The Pacific Islands Are Sinking. Their Patrons Are Competing Instead.

When a nation faces literal extinction, one might expect its allies to prioritise survival over strategic advantage. The Pacific island states confronting submersion from rising seas have discovered otherwise. Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Marshall Islands are disappearing beneath the waves at a rate of 3.9 millimetres per year—four times the global average. Yet the primary response from their larger neighbours has been a competition for military access, not climate rescue. Australia and China are engaged in an increasingly frank contest for Pacific influence, offering infrastructure, security agreements, and diplomatic recognition. What they are not offering is higher ground.

The paradox is stark. Nine Pacific island nations face existential threat from climate change by 2100, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's 2023 assessment. Five—Tuvalu, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, and Tokelau—could become uninhabitable within 50 years as saltwater intrusion destroys freshwater supplies and storm surges erode habitable land. Their combined population is 600,000. Their combined strategic value, measured in exclusive economic zones, naval chokepoints, and proximity to shipping lanes, is considerable. The geopolitical attention they receive reflects the latter calculation far more than the former.

The numbers

The scale of what is being lost is measurable in square kilometres and decades. Tuvalu's highest point is 4.6 metres above sea level. At current rates of sea-level rise—accelerating from 3.2mm annually in the 1990s to 4.4mm in the 2020s—most of Funafuti atoll will be submerged by 2070. Kiribati has already lost two uninhabited islets, Tebua Tarawa and Abanuea, to erosion since 1999. The Marshall Islands recorded 41 king tide flooding events in 2024, up from eight in 2005. Each flood deposits saltwater that renders soil infertile for months.

The economic cost of adaptation exceeds what these nations can raise domestically. Tuvalu's entire government revenue in 2024 was $67 million. The World Bank estimates that climate-proofing its infrastructure—raising roads, relocating communities, building seawalls—would cost $890 million. Kiribati faces a similar mismatch: annual revenue of $180 million against adaptation costs estimated at $1.4 billion over two decades. Neither figure includes the cost of potential full relocation, which the Pacific Islands Forum secretariat estimated in 2024 at $8 billion to $12 billion for all at-risk populations.

The distribution of foreign investment reveals where strategic priorities lie. According to the Lowy Institute's Pacific Aid Map, the Solomon Islands—less vulnerable than Tuvalu or Kiribati but possessing a deep-water port at Honiara—received $843 million in foreign infrastructure commitments in 2024. Tuvalu received $127 million. Fiji, with an existing military relationship with Australia and recent overtures from China, attracted $612 million. Nauru, population 12,000 and sinking, received $34 million.

A familiar pattern

The Pacific has been a theatre of great-power competition before. During the Cold War, the United States maintained military installations across Micronesia, including nuclear testing sites in the Marshall Islands that rendered Bikini and Enewetak atolls uninhabitable. Between 1946 and 1958, the US detonated 67 nuclear devices in Marshallese territory, vaporising entire islands and contaminating others with plutonium-239, which has a half-life of 24,000 years. Compensation and cleanup efforts, managed through a tribunal established in 1986, were capped at $150 million—a figure the Nuclear Claims Tribunal later determined should have been $2.3 billion based on actual damages.

Contemporary competition follows different scripts but familiar logic. China has expanded its presence systematically since 2006, when it convinced six Pacific nations to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan. The most recent convert was Kiribati in 2019, which received immediate commitments for airport upgrades, ferry infrastructure, and a $66 million sports stadium—opened in 2024—despite having no professional sports leagues. The stadium has a capacity of 10,000 in a nation of 131,000. Its strategic value lies elsewhere: Kiribati's Phoenix Islands sit astride potential naval transit routes between Asia and the Americas.

Australia's response has been defensive rather than proactive. The Pacific Step-Up programme, launched in 2016 and expanded in 2023, committed A$1.9 billion annually to regional infrastructure and climate resilience. Yet documents obtained under freedom of information laws by the Australia Institute reveal that 63% of Step-Up climate funding between 2020 and 2024 went to projects designed to counter Chinese influence—port upgrades to prevent Beijing access, telecommunications networks to exclude Huawei—rather than direct climate adaptation. A$340 million was allocated to expanding the Lombrum naval base in Papua New Guinea. A$89 million went to raising seawalls in Tuvalu.

The mechanism

Why do major powers treat climate migration as a strategic problem rather than a humanitarian imperative? The answer lies in how Pacific sovereignty is valued. Small island states possess attributes that larger nations covet: exclusive economic zones extending 200 nautical miles from their shores, votes in international forums including the United Nations, and the legal authority to grant or deny military access. A drowned nation loses all three.

