The Lawfare Podcast: The Marshall Islands’ Sweeping Climate Adaptation Plan with Jake Bittle

[Introduction]

Jake Bittle: They figured out a way to create a really educated and informed set of binary choices about how to protect or not protect the country. Which allows them to show, I think, the funding community, the donor countries, if you will, what it is that they're funding or not funding, right? So, it's very easy for countries to come and get on a dais and say it's life or death, it's life or death.

It's harder for them to produce a document that, you know, they submit and that the UN ratifies that shows, you know, with numbers, that it's life or death. You know, it's life or death for this island in this, year it's life or death for that island in that year. It's potentially already been life or death for this other island or this other atoll.

Tyler McBrien: I'm Tyler McBrien, managing editor of Lawfare, and this is the Lawfare Podcast, January 5th, 2024. Last month, at COP28 in Dubai the Republic of the Marshall Islands unveiled its sweeping National Climate Adaptation Plan, the multi year product of government officials interviewing thousands of Marshallese residents across the country's dozens of coral atolls.

The plan is ambitious and groundbreaking because it has to be. As John Silk, Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands, said in September, quote, we call it our National Adaptation Plan, but it is really our survival plan. I sat down with Jake Bittle, a staff writer at Grist who covers climate impacts and adaptation, and the author of a recent book about climate migration called “The Great Displacement,” about this very plan, which Jake obtained ahead of the annual climate conference.

We discussed what makes this particular climate adaptation plan revolutionary, the thorny geopolitics of climate financing, and the unimaginable, unquantifiable loss that might occur should the worst case scenarios come to fruition for the Marshallese. But we also talked about why, despite its dire warnings and existential subject matter, the plan's creators ultimately see it as an optimistic document. It's the Lawfare Podcast, January 5^th: The Marshall Islands sweeping climate adaptation plan with Jake Bittle.

[Main Podcast]

So Jake, we have a lot to dig into today. I definitely want to talk about climate migration and adaptation, your experience reporting on COP28 and some of the financing issues that arose there this year.

But first I want to start at the Marshall Islands. For listeners who may not be as familiar, do you mind just situating us? Where are the Marshall Islands? Maybe a bit of a visual, as far as you know, what they look like. And then what the Marshall Islands specifically are facing in terms of the coming climate catastrophe.

Jake Bittle: Right. So the Marshall Islands are a chain of a few dozen islands and coral atolls that are about, they are a few thousand miles east of Indonesia. They're very, very, very far into the Pacific Ocean. And each one of them is, you know, maybe two or three meters at most above sea level. And they're made out of coral, which is more porous than, you know, solid land.

So they face a great deal of vulnerability from climate change, both because, you know, one or two meters of sea level rise would render many of those islands and atolls uninhabitable. And also because as the sea rises, the salt water penetrates into the groundwater aquifers on the islands and the atolls, which robs most of the population of safe drinking water.

So you have threats from underground, threats from storms that are coming across. And of course, there's also ambient issues like heat and rainfall decreases. I should also say that the Marshall Islands, until the mid-20th century, were a territory belonging to the United States. They're now independent, but they have a, what's called a compact of free association with the United States because the U.S. conducted dozens of nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, most famously in Bikini Atoll.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, that's great. And I want to dig into that legal authority and, you know, the options for Marshallese emigration. But first, I'm curious about this sweeping, what you call life or death plan that the Marshall Islands government has put forth and developed.

What's in the plan? And especially interested in how they developed it.

Jake Bittle: Right. So yeah, so a lot of vulnerable countries under an authority in a previous United Nations climate agreement have developed what's called National Adaptation Plans. It's basically like a top down program for how to adapt to, how to assess and adapt to coming climate impacts.

The Marshall Islands plan was unique. I think in part because the country, despite its very small size, has kind of an outsized role in global climate negotiations. They put a lot of effort and thought into putting this plan together. And I think most notably, almost every other national adaptation plan that's been developed, and there's been a few dozen countries that have done this, they basically just, you know, hire scientists and economists to project impacts and then come up with plans.

With the Marshall Islands, it was a little different. They interviewed more than 1,300 different residents from all kinds of islands and atolls within the country, which is about 3 percent of the population. And they said, well, you know, what impacts are you seeing and how do you want to adapt?

