A tiny island country is selling citizenship for US$105,000 to save itself from rising seas

A beach in Ewa on the Pacific island of Nauru, on September 2, 2018. (Mike Leyral/AFP/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Citizenship of Nauru, an island nation spanning just 8 square miles in the southwest Pacific Ocean, can be yours for US$105,000 (about C$150,100). The tiny, low-lying island has launched a “golden passport” initiative with the aim of raising money to fund climate action.

Nauru faces an existential threat from rising sea levels, storm surges and coastal erosion as the planet warms. But the world’s third smallest country lacks the resources to protect itself from a climate crisis disproportionately driven by wealthy countries.

The government says selling citizenship will help raise the funds needed for a plan to move 90 per cent of the island’s around 12,500-strong population onto higher ground and build an entirely new community.

Golden passports are not new but they are controversial; history is littered with examples of them being exploited for criminal actions. Yet as developing countries struggle to get the money they need to deal with escalating climate impacts — a funding gap likely to be exacerbated by the U.S. withdrawal from global climate action — they are being forced to find new ways to raise cash.

“While the world debates climate action, we must take proactive steps to secure our nation’s future,” Nauru’s President David Adeang told CNN.

The passports will cost a minimum of $105,000, but will be prohibited for people with certain criminal histories. A Nauru passport offers visa-free access to 89 countries including the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Few of these new passport holders are likely to ever even visit remote Nauru, but citizenship allows people to lead “global lives,” said Kirstin Surak, associate professor of political sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires. This can be particularly useful for those with more restrictive passports, she told CNN.

For Nauru, this program is being pitched as a chance to secure the future of the island, which has a difficult, dark history.

Nauru was strip mined for phosphate from the early 1900s. For nearly a century, the landscape was gouged by miners, leaving the center of the island a near barren landscape of jagged rocks.

It has left around 80 per cent of the island uninhabitable, meaning most people now live clustered along the coastlines, exposed to sea level rise, which has been increasing here at a faster rate than global average.

Once the phosphate ran out, Nauru looked for new revenue sources. Since the early 2000s, it has served as an offshore detention site for refugees and migrants attempting to settle in Australia — a program scaled back after detainee deaths.

Now, the island is at the centre of a controversial plan to mine the deep sea for materials for the green transition.

Nauru was even in the sights of now-disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who floated a plan to buy the island and build a bunker to survive an apocalypse, according to 2023 filings in a lawsuit against him.

For the people who live there, however, Nauru feels anything but future-proofed.

“A lot of people residing on the coast have already lost land — some have had their entire houses engulfed by king tides and they have lost everything,” Tyrone Deiye, a Nauruan national and a researcher at Monash Business School in Australia, said in a statement.

Selling citizenship has the potential to make “an absolutely enormous” economic impact for micro-states like Nauru, LSE’s Surak said.

Nauru expects to make around $5.6 million from the program in its first year, eventually scaling that to around $42 million a year. It will be built up gradually “as we assess for any unintended consequences or negative impact,” said Edward Clark, CEO of Nauru Economic and Climate Resilience Citizenship Program. Ultimately they hope the program will make up 19% of total government revenue.

The success of the program will depend on how “revenues are channeled into the country, and what they are used to do,” Surak said. That means vetting and transparency on where the funds go, and preventing people who would otherwise be prohibited from being granted passports from paying officials off the books to get one, she added.

An earlier program to sell citizenship in the mid-1990s was mired in scandal, including the 2003 arrest in Malