384: Life Below Sea Level: Can a Country Survive Losing Its Land?

A ship rams a canoe. The canoe starts to sink. The ship's crew lean over the rail and offer a loan to repair it. That is how Surangel Whipps Jr., President of Palau, describes climate finance in the Pacific, a region responsible for around 0.03% of global emissions. He speaks to Christiana Figueres a few weeks into his year as Chair of the Pacific Islands Forum, and as pre-COP talks wrap in in Fiji and Tuvalu ahead of COP31. In Palau, on his islands, high tides are already flooding the taro patches with saltwater, and the main hospital sits at the water's edge.

About this episode

This week, Christiana returns to the fight that wrote 1.5°C into the Paris Agreement, a limit the small island nations won while most of the world's biggest economies pushed for two degrees. A decade on, the UN expects the world to overshoot it. What does this mean for entire countries that sit just a few metres above sea level?

President Whipps explains why diesel power costs his country close to 30 cents a kilowatt hour, when solar is the cheapest energy in the big markets, and what he says to young Palauans who are no longer sure they should have children.

And, Tom Rivett-Carnac joins Christiana to ask what is actually required of the rest of us. Last year, the world's highest court sided with the islands. Last month, the UN agreed that a country does not stop being a country once the sea takes its land. Why hasn't the money followed?

Thanks to our friends at BE HOPE Podcast Takeover, bringing podcasts around the world together to explore the theme of hope and how we can continue to make progress in a rapidly changing world.

Learn More

🎬 Watch All Rise, the documentary narrated by Christiana that follows the Pacific law students who took climate change to the world's highest court

🎟️ Register for our Bath Abbey event livestream on 14 October, Powering the Next Generation to Lead Climate Action

🎧 Listen back to our earlier episodes on the road to the world court: Sovereignty and Survival: A Spotlight on Vanuatu, The Climate Case of the Century, and The ICJ Climate Opinion Explained

⚖️ Read the ICJ advisory opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, the unanimous July 2025 ruling that named 1.5°C the primary temperature goal under the Paris Agreement

🌺 Read the Palau Pledge, the promise every visitor signs to the children of Palau on arrival, and the text that has inspired a movement in Costa Rica to write its own

🌊 Understand the UN's first declaration on sea-level rise, Just Security's analysis of what its presumption of continued statehood means for countries that could lose their land

🛂 Learn more about the Australia-Tuvalu Falepili Union, the treaty behind the climate visa ballot that most of Tuvalu's population entered

🌡️ Read UNEP's Emissions Gap Report 2025, which found the world will very likely pass 1.5°C within the next decade, and why the size of the overshoot still matters