So the plan, you know, even though they had to come up with a way of dealing with life or death impacts, right? Like the sea level rise that could subsume most of their landmass. They also tried to create a kind of bottom up program for dealing with it by asking everyone what they thought the best adaptation solutions were.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. And because of this different methodology, I'm curious how it compares to other national adaptation plans. And I'm also curious, you know, what countries have them? You know, is this something that mostly Pacific Island nations have because of the immediate effects of climate change are much more dire, or is this a more widespread policy?

Jake Bittle: Right, so the most of the countries that have done this are what they call the least developed countries, the countries that are extremely vulnerable to climate change, and the reason for this is that under the Paris agreement every country is supposed to do what's called its nationally determined contribution, right, like our contribution to solving climate change.

A country like the Marshall Islands, you know, they never really had very many carbon emissions at all, right? There's not that many cars. There's certainly not that many like power plants. So part of their nationally determined contribution was to come up with an adaptation plan to deal with climate impacts.

So yeah, a lot of Pacific Island states, a lot of states in the Caribbean, the, basically all the countries that are on the front lines of climate impact.

Tyler McBrien: Great. And I want to talk about some of the things that really jumped out to you in the plan, especially these decision points. You mentioned they are, they're time bound decision points over the next, I guess, century or so. What are those and, and, and what, what will they be deciding at those points?

Jake Bittle: Right. Yeah. So I think that the, the main sort of background piece that you need to know is that no one in the Marshall Islands that was interviewed by the government, no one said that they wanted to leave. You know, not only do they not want to leave the country itself, they also didn't want to leave their home islands or their home atolls, which are really culturally important to the population of the Marshall Islands.

Everyone has to stay on their home island and they should be buried on their home island, et cetera. So knowing that, the government had to come up with a way of basically democratically and fairly drafting a plan to have them leave those islands if it was necessary. And so what they did was they created, I think, four separate decision points over the course of the next century.

And the first one is like, okay, we're going to do everything we can to keep people in place. And then by the middle of the 21st century, we're going to decide how good of a job we've done with that. And if we don't think we've done a good enough job, we're going to start trying to select islands that we're going to protect long term, right?

So basically we identify a few key landmasses, probably the capital city, the other largest city and some of the more robust islands in terms of land mass. And we're going to basically hunker down in those places. So we're going to shift social and infrastructure investment away from the most vulnerable islands and atolls and toward those islands that we're going to sort of hunkered down on, that's one decision point.

The other one, right, which is like all the way at the end, I won't go through all of them, but the other one at the, at the end, in the, in the middle of the 22nd century or the early 22nd century, is to decide, can we stay on this country at all? Right? So it's like after 150 years of trying to invest in all the islands and about a hundred years of trying to invest in just the ones that we think are the safest. Have we managed to protect those specific islands from two meters of sea level rise? If we haven't, and if it seems like even those fortress islands are going to be inhabitable, we have to find a way to get everybody in the country to migrate to the United States, right?

So that is, that part, that last part is extremely vague. They have, I think on purpose, not tried to specify what that would look like. But I think that there are, they're doing something really revolutionary by even setting a deadline for essentially deciding whether the country can continue to exist.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. And I want to dwell on that first point you made, which strikes me as a very underappreciated point about climate migration is that it's often bandied about as, you know, an unfortunate, but very available sort of response or solution. But as you put it well, and as one respondent put it to the interviewer, when they said, quote, we will die here, is that people don't want to leave their homes, which is a very understandable human response.

You've written also extensively about climate migration in the U.S. I'm curious just to back up a bit, what other misconceptions you see about, about climate migration, thinking in particular about, you know, how it happens. It's some people may think it's this sort of methodical planned out one time, you know, unidirectional thing when it's often, you know, people fleeing from a hurricane and then returning to their homes or-

Jake Bittle: Right.

Tyler McBrien: -or, or migrating from one danger area to another danger area. So if you could just expand a bit about misconceptions about climate migration that you've encountered in your work.

Jake Bittle: Right, yeah. And this is, it was really interesting in the context of the. Marshall Islands article because when I was doing the promotional tours and events for this book that I wrote about climate migration in the U.S., I kept saying over and over again that I didn't think migration was really the right word for what people in the U.S. were doing, right? As you said, they would move away and move back or they would move multiple times. They would move only when it was a last resort and then they would move five miles away or something to a place that was just as flood prone as the one that they were leaving behind.

