but a foothold in a much, much steeper journey. In Paris they were represented primarily by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) negotiating bloc, a coalition of small island and low-lying coastal countries that share similar development challenges and concerns about the environment, especially their vulnerability to the adverse effects of global climate change. AOSIS, with 44 members and observers from all regions of the world, works as a negotiating voice for small island developing states (SIDS). The small islands representatives demanded a number of elements, including a long-term temperature goal of “well below 1.5 degrees” Celsius above pre-industrial levels, an indicative pathway to achieve it, an international mechanism on Loss and Damage due to climate-related events, and scaled-up, reliable financial resources above the $100 billion per year by 2020 already promised by developed countries to developing nations, particularly the most vulnerable

Rehabilitation: A Proposal for a Climate Compensation Mechanism for Small Island States

For over two decades, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) has attempted to craft a funding mechanism that would address loss and damage resulting from climate change. With a steady drumbeat, AOSIS has developed and advocated a three-pronged proposal, emphasizing the need for more robust approaches to (i) disaster risk reduction and management, (ii) risk transfer, that is, shifting risk from one to another through insurance, and (iii) compensation and rehabilitation. Relative to the urgency and enormity of the climate crisis, the overall package is underdeveloped, with some members of the international community expressing reservation or outright resistance to its evolution. Comparatively speaking,however, the former two prongs have received more attention, with risk transfer or insurance being the most developed element of the proposal. As the specter of irreversible, slow-onset events-such as sea level rise, drought, and ocean acidification looms larger and more concrete, means for rehabilitating vulnerable island states has become particularly important. In this article, Professor Burkett explores the crucial elements of a funding mechanism to address the significant impacts of slow-onset events on small island states and provides a rationale for a compensation and rehabilitation mechanism, as well as a proposed framework for implementing it

Climate-induced migration and the role of philanthropy

We are now in a ʻno-analogue’ state according to University of Hawaioceanography professor, Dr Richard Zeebe. In other words, in the documented history of our planet, we have not seen the amount of carbon released combined with the speed with which we are depositing it in the atmosphere. We are entering a future without precedent

Strategic Voting and African-Americans: True Vote, True Representation, True Power for, the Black Community

As long as American politics remain securely bound to the two-party system, Blacks will remain a voting block; a block that may shift, but a block nonetheless. And although this appears to be to our strategic disadvantage, allowing conviction to direct us, as well as a deep respect for the intense struggle for the franchise, will forever be a noble posture

The Nation Ex-Situ: On Climate Change, Deterritorialized Nationhood and the Post-climate Era

It is plausible that the impacts of climate change will render certain nation-states uninhabitable before the close of the century. While this may be the fate of a small number of those nation-states most vulnerable to climate change, its implications for the evolution of statehood and international law in a "post-climate" regime is potentially seismic. I argue that to respond to the phenomenon of landless nationstates, international law could accommodate an entirely new category of international actors. I introduce the Nation Ex-Situ. Ex-situ nationhood is a status that allows for the continued existence of a sovereign state, afforded all of the rights and benefits of sovereignty amongst the family of states, in perpetuity. In practice this would require the creation of a government framework that could exercise authority over a diffuse people. I elaborate on earlier calls to use a political trusteeship system to provide the framework for an analogous structure. I seek to accomplish two quite different but intimately related tasks: first, to define and justify the recognition of deterritorialized nation-states, and, second, to explain the trusteeship arrangement that will undergird the ex-situ nation. In doing so, I introduce the notion of a post-climate era, in which the very structure of human systems-be they legal, economic, or socio-political-are irrevocably changed and ever-changing