The Islands That Are Sinking: Politics, Climate, and the Pacific

Sí.

Yes.

En 2022, las Islas Salomón firmaron un pacto de seguridad con China, y fue un terremoto geopolítico en la región.

In 2022, the Solomon Islands signed a security pact with China, and it was a geopolitical earthquake in the region.

Australia y Estados Unidos estaban muy preocupados porque ese acuerdo permitiría a China tener presencia militar, potencialmente, en el Pacífico sur.

Australia and the United States were very worried because that agreement would allow China to have a military presence, potentially, in the south Pacific.

Era algo sin precedentes.

It was something unprecedented.

I covered a piece touching on that whole period.

The Australians were genuinely rattled.

The way the Solomons had pivoted toward Beijing felt, to Canberra, like watching someone change the locks on a house you'd always assumed was yours.

Es una imagen muy buena.

That's a very good image.

Y lo interesante es que China también usa el clima como instrumento diplomático con estas islas.

And the interesting thing is that China also uses climate as a diplomatic instrument with these islands.

Ofrece financiación para infraestructuras, para adaptación al cambio climático, y eso crea una dependencia económica.

It offers funding for infrastructure, for climate adaptation, and that creates economic dependence.

No es solo seguridad militar, es mucho más sutil.

It's not just military security, it's much more subtle.

That subtlety is exactly what makes Pacific island politics so difficult to read from the outside.

When you're a small nation being courted by two superpowers, and you're also literally watching your coastline disappear, every conversation about aid and infrastructure has this enormous weight underneath it.

Los líderes del Pacífico son muy buenos negociadores, precisamente porque han tenido que serlo.

Pacific leaders are very good negotiators, precisely because they have had to be.

En las conferencias climáticas internacionales, son a menudo los representantes de países pequeños los que hablan con más urgencia y más autoridad moral.

At international climate conferences, it is often the representatives of small countries who speak with the most urgency and moral authority.

No tienen ejércitos, pero tienen algo que ningún gran país tiene: la evidencia visible de lo que viene.

They have no armies, but they have something no large country has: the visible evidence of what is coming.

I think about the speech Tuilagi Ionatana gave at COP a few years back, where he stood there and said, essentially, 'you are negotiating over timelines, we are negotiating over whether our country still exists.' There's a quality of witness in that kind of statement that diplomatic language almost never achieves.

Es que hay una diferencia enorme entre hablar del clima como un problema abstracto y vivirlo como una realidad concreta.

There is an enormous difference between talking about climate as an abstract problem and living it as a concrete reality.

En las Islas Salomón, la gente ya sabe lo que significa que suba el nivel del mar.

In the Solomon Islands, people already know what rising sea levels mean.

No necesita modelos matemáticos para entenderlo, lo ve en su jardín.

They don't need mathematical models to understand it, they see it in their garden.

Let's talk about the science for a minute, because the western Pacific is genuinely different from, say, the North Atlantic in how it responds to climate forcing.

The sea level rise there is partly thermal expansion, partly ice melt, but there are also local factors, trade wind patterns, that have accelerated it beyond what the global average would predict.

Eso es algo que no se explica suficientemente.

That is something that is not explained enough.

El cambio climático no es uniforme.

Climate change is not uniform.

Hay regiones donde el impacto es mucho más severo que en otras.

There are regions where the impact is much more severe than in others.

Y el Pacífico tropical occidental es una de esas regiones.

And the western tropical Pacific is one of those regions.

Los modelos climáticos predicen que para el año 2100, algunas de las islas más bajas serán inhabitables durante ciertos períodos del año.

Climate models predict that by 2100, some of the lowest-lying islands will be uninhabitable during certain periods of the year.

And 'uninhabitable during certain periods' is the polite academic formulation.

What it means in practice is saltwater intrusion into freshwater wells, cyclone damage that's more severe because the storm surge has more sea to push, and crops failing because the soil chemistry changes.

La yuca, el taro, los cultivos básicos de estas comunidades, son muy sensibles a la salinización del suelo.

Cassava, taro, the basic crops of these communities, are very sensitive to soil salinization.

Cuando el agua del mar se filtra en la tierra, esos cultivos mueren.

When seawater seeps into the land, those crops die.

Y no hay sustituto fácil.

And there is no easy substitute.

La seguridad alimentaria y el cambio climático están absolutamente conectados en estos lugares.

Food security and climate change are absolutely connected in these places.

Which connects to a bigger question about what we actually mean by 'climate adaptation.' There's a version of that conversation that's almost comfortable, you know, better sea walls, early warning systems, more efficient irrigation.

And then there's the harder version, which is: what do you do when the place itself can't be adapted?

Esa es la pregunta que los líderes del Pacífico llevan años poniendo sobre la mesa en los foros internacionales.

That is the question that Pacific leaders have been putting on the table in international forums for years.