So it was this very chaotic, unintentional, unplanned sort of really involuntary process of movement. And that's, that's true in a lot of other places in the world too. Like if you look at, for instance, the migration patterns that followed the floods last year in Pakistan, it's the same thing. Almost all the migration is internal within the country.

It takes a long time to understand where people are going and whether they're going to stay there. But interestingly, you know, in the case of the Marshall Islands, right, because I think because there's so little land and because of this compact of free association and because there's so much unwillingness to leave and so much cultural attachment to the Pacific islands and atolls, actually I think that if this kind of migration does happen in the Marshall Islands, it probably will look exactly like I was saying the U.S. migration does not look right.

Like it probably will be one time intentional, very plannedm over a very long distance and it probably won't be reversed, right? Like it will be a coherent movement of people from the Marshall Islands to the United States and they'll do so only once the government has said you have no other option and we need to figure out a plan for this, right?

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, I think that speaks well, Jake, to the, to the revolutionary aspect of this, this plan. But I want to talk a bit about the Marshallese residents for a bit. I got the sense from your reporting on the report that the Marshallese people are not, you know, waiting until these decision points hit them or, or arrive.

They are doing, or have been doing things in their communities to sort of stave off the, the biggest effects of climate change. You know, they're not waiting for a top down legal advisory opinion from, you know, the International Court of Justice. They're not waiting for a COP29. What are some of these things that, that the Marshallese people are already doing to adapt?

Jake Bittle: Right. Yeah. This is, this is really interesting. And I, when one of the, the authors of the plan spoke to me about it. Or I guess I should say one of the government officials who was presenting the plan at COP28 spoke to me about it. One of the most, sort of, jarring or really significant things that he said was he said, well, when they went out to interview people about what adaptation actions they thought the government should take, they went to one island, and they saw that residents, you know, who were dealing with sea level rise had actually created a seawall out of basically just trash, you know, debris and trash bags and stuff.

And it was, you know, obviously not working as well as a concrete seawall would, but it was working decently well to prevent the kind of flooding that was disrupting their lives. So I think it's, it's a really good point, right? Like we, especially as a reporter covering climate adaptation, like I try to follow the famous maxim of like following the money, right?

Like I look at grants from the World Bank and the Green Climate Fund to see what kind of actions they're funding, but actually, you know, independent of those kind of grants and, and international finance, that adaptation is already happening, right? So, you know, if you're not getting enough water from the underground aquifer, what can you do?

You can create a system for catching rainwater, right? And I would say hundreds of thousands of Marshallese have already done that, right? If the roads are flooded, you know, between you and your job, you can invest in a canoe and start creating basically like a canoe taxi service, right? If the water is coming up to your doorstep, you can throw a bunch of trash bags down.

So a lot of this stuff is, is really informal. There've also been some more coherent adaptation efforts. Like for instance, they built a water treatment plant in the country's second biggest city that was financed by a bunch of multilateral development banks. So it's not like they haven't been pursuing adaptation actions already, but they run this, you know, scale from really coordinated and well-funded to, you know, completely informal at basically at a cost of $0.

But, you know, because Marshallese, in particular, have such a intimate knowledge of the land and the water around them, it's not like they don't know how to protect themselves, certainly they lack the resources to do it on the scale that climate change requires though.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. And on that last point, I would love to continue to follow the money.

I took away this message from your reporting that the, the Marshallese are basically saying, as you were just saying, we know what to do. We know how to do it. We just lack the resources. So if you fund us, we can, we can do it. You know, I, I want to get into these thorny funding questions, which can feel especially thorny when, you know, we're talking about, like you said, a life or death plan.

And so the, the alternative is, is so existential. But as you well know that, you know, these are the sticking points and the impediments. So, in your point of view, what is the plan calling for in terms of funding? How much will it cost, and who may or may not pay for this?

Jake Bittle: Right, yeah, that's a good question.

So, the principal ask, right, the top line budget of the plan is they say that if they got 35 billion dollars, they could protect most of the country from two meters of sea level rise and all the impacts that that would entail, right? So this is basically the best case scenario. And it's the scenario that they say would allow almost everyone in the country to stay there and might even allow some people who've already immigrated to the United States to come back and set up new lives there, right?

