Nothing is stable if not the ground beneath our feet. In the complex and unpredictable realm of human social, political, and economic activity, land is one of the few reliably static elements. Traditionally, we can depend on rivers, lakes, and coastlines to be there year in and year out. But today, many scientists believe that we have entered a new geological era — the Anthropocene — in which humanity no longer merely adapts to the geology of the earth but is a powerful geological force of its own. Accelerating natural resource consumption and unchecked pollution since the Industrial Revolution have resulted in rapid shifts in earth systems, which are increasingly visible in geographic changes. Desertification, flooding, mass deforestation, and other amplified climate events are already occurring and will only continue in the future. These changes threaten the physical and geopolitical relationship between human populations and the land they inhabit. In order to adapt to these shifting conditions, humanity needs to move away from the traditional, static understanding of borders and embrace one that maintains coherence in the changing landscape of the Anthropocene.
The Arctic is a useful case for understanding the shortcomings of the rigid territorial state model in a fluid geographic space. Under international law, the North Pole and its surrounding waters are not owned by any country. All countries, including the five with territorial claims in the Arctic — Canada, Norway, Russia, Denmark, and the United States — only have sovereignty over an Exclusive Economic Zone that extends 200 nautical miles from their coastline. This approach takes for granted the obvious and binary division between land and water, where land is understood as sedentary and controllable and water as unbounded and nonterritorial. This geophysical binary is complicated, however, by the very nature of Arctic space: Ice does not fit into the simple division between land and sea. The surface of the ice sheet is in constant flux, melting and refreezing with the seasons, making it extremely challenging to maintain clear borders. This problem, along with the challenging task of determining where land ends and water begins in the Arctic, has been the cause of several recent geopolitical disputes.
In 2007, a team of Russian scientists and legislators decided to plant the Russian flag in the seabed of the North Pole. They also submitted a petition to a UN commission, which claimed that, based on seismic and oceanic depth data, much of the land under the Arctic Ocean is an extension of Russian landmass. Though Russia’s claim was largely motivated by the changing materiality of the Arctic, it leaned on the old flag-planting trope — and the corollary assumptions of claims to stable territory — to frame its actions. The international response to the Russian flag planting demonstrated the inevitable tensions that come with attempting to fit partially fluid space into the rigid land-and-sea dichotomy. The United States argued that while states can make legitimate claims to land, they cannot make such claims to water, which it extended to include ice. Canada dismissed the claim by merely asserting its own claim on Arctic space. Former Canadian Foreign Minister Peter MacKay contended, “The question of sovereignty of the Arctic is not a question. It’s clear. It’s our country. It’s our property. It’s our water…The Arctic is Canadian.” Canada has also sought to exert its claim over the Northwest Passage, a route through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans and is a potentially indispensable trade route. Canadian officials discuss the icy network as just another part of Canadian land — the United States talks about it as a key international strait. As with the Russian claim, the bifurcation of transitory space into land and sea hinders effective geopolitical compromise.
Melting Arctic ice doesn’t only raise the question of Arctic sovereignty — rising sea levels caused by shrinking polar caps are also challenging the material borders of island nations. Most of the more than 100,000 residents of Kiribati, an island nation in the Central Pacific, have already been forced to relocate to a central island, and its government is in talks with Fiji to buy 5,000 acres of land before its islands are submerged. In Tuvalu — a collection of nine islands and atolls between Hawaii and Australia that is home to around 10,800 people — encroaching seawater is dramatically interfering with agricultural production and freshwater sources. It is predicted that the island nation will be almost entirely underwater by the end of the century. Thousands of islands are at risk of being submerged within decades, and nation-states, home to hundreds of thousands, will disappear. Continental nations are at risk too — countries just above sea level could lose much of their habitable land. A 1.5 meter sea level rise would displace 15 percent of the population of Bangladesh, or 17 million people. In Bangladesh, 50,000 people flee to the capital each month because their villages or means of subsistence have been destroyed by rising sea levels.
The physical relocation and disappearance of national borders will create a huge climate refugee population. The current global refugee population is already above 50 million, the highest it has been since World War II, and experts predict it will grow to 150 million by 2050. Fixed border strategies are incompatible with such large refugee populations. Building physical barriers along borders — as some European countries have done in response to the current refugee crisis, or as India has done along its border with Bangladesh — causes overwhelming suffering for those prevented from moving to safer lands. We now live in a world where climate change threatens livelihoods and stability, and our rigid approach to borders is a barrier to sustainable and humanitarian solutions.
Climate change also shuffles the soil and water of regions, increasing the risk of border conflict. Climate change-induced desertification or sustained drought can eliminate a country’s essential agricultural land and lead to border disputes. During the 2011 drought in the Horn of Africa, nomadic livestock farmers, who account for as much as 70 percent of Somalia’s population, suffered major losses in livestock because they couldn’t find consistent sources of water or green pastures. Conflict over water and space for grazing broke out between livestock farmers and became a major security issue in the region. As arable land and water resources are rearranged near major national borders, a framework of cooperation and shared access — regardless of border distinctions — will be essential to prevent famine and conflict.
The stable geography that forms the very literal foundation of human activity has been thrown into flux. The modern system of international politics rests upon the assumption of stable physical boundaries and geographical characteristics and takes the territorially defined nation-state as the fundamental actor. If left unaddressed, this crumbling assumption will have dangerous consequences. Resource and land disputes could become more frequent and dangerous as water and arable land patterns are reconfigured and the defining geographical elements of borders become less reliable. As populations are displaced by rising sea levels or extreme weather events, environmental refugees will be forced across international borders. Adapting to the conditions of the Anthropocene will require a more supple approach to the nation-state on the level of international policy and cultural understanding.
Climate change means that we live in a world where material characteristics, weather patterns, and human communities of any given place are subject to radical change. The current geopolitical ideal based on a dualistic opposition between stable land and antiterritorial sea is insufficient for grappling with a world where the physical organization and characteristics of the land are in flux. This geographic instability presents a direct challenge to the nation-state border. In order to stabilize geopolitics in a world of climate change, the concept of sovereignty based on calcified definitions of boundaries must be allowed to melt away, replaced by less territorial conceptions of nationhood. In the Anthropocene, we teeter on the brink of disaster if we let borders shape things to come.