By Mike Copage
Pacific island countries, and low-lying lands globally, are on the front lines of climate change. From rising sea-levels to intensifying cyclone impacts, vulnerable food and economic security, they face a great many risks. Equally, the history of Pacific islanders revolves around learning and adapting to the unique environments of their homelands—and they are unequivocal about their desire to continue that long tradition of adaptation in the face of amplified climate risks.
To remain a partner of preference in the Pacific, countries like Australia must demonstrate real commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions—but also take the Pacific’s lead when islanders ask for support in managing the security risks posed by climate change. Nowhere is that need clearer than in challenging the long-held assumption that Pacific islanders are doomed to relocate their entire communities. While sea levels and storm surges threaten to flood their lands, a key and viable solution is counterintuitively simple in the face of that immense challenge.
Land reclamation is and should remain a key part of a balanced approach to supporting the Pacific community. Tuvalu demonstrated this in its priorities for Australian support through the Falepili Union. Enabling this is a question of cost, financing and consequences—all of which bear examination in more detail.
Land reclamation in marine environments involves either draining coastal wetlands or depositing a substrate, such as sand, to raise landmasses above sea level. This can be used either to extend existing coastlines or to create artificial islands. It’s far from a novel technique: there is a long global history of land reclamation, and its application is widespread.
A 2023 study found that it had been deployed between 2000 and 2020 by 106 of 135 (78 percent) of coastal cities with more than 1 million people. This activity added roughly 2350km2 of land to the Earth’s surface in that period—slightly more than the land territory of Nauru, Tuvalu, Marshall Islands, Niue, Palau, Micronesia and Tonga combined. Their total population is 308,850.
The cost of land reclamation is a key to making their case, given the significant gap in global public financing for climate adaptation: as of late last year, the amount needed was 10 to 18 times as much as the available financing, according to UNEP. The costs of each project are highly variable and dependent on design parameters as well as capital and labour inputs. An interesting example is the largest land reclamation project in the Maldives—Ras Male. The project is designed to create 11.5km2 of land 2 metres above sea-level (well above average estimates of sea-level rise for 2100), at an estimated cost of roughly US$91 million. Designing to cope with future sea-level rise is an important consideration in cost—of the 106 major coastal cities that have resorted to land reclamation, 70 percent appear at high risk of flooding by 2100 even under a medium global emissions scenario (with a temperature rise of 2°C and 3°C).
Its utility in climate adaptation is clear. Under a high-emissions scenario and without land reclamation, much of the area of Tuvalu’s atolls (including its capital, Funafuti) will be flooded by daily tides by 2050, and the country will be almost totally submerged by 2100. Its work to date under the Tuvalu Coastal Adaptation Project (T-CAP) is shoring up infrastructure around three atolls (including Funafuti) to prevent such flooding, supported by the Green Climate Fund and bilateral partners such as Australia (which is contributing roughly US$26 million to T-CAP).
In the longer term, Tuvalu has been developing its Long-Term Adaptation Plan (L-TAP) with regional and global partners to sustain its resilience to coastal flooding risk. The L-TAP is still being fully costed but could be roughly US$1.3 billion, which will include the creation of a 3.5km2 of land free from the future flooding risks projected by experts from NASA and the UN. This is all balanced with support for limited climate mobility arrangements and disaster response, as found in the Falepili Union.
Australia has also contributed technical expertise towards these reclamation works. Hall Contracting is a Queensland-based dredging company supporting T-CAP. Leveraging this expertise and learning from the experience of land-reclamation projects and proponents are critical to ensuring the future success and sustainable application of land reclamation as its importance rises across the region.
Land reclamation can have significant consequences that must be balanced. The extraction of sand from ocean floors has led to export bans across maritime Southeast Asia. The environmental impact of that extraction is severe, and it can lead to the devastation of marine life and resources that are critical to the survival of coastal communities (a clear concern for low-lying islands). Where water has been pumped out of wetlands (as is notably the case in the Netherlands), the result can be significant damage to ecosystems critical for flood prevention and resilience—on top of damaging sensitive ecosystems and contributing to the release into the atmosphere of stored carbon dioxide and methane that would otherwise remain locked in the ground.
The societal benefit of land reclamation to date has also been mixed. The United Arab Emirates’ experience—as has been argued in the Maldives projects—demonstrates its value for economic and real-estate value, rather than strengthening the resilience of societies under climate stress.
The greatest concerns are surely about the use of land reclamation to advance geopolitical interests. China’s deployment of reclamation to support its unlawful territorial claims across the South China Sea is well documented. Equally, it remains a comparatively cheap way to extend the reach of air power without using aircraft carriers. Navigating the use of land reclamation for military and territorial gain is an entirely different question from its role in helping low-lying islands adapt—although attention should be paid to where the technical capacity and expertise from geopolitical applications could be leveraged as influence to support adaptation.
To be clear, land reclamation alone cannot safeguard Pacific island countries from the risks posed by climate change. Domestic challenges for food production and disaster response and recovery may compound with rising economic difficulties, alongside global disruptions to food and trade supply chains.
Its costs are not prohibitive, however. Countries such as Tuvalu have clearly decided that it forms a key part of their future. To remain a partner of preference, countries like Australia must continue to support those efforts and pay attention to what other forms of support Pacific islanders request as climate change intensifies.
Mike Copage is head of the Climate and Security Policy Centre at ASPI.