So that number, I mean, for context, right, the entire world got about, you know, just a little bit more than that in adaptation funding last year, right? So if you took the entire global budget for adaptation and you sent it to this country with a population of under 50,000, then, then that might be enough, right?

They think that that would probably be enough, although it could be an underestimate, right? That budget, you know, may have been calculated to make it seem achievable, as unachievable as it might sound, right? So if it was the only country dealing with these problems, it might be possible, but right now, there's nowhere near enough funding, you know, to deal with that and also deal with all the other countries with much larger populations, much larger land masses that are dealing with similar or worse problems, right?

So the, the main funders of this plan, you know, in theory, right? It's the developed countries of the world. It's the United States, Germany, the rest of the European Union, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom, the countries that are responsible for the largest share of historical greenhouse gas emissions have both the, I would say, moral and probably also the logistical responsibility for funding all of this, this plan.

And what the way that they would do that was, you know, it could be bilateral loans, right? Like the United States could just give a bunch of money to the Marshall Islands. We have in the past through these various trust agreements, or, you know, through multilateral institutions, such as the World Bank, or through these kind of bespoke funds, like the Green Climate Fund and the Adaptation Fund that have been set up through prior agreements at United Nations climate conferences.

So it's a logistical mess figuring out, you know, how to, how do you apply for a grant to save an entire country? Like that's obviously not very feasible, but you know, basically their hope is that they would cobble together hundreds or thousands of different grant agreements and, and loans, potentially, and get the money that way.

One more thing which I think I should mention, is that the Marshall Islands and a few other island states, which are some of the biggest flag countries for maritime shipping, like a lot of big shipping vessels will fly under the flag of the Marshall Islands, for complicated tax and jurisdictional reasons.

The Marshall Islands wants to establish an international levy on greenhouse gas emissions from shipping so that any country that flew its flag would have to contribute money to its adaptation fund for every, you know, ton of greenhouse gases that they emit. So there's all kinds of ways. None of them is like as easy as, you know, going to the bank and setting up a loan and it's going to be very, very challenging.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. And, you know, you mentioned in your reporting that you got your hands on the plan ahead of COP28, where it's, the intent was to sort of unveil it there. So I'm curious, you know, how that went, what the reception was to the Marshall Islands plan among other member states or other parties to COP28 and how it, impacted these discussions on, on climate financing.

I'm also especially interested in, in this irony that you brought up in another article of yours in the, the fact that for some reason, adaptation financing has been much more contentious than the loss and damage fund, for example, which, you know, I think years ago you would reasonably predict that that would be a huge sticking point of climate reparations, but you know, that's has seemingly become a bit of an easier road.

So I'm curious about those dynamics that, that went down at COP28.

Jake Bittle: Yeah, that's a, yeah, that, those are, that's a, it is a really interesting dynamic. So I think in terms of the reception of the plan, I think the, the, the positive, like the, the good news is I think that this will change for the better adaptation planning by other countries.

And I, like, I think that future vulnerable countries that, that do this will have to take a lot more democratic participation. And I think that it, that this shows how much, you know, a strong adaptation plan can be not just a technical document for guiding investment within a country, but also kind of a political document, right?

That sort of plants a flag of, we think this is a possible future for our country. And I mean, I think again, like the specificity and the audacity of the plan was also, it's also kind of a fundraising mechanism, right? Like if they say we cannot save the country, why would anybody give them money to try to save the country? So that they found a way to say, look, like, this is a very coherent, realistic plan for saving the country. Would you like to help? Right.

And that I think could in the future sort of, I think there could be like a snowball turning into an avalanche effect here, right? Where, you know, it's not that they come to COP28 with this plan and everyone says okay, but it changes going forward the conversation around what adaptations planning is supposed to be and what you can achieve by investing in adaptation, right?

So the bad news is, I think everybody who works on adaptation came away from COP28 feeling, for lack of a better word, miffed, right? Like there was supposed to be a big agreement on the, what's called the Global Goal on Adaptation, a sort of complicated provision of the Paris Agreement, and that goal was agreed to without any serious financial commitment on the part of developed countries.

