What if the archipelago disappears?
If it does go underwater, that doesn’t mean Tuvalu will cease to be a country. At least that’s what the Prime Minister said last Thursday (21). Prime Minister Kausea Natano questioned the “unnecessary conversations in academic and diplomatic circles about the definition of a country in the light of international law” on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
“Our sovereignty is nonnegotiable,” Tuvalu’s prime minister told AFP, adding his country would work with the international community to “put an end to these distractions.”
What makes a country? The 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States provides that a state consists of a defined territory, a permanent population, a government and the ability to interact with other states. If the territory is consumed or no one can live on what remains of it, at least one of the criteria is no longer met.
land reclamation. However, faced with this possibility, the country launched a coastal adaptation project aimed at reclaiming 3.8 km of land from the ocean, in addition to filling the most vulnerable points of its territory. The project was funded with US$36 million (around R$175 million at current prices) of international aid through the Green Climate Fund and US$2.9 million (R$14 million) from the Government of Tuvalu itself.
Innovative response to the threat. Furthermore, in a worstcase scenario, Tuvalu is shifting its cultural heritage into the digital sphere, in what some are calling the “nationstate 2.0” model.