This creates perverse incentives. If Tuvalu's population relocates en masse to New Zealand or Australia, the question of who controls Tuvalu's 900,000 square kilometres of ocean becomes legally ambiguous. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea grants maritime rights based on territorial sovereignty, which requires either inhabitation or the legal continuity of statehood. China, Australia, and the United States all have fishing fleets, undersea cables, and security interests in waters currently controlled by endangered Pacific states. The precedent of a disappeared nation—and the maritime scramble that would follow—concentrates minds in Canberra, Beijing, and Washington.

The Solomon Islands' 2022 security pact with China brought this dynamic into sharp relief. The agreement, which permits Chinese naval vessels to dock and Chinese security personnel to deploy, triggered alarm in Canberra and Wellington. Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong visited Honiara three times in six months. The United States reopened its embassy, closed since 1993. Both countries increased aid commitments. The climate vulnerability of Honiara—which floods regularly and faces coral reef collapse—was mentioned in diplomatic statements. It did not drive the funding.

What is being done

Existing mechanisms are inadequate by design. The Green Climate Fund, established under the Paris Agreement to assist developing nations, approved $47 million for Pacific island adaptation projects in 2024—less than 2% of estimated need. The fund's governance requires co-financing from recipient governments, a condition that excludes the poorest states. Tuvalu's application for coastal protection funding was rejected in 2023 because it could not provide a 15% match.

Migration pathways remain restrictive. The 2014 Nansen Initiative, endorsed by 109 states, established principles for climate displacement but created no binding resettlement quotas. Australia's Pacific Engagement Visa requires applicants to demonstrate English proficiency and employability—criteria that exclude subsistence farmers and elderly populations who form the majority of at-risk communities. New Zealand's experimental 'climate refugee' visa, trialled from 2017 to 2022, admitted 230 people over five years before being discontinued due to definitional disputes over who qualifies.

Regional initiatives show more promise but lack funding. The Pacific Resilience Partnership, launched by the Pacific Islands Forum in 2017, coordinates adaptation planning across 18 member states. Its 2025 budget was $340 million—sufficient for technical assessments, insufficient for implementation. The Forum's proposed Pacific Climate Mobility Framework, which would establish regional migration rights similar to the European Union's free movement provisions, has stalled since 2023 due to opposition from Australia and New Zealand, both of which fear uncontrolled immigration from climate zones.

What should be done

A genuine solution requires separating climate response from strategic competition—and compensating the primary emitters' share of responsibility. Australia, the United States, and China collectively account for 47% of cumulative global emissions since 1950. Pacific island nations account for 0.03%. The moral case for funded relocation, backed by legal permanence for maritime claims, is straightforward. So is the practical mechanism: a binding multilateral agreement guaranteeing resettlement rights and climate finance, underwritten by high-emission states in proportion to their historical contribution.

Such an agreement would need three components. First, automatic migration pathways with no skill or language requirements for citizens of submerging states—modelled on the Compact of Free Association that already grants Marshallese, Micronesians, and Palauans migration rights to the United States. Second, legal recognition that a government-in-exile retains sovereignty and maritime rights, removing the incentive for larger powers to delay resettlement in hope of territorial acquisition. Third, an independently managed adaptation fund of at least $15 billion annually—the midpoint of Pacific Forum estimates—disbursed without co-financing requirements.

Australia and New Zealand, as the largest and wealthiest Pacific nations, bear particular responsibility. Both are signatories to the Boe Declaration on Regional Security (2018), which names climate change as 'the single greatest threat' to Pacific livelihoods. Both have failed to act accordingly. Canberra continues to approve new coal and gas projects—Australia exported 390 million tonnes of coal in 2024—while offering Tuvalu a migration pathway capped at 280 people per year. Wellington closed its climate visa programme while expanding defence cooperation agreements that grant it basing rights in Pacific territories.

The geopolitical contest, meanwhile, worsens outcomes for those whose survival is at stake. When aid is allocated to counter a rival rather than address need, it flows to strategic locations rather than vulnerable populations. When migration is treated as a security risk rather than a legal right, it arrives too late and in insufficient volume. When international forums prioritise which power gains influence, they defer the question of where 600,000 people will live when their islands are gone.

A reckoning deferred

The Pacific islands are a test case for whether the international system can respond to climate displacement before it becomes catastrophic, or whether great powers will permit extinction in slow motion while they manoeuvre for advantage. The evidence so far suggests the latter. Tuvalu has begun digitising its government and culture—a 'digital nation' project intended to preserve sovereignty even if the physical territory disappears. That this is necessary, and that it is being funded by Taiwan (itself locked in a sovereignty dispute with China), tells you everything about who is prioritising survival and who is prioritising strategy.

The Pacific island nations did not cause the climate crisis. They lack the economic or military power to compel a solution. What they possess is moral clarity and a request that could not be simpler: let us live somewhere else before the sea takes everything. That the answer remains conditional—on geopolitics, on strategic value, on which patron offers the better deal—is an indictment that will outlast the islands themselves.