And furthermore, you know, the existing funds like the adaptation fund, something called the Special Climate Change Fund. Every now and then countries are supposed to come to COP28 and basically refill that piggy bank, right? Like Canada comes and says, look, we're going to give a few million more dollars to this.

And the contributions to those adaptation funds were actually lower than they've been in previous years. And there was no big windfall of contributions from rich countries. To step to the loss and damage fund, this is a, it's kind of a complicated distinction, but basically adaptation funding is supposed to deal with disasters that haven't yet happened yet.

So preparing for a future sea level rise, for instance, loss and damage funding is supposed to deal with the recovery from disasters that are inevitable or that have already happened. Right? So that's like relocating a population after a flood or giving insurance payments to farmers when crops fail because of drought.

There's a lot of overlap between the two. I think it's a little bit of a gray area, but, the conversation around them has diverged. Right, so, adaptation finance has kind of stagnated. There's not very much new development on that, but loss and damage funding, which has historically been extremely contentious because it requires developed countries to essentially accept responsibility for causing like, you know, I think in law, for instance, like you never want to, that's the reason why people settle, right.

It's like we settle because we don't want to admit responsibility, right? If I'm like Monsanto or something, I'm not a lawyer. So I don't know if that makes sense, but anyway, like loss and damage has been difficult because the United States doesn't want to say, here's some money for that flood, because it kind of implies that the U.S. was a partial cause of the flood, which is really, really difficult.

Whereas if we say, hi, we're the United States. We want to help the Marshall Islands develop, right, sustainably develop and, and get into the 21st century. We might say here's some money for education. Here's some money for dealing with future sea level rise. There's a fine distinction. Anyway, though, loss and damage finally had a breakthrough at COP28 in Dubai.

There was a huge sort of unprecedented announcement that countries were going to set up this loss and damage fund. They were going to help poorer nations deal with the impact of climate disasters. And I think that the reason for this, and the reason my adaptation hasn't moved is that it's very easy to, it's become very easy to set up a fund, right? Like cynically, the contributions to the loss and damage fund, they're, you know, in the single digit millions for some countries. It's not even a fraction of a percent of what's needed. So I think that basically the rich countries are sort of hiding behind the political cover of setting up a loss and damage fund, which is praiseworthy and kind of revolutionary, but they still aren't giving contributions either for adaptation or loss and damage that are anywhere near the scale that's needed, right?

So I think that the, the NGOs and activists and country negotiators that work on the adaptation issue are saying, well, it's all well and good for them to give a few million dollars to this loss and damage fund, but we've been asking them for decades to give billions and billions of dollars to adaptation and they aren't doing it. Does that make sense?

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, definitely. And first, I want to say don't worry about not being a lawyer. If you or I get any of the law wrong, our listeners will sound off in the comments and let us know.

Jake Bittle: Yeah, please do.

Tyler McBrien: So call us out, please. But no, that makes a lot of sense. I, I, I think I share your cynicism in that the fund, you know, gives, you know, higher income countries this thing to hold up and say they set up even if it's completely insufficient, but nonetheless, revolutionary, as you said.

I want to complicate this even further, as you've written about the financing question is not the only sticking point, but in addition to sort of defining success, I think you drew a comparison at one point between defining successful adaptation versus mitigation, the latter of which has the benefit of having these more technical and measurable benchmarks in terms of degree increase sea level rise, et cetera. Can you talk about that difficulty as well in defining success and setting goals for adaptation?

Jake Bittle: Right. Yeah. So, I mean, just if you think about the difference between financing, you know, a multilateral development bank or the United States or something, financing a solar farm in Sub Saharan Africa or financing like a drought protection scheme or resilient crop program in Sub Saharan Africa, it's, it's different.

It's easier in every way to do the solar farm, right? One, for instance, you know, electricity costs money, right? So if I lend money to a country in Africa to build the solar farm, I get some money back eventually. Once the solar farm is up and running, right, they're going to sell electricity. And for every kilowatt hour, they sell, I'm going to get like a few cents return. So I'm not even really losing money. Also, we can just measure that country's annual greenhouse gas emissions. And if the solar farm helps them reduce their emissions, we know that we made some progress on the mitigation aspect of climate change. It's so different for like a drought scheme, for instance, like you, well, you're not going to profit on the food.

