The Water Is Coming: Mitigating The Rising Sea Levels Through Artificial Installations and Artificial Islands

Our planet is heating up. The glaciers are melting faster than before. The call for Climate Change mitigation has never been louder than it is in the last decade. Despite all these, the sea levels are still creeping up on us giving rise to a new potential side effect in the future – “the water refugees”. Studies place an estimated number of about 1 Billion people to be displaced by the rising sea levels by the year 2060. The solution to this will not lie on us having more people on less land but us using technology to reclaim the land submerged by the rising waters.

The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is a key instrument that dealt with maritime delimitation, effectively ending the argument on the limits of the territorial sea. Whereas it can be seen as the cornerstone of maritime delimitation; current issues make the instrument look like a Band-Aid resolution of the boundary issues and dealing with emerging issues due to climate change. The UNCLOS is silent concerning what happens when the low water mark, which is the starting point of maritime delimitation, shifts with global warming and climate change.

Traditionally, and as per The Convention, Artificial Islands are temporary installations that do not generate baselines. With the emerging concept of blue urban-ism and countries facing the threat of submersion due to the rising sea levels, blue cities and the installation of Artificial Islands seems to be the plausible salvation to these countries. While acknowledging that granting countries power to generate baselines from Artificial Islands will open a Pandora box, this paper suggests a reserved review of circumstances warranting an Artificial Island to generate its baselines and reclaim submerged land. This is in instances where the Artificial Islands and installations are created to mitigate the effects of the rising sea levels that threaten to have substantial effects to the land of a country such as the Maldives. Coastal flooding, extreme tides and fierce storms are just but symptoms of the underlying problem that is the rising sea level. Unless proper and immediate measures are put in place to mitigate it, The story of the submerged city of Atlantis might just become a reality in the next generation.