Y la respuesta de los países ricos ha sido, en general, insuficiente.

And the response from wealthy countries has been, in general, insufficient.

Hay promesas de financiación climática, pero el dinero llega tarde, llega poco, y a menudo llega en forma de préstamos, no de donaciones.

There are promises of climate finance, but the money arrives late, arrives little, and often arrives in the form of loans, not grants.

Loans.

I want to sit with that for a second.

You're telling a country whose territory may not exist in fifty years to borrow money to adapt to the thing that's going to erase them.

The moral geometry of that is genuinely strange.

Por eso el concepto de 'pérdidas y daños', en inglés 'loss and damage', se ha convertido en tan central en las negociaciones climáticas.

That is why the concept of 'loss and damage' has become so central in climate negotiations.

Es la idea de que los países que más han contaminado históricamente tienen una responsabilidad económica con los que sufren las consecuencias sin haberlas causado.

It is the idea that countries that have historically polluted the most have an economic responsibility toward those who suffer the consequences without having caused them.

En la COP27, se acordó por primera vez crear un fondo para esto.

At COP27, a fund for this was agreed upon for the first time.

Agreed upon and then, as tends to happen with these international funds, the actual capitalization has moved at a very different pace than the announcement.

Last I checked, the pledges were a fraction of what the science suggests is needed.

Es el patrón habitual.

It's the usual pattern.

Y eso es lo que hace que países como las Islas Salomón busquen alianzas alternativas.

And that is what makes countries like the Solomon Islands seek alternative alliances.

No es necesariamente que confíen más en China que en Australia o en los Estados Unidos.

It's not necessarily that they trust China more than Australia or the United States.

Es que necesitan resultados concretos, y los buscan donde pueden encontrarlos.

It's that they need concrete results, and they look for them wherever they can find them.

That's a really clean way of putting it.

It's not ideology, it's desperation with a smile.

Podría ser el título de un libro.

Could be the title of a book.

Pero sí, creo que es la realidad.

But yes, I think that's the reality.

Y lo mismo ocurre con otros estados insulares del Pacífico: Kiribati, Tuvalu, las Maldivas en el Índico.

And the same happens with other Pacific island states: Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.

Todos están en situaciones similares, todos negocian con los grandes poderes desde una posición de vulnerabilidad extrema.

All are in similar situations, all negotiate with the great powers from a position of extreme vulnerability.

Tuvalu signed a deal with Australia in 2023 that, and this is genuinely extraordinary, offers Tuvaluans a pathway to Australian residency and citizenship if their island becomes uninhabitable.

It was framed as a migration agreement but it's really a contingency plan for the disappearance of a nation.

Es un precedente legal muy interesante y muy inquietante al mismo tiempo.

It's a very interesting and very unsettling legal precedent at the same time.

Porque implica que estamos aceptando que algunos países sencillamente van a desaparecer.

Because it implies that we are accepting that some countries will simply disappear.

No como hipótesis, sino como algo que hay que gestionar administrativamente.

Not as a hypothesis, but as something that needs to be managed administratively.

¿Qué pasa con la soberanía?

What happens with sovereignty?

¿Qué pasa con la zona económica exclusiva de un país que ya no tiene tierra?

What happens with the exclusive economic zone of a country that no longer has land?

That's the question no international law textbook has a clean answer for.

Tuvalu has actually said they intend to claim their maritime exclusive economic zone in perpetuity, even if the physical land is gone.

Which raises a genuinely novel legal question about whether a state can exist without territory.

Es fascinante desde un punto de vista jurídico.

It's fascinating from a legal point of view.

El derecho internacional fue diseñado pensando en estados con fronteras físicas.

International law was designed with states with physical borders in mind.

La idea de una nación sin tierra pero con ciudadanos, con cultura, con zona marítima, pone en cuestión categorías que damos por sentadas.

The idea of a nation without land but with citizens, with culture, with a maritime zone, calls into question categories we take for granted.

Y el cambio climático es lo que ha forzado esta reflexión.

And climate change is what has forced this reflection.

Coming back to the Solomon Islands specifically, and the political crisis: whoever emerges as prime minister in the coming days or weeks faces an immediate governing challenge, but also this longer structural question about how the country positions itself between these competing powers while also, you know, fighting for its physical survival.

Y lo que me parece importante es que esa lucha no es solo económica o política.

And what I think is important is that struggle is not just economic or political.

Es cultural.

It is cultural.

La identidad de muchas comunidades de las Salomón está profundamente ligada a lugares concretos, a islas específicas.

The identity of many communities in the Solomons is deeply tied to specific places, to specific islands.

Perder esa tierra no es solo perder un activo material.

Losing that land is not just losing a material asset.

Es perder quiénes son.

It is losing who they are.

That's something that doesn't translate well into the vocabulary of climate negotiations.