Like that's just not really acceptable in the eyes of most funders even, but like, first of all, you're, you're just giving money away, right? Like you can't really give a loan so you're just giving money as a grant for them to do it a drought protection scheme or like a new sustainable farming operation. Like that's really really, you know it's been politically difficult for some rich countries to wrap their minds around the fact of just giving money away.

But also just how do you know if it worked right? Do you measure the survival percentage of seeds on each acre? Do you measure the annual trend in harvests? Do you measure income for the farmers? Do you measure food security in the region? Nobody can agree. And I think it's just a pure, it's almost more of a technical problem than a political problem.

Nobody can really agree on what successful adaptation looks like, right? And if you expand it out beyond an individual hazard and you just set a goal for adaptation funding. That's really hard to like, I could set a goal of like, I want, you know, there to be 100 deaths per 100,000 people or something from disasters each year.

But, you know, the wrong hurricane could blow me through that goal. Or I could have a lucky few years and say, I achieved the goal when actually I didn't do anything. So it's just, it's really, really hard to figure out how you know when this stuff is working. And I think like there's a serious lack of institutional and academic knowledge on this, but also it just is kind of like at the level of syntax, a very difficult problem.

So this was another log jam in the global goal on adaptation. Like they were just unable to, I mean, they came up with seven core principles, but they had to create a whole new, basically like technical directorate, which is now going to meet, you know, multiple times a year for who knows how many years to just come up with a list of indicators, right?

And the, the Sendai, so they had this previous like agreement many, many years ago called the Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction. This is before they were even really talking about climate change, it's a separate UN group. But they came up with no fewer than 38 indicators to figure out how you were reducing disaster risks, right?

So that's, that's a less complicated issue than adapting to climate change. So we could see hundreds of, I don't think anyone wants hundreds, but you could see dozens of different indicators for figuring out, you know, like how you're doing this successfully. It's just not easy for countries, especially those with you know, small climate change departments, right? Like very little institutional state capacity. It's just not easy for them to pursue these projects when it's this complicated.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah. And at the risk of being too optimistic after, after that answer, how do you see the Marshall Islands adaptation plan, pushing the conversation forward or inspiring other national adaptation plans, or is it just such an intractable problem that will probably end up with, you know, 100 indicators and, and little funding and nowhere to go?

Jake Bittle: No, I don't think it's that hopeless. Like, I think that the strength of the Marshall Islands plan, or one strength of the Marshall Islands plan, well, I'll just focus on two, right? So because they interviewed so many people, they came up with a really, really astonishing variety of solutions, like some of which we talked about earlier.

And they found solutions that sit all along the scale of like financial intensity, if you will, right? There's some that are really, really cheap and there's some that are really, really expensive. The second thing is, and I think this is also really important is they figured out a way to create a really educated and informed set of binary choices about how to protect or not protect the country, which allows them to show, I think, the funding community, the donor countries, if you will, what it is that they're funding or not funding, right?

So, it's very easy for countries to come and get on a dais and say it's life or death, it's life or death. It's harder for them to produce a document that, you know, they submit and that the UN ratifies that shows, you know, with numbers that it's life or death, you know, it's life or death for this island in this year, it's life or death for that island in that year. It's potentially already been life or death for this other island or this other atoll.

I think that's kind of the, the strength of the plan. I think you'll probably see future plans go on those lines. And I think that like they've also shown though, that because of this sort of bottom up focus, they've shown that they don't necessarily need, you know, a set of indicators and targets in order to pursue successful adaptation, that, you know, a lot of it happens organically and sort of needs international support.

So as noble as it is to come up with indicators, like, I think it will be helpful to do that. I think they've also shown that, like, with the funding, you can kind of leap over some of these technical conversations.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, and I want to also get on the table what exactly is lost if, you know, the Marshallese have to abandon certain islands or, you know, God forbid, the entire country.

I want to just read quickly what John Silk, the Marshall Islands foreign minister said at a panel. He said, quote, loss to us is not just a financial loss or an economic loss. It's cultural loss. If people have to migrate from their home Island to another place, even if you go to another part of the Marshall Islands and you build a seawall and we bring our people there, they will never feel at home because they're not.

This speaks to earlier what we were talking about, how people don't want to leave their homes, which is very understandable. And you've also written in, in your book, and this is the U.S. example, that when a community disappears, so does a map that orients us in the world. And I think that's, you know, there's even a lower, tragic deaths when an entire country rather than just a community is lost. Can you talk about some of, some of these losses, but then also the flip side of that, you know, what also can be built in its place?

I'm thinking in particular of some of the Marshallese communities in the U.S. that, were established after the last wave of, of emigration due to the nuclear tests.

Jake Bittle: Right. Yeah. I mean, it's, it's really hard to, I think this is the other. This is the other strength of the plan, right, is they acknowledge, like, it's, it's impossible to put a dollar amount on the, the cultural and spiritual loss that the Marshallese are facing, right?

It's like, these are culinary traditions, right? Dances, rituals, like, just oral history, right? I mean, the Marshallese, the ancient Marshallese, they have a tradition of, of marine navigation that is still, like, not really that well understood by modern navigators and scientists. Like it's not even clear to us how they used to navigate from island to island because they shouldn't have been able to do it as well as they did given the technology that they had, right?

So all the sort of intangible, like navigational knowledge, like that could all stand to be lost. And of course, like, as I think I mentioned earlier, like being buried on your home island or atoll is like an extremely important part of Marshallese tradition and that is just going to be impossible potentially for people on some islands.

And I, you know, in the book I wrote about, you know, a sort of parallel track. Like I wrote about a community in Southern Louisiana that was dealing with coastal erosion. This was an indigenous village that kept having to move farther and farther back from its original bayou. And eventually that bayou went underwater altogether.

So it's, it's really hard to put a dollar amount on these things. And there, I think it's like, it's really important to have as a first principle that this kind of loss can and should be avoided and that there's not really a good way of, of compensating or redressing it when it happens, right? Like we can, you know, in the case of Louisiana, like they, the state built a new town for some of the people on this island that had to leave because of storms, you can do that. You can give them even just like stipends, but it's not really enough to replace, like we just don't, there's no amount of money that's high enough. Right.

So like, having said that though, once you accept some of this upheaval as inevitable, I think the government has like a responsibility. And also an opportunity to do everything it can to create new traditions, like new community forms and new, like infrastructure in the places where we know that people are going to go, right?

So in Louisiana, right, like the town that they built for the people from, it's called Isle de Jean Charles that had to migrate, this town, this like village that they built them farther inland is like next to a like Chevron equipment facility. So that's like an unfortunate, you know, sort of thing. And then they, they also wanted to have like a, a little, you know, man-made river fishing ponds that these sort of people who have been fishing their whole lives could keep fishing. That didn't come to fruition the way that the indigenous people thought that it would. So there's like some obvious missteps there that could have been done better.

In the case of the Marshallese, thousands of them, you know, who've left both because of the nuclear testing and also just because of, you know, ambient sea level rise over the past decade, they've ended up in Springdale, Arkansas, and there's like a really great driving, you know, and like sort of robust Marshallese community and in that town now, but also, you know, there hasn't been very much institutional support. It's all been, you know, internal, like they found their own community centers and they found their own sort of mutual aid groups. There hasn't been a lot of like resettlement aid, you know, from the federal or the state government and the predominant occupation people in Springdale have is they work for like Smithfield, right?

They work in, in poultry factories, which are like, you know, some of the, the most notoriously like unpleasant and dangerous places to work. So obviously this could have gone better. And I think that the fact that it didn't go very well sort of, you know, highlights that it's incumbent on, you know, these are, the United States is both a developed country and that it should be donating to the Marshall Islands to help them protect their land, but also, you know, in as much as there's already migration, we also owe it to them to smooth that transition.

And while it can't replace the cultural traditions that are lost, there's still an opportunity to make it better than it could be and smoother than it could be.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, I was, I was really interested in, in the unlimited legal authority that you mentioned. And I think you also mentioned in other podcasts that you, you wanted it to be a bigger part of your book, but maybe this explains some of the bridge between your reporting.

It also seems this is, it's just this interesting quirk of history that the Marshallese do have this sort of like, you know, exit valve or something like that. Obviously, it came at great cost, environmental and otherwise to, to their home, to their homes. But you know, I'm curious what other Pacific islands, what options they have in terms of mass migration off of their islands, if, as I mentioned, God forbid, it comes to that.