The reports talk about GDP impact, about infrastructure costs, about population displacement statistics.

And those things matter.

But there's a loss in all of this that the spreadsheets genuinely can't capture.

Totalmente.

Completely.

Y por eso me parece que el voto de ayer en Honiara, aunque parezca un asunto interno menor, merece atención.

And that is why I think the vote yesterday in Honiara, although it may seem a minor internal matter, deserves attention.

Porque las decisiones que tome el próximo gobierno de las Islas Salomón, sobre con quién se alía, cómo negocia, qué posiciones adopta en los foros internacionales, tienen consecuencias que van mucho más allá de ese archipiélago.

Because the decisions that the next Solomon Islands government takes, about who it aligns with, how it negotiates, what positions it adopts in international forums, have consequences that go far beyond that archipelago.

There's actually a phrase I heard from a Pacific diplomat years ago, when I was covering a climate summit in the region, which was something like: 'We are the warning system.

When we go under, it won't just be us.' And he meant it not as a threat but as a statement of fact about how the physics work.

Es una imagen poderosa.

It is a powerful image.

Y es verdad.

And it's true.

Lo que ocurre en el Pacífico occidental, la pérdida de tierras, la migración climática, la inestabilidad política que genera la presión sobre los recursos, es un anticipo de lo que veremos en muchas otras regiones del mundo.

What is happening in the western Pacific, the loss of land, climate migration, the political instability generated by pressure on resources, is a preview of what we will see in many other regions of the world.

Solo que allí está ocurriendo antes.

Only it's happening there first.

Octavio, I noticed you said something a little while back that I've been meaning to ask about.

You said 'lo que llaman en inglés', 'what they call in English', when you mentioned climate migration.

Then you explained it in Spanish.

Does Spanish not have a settled term for that?

Buena observación.

Good observation.

'Migración climática' existe y se usa, pero el término 'refugiados climáticos' es más problemático, porque legalmente los refugiados climáticos no existen en el derecho internacional.

'Migración climática' exists and is used, but the term 'refugiados climáticos', climate refugees, is more problematic, because legally climate refugees do not exist in international law.

La Convención de Ginebra no los reconoce.

The Geneva Convention does not recognize them.

Por eso en español también usamos 'desplazados por el clima' para evitar implicaciones legales que no se sostienen.

That is why in Spanish we also use 'desplazados por el clima' to avoid legal implications that cannot be sustained.

So the language itself is doing political work.

If you call them refugees, you imply legal obligations that states haven't agreed to.

If you call them displaced people, you're more accurate but you're also letting those states off the hook somewhat.

Exactamente.

Exactly.

Y aquí hay algo interesante sobre cómo funciona el español en contextos técnicos.

And here there is something interesting about how Spanish works in technical contexts.

Hay palabras que se usan de formas distintas según el registro.

There are words that are used in different ways depending on the register.

'Desplazado' en español cotidiano puede significar simplemente que alguien se ha movido de lugar.

'Desplazado' in everyday Spanish can simply mean that someone has moved from one place.

Pero 'desplazado' en contextos humanitarios o jurídicos tiene una carga específica, casi técnica.

But 'desplazado' in humanitarian or legal contexts has a specific, almost technical weight.

El mismo adjetivo, dos significados muy distintos.

The same adjective, two very different meanings.

English does the same thing, of course.

'Irregular migrant' versus 'illegal immigrant' are doing completely different things politically even when they describe the same person.

But I like that example in Spanish because 'desplazado' is such a physical word.

Something that has been pushed out of its place.

Viene del verbo 'desplazar', que significa mover algo de su lugar original.

It comes from the verb 'desplazar', which means to move something from its original place.

Y es una palabra que en español tiene resonancias históricas muy fuertes, sobre todo en América Latina, donde el desplazamiento interno por conflictos armados ha afectado a millones de personas.

And it is a word that in Spanish has very strong historical resonances, especially in Latin America, where internal displacement due to armed conflict has affected millions of people.

Así que cuando la usamos para el clima, trae consigo todo ese peso.

So when we use it for climate, it carries all that weight with it.

That's actually a gift to a language learner, because it means you can hear a word like 'desplazado' and immediately understand both the physical action and the human story it's carrying.

There's a precision there that a lot of abstract terms don't have.

Y es que las Islas Salomón nos han dado hoy esa misma lección, ¿no?

And the Solomon Islands have given us that same lesson today, haven't they?

Un voto, cuatro escaños de diferencia, y detrás de eso, una historia sobre el agua, la tierra, la identidad y el poder.

One vote, four seats of difference, and behind that, a story about water, land, identity, and power.

Todo a la vez.

All at once.

No está mal para un archipiélago que, como decía, la mayoría no sabría encontrar en un mapa.

Not bad for an archipelago that, as I said, most people couldn't find on a map.