You know, the U.S. famously has a perfect immigration and asylum system. I'm joking, but so I'm curious what other options there are to Pacific Island nations or others that, that don't have this interesting thing.

Jake Bittle: Yeah. And I mean, I think like, I think that it's, it's really complicated because I think that for, if you talk to people in the Marshallese government or people who live in the Marshall Islands, they'll say that the, the comp, what's called the compact of free association, you know, not only does it come at a significant cost, did it, did come at a significant cost in the form of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests.

But also even now, I think they would say that it's not like the U.S. doesn't get anything in return. Like, I think the Marshall Islands is this very important strategic sort of node for the U.S. Navy, Air Force, and the military in, you know, counteracting, you know, China's actions in the South China Sea and just giving us a hold in the Pacific, which is like a really strategically important. And in another example of this, recently, the nation of Tuvalu, which is not too far away from the Marshalls in the grand scheme of things.

They signed a bilateral compact with Australia, basically giving, you know, Tuvalu, like a, a semi unlimited migration, that there were a certain number of people from Tuvalu can go to Australia, you know, as climate impacts get worse. And there again, there was criticism that this is basically like ceding a portion of sovereignty to Australia, which gets some unspecified things in return.

So there's a, there's ways that, you know, island nations can make deals or like kind of find ways to strategically enable further migration. But in the case of the United States, it's hard to imagine, you know, anything replicating the, the latitude of the compact of free association that the Marshall Islands has.

I think you can look to the temporary protected status program, you know, that like when there was an earthquake in Haiti, for instance, we were able to temporarily suspend a lot of immigration restrictions for people who were fleeing that country. And there's some amount of executive authority to do that for other disasters.

And I think like, you know, one potential policy solution that's been proposed is that you can really beef up the usage of the temporary protected status program to help climate refugees resettle in the United States. Now, of course, like it's temporary and it's specific, or at least it's supposed to be temporary and specific.

So there would be some potential political blowback if you overused it, of course. But yeah, I think that like the scale of migration that's going to be necessary for a lot of countries, like, it just can't happen through the, the vanilla, like, asylum system that the U.S. has. It just isn’t, it’s just far too restrictive and complicated to allow for the kind of the coordinated migratory movement that is going to be needed for some of the most vulnerable countries.

Tyler McBrien: Yeah, and that's a really helpful clarification. It's not so much a quirk of history as an ongoing quid pro quo and trade off with these geopolitical, strategic geopolitical, you know, location of the Marshall Islands.

Yeah. I want to, I want to end on as much as we can, you know, an optimistic note. And, and I, I do that because as you mentioned, the, the authors, the creators of the adaptation plan themselves characterize the document as optimistic. So first, do you think that's a, you know, another clever marketing or ploy or, you know, an attempt to get more financing or do they really believe it?

And if so, why do you think they, they call it an optimistic document?

Jake Bittle: No, they, I mean, yeah, this is when I, when I first started speaking to them about it, I was jarred by how optimistic they were and how much they framed it as an optimistic document. But I mean, I quickly came to understand. I think that like they all say, and they said this to me, that they don't really see that they have a choice but to be optimistic.

Like I think that it's easy for ministers and government policy makers to look at the data and say, look, like it really doesn't look good. We have to have some harsh truths here. Like this is, you know, we have to be brave and face up honestly to what's needed. But I think when they went out and they saw how determined, you know, residential populations on some of these vulnerable islands and atolls, and by the way, the country has like 2% consistent internet access.

Like most of these people, they weren't, their voices hadn't previously been incorporated into the conversation around climate adaptation in the country. Like I think when they saw that, they just said, well, you know, if this is where our people are at, this is where we have to be too. And so let's do everything we can, not to just say that it's an optimistic document, but to come up with a document that's both optimistic and honest.

And like, that is, that's always kind of the, that's always the difficulty when you're talking about climate change is how do you be both, you know, optimistic and motivating while also being honest and nowhere is it more difficult than in the case of something like this plan, but I think that, yeah, they just see it as necessary to take the path of we can save a lot because, you know, that I think they feel like they owe it to the people that they're doing this for, if that makes sense.

Tyler McBrien: It sure does. And with that, Jake Bittle, I'd like to thank you for joining me. Thank you for reporting and we'll definitely keep an eye on your reporting at COP29 and beyond.

Jake Bittle: Thanks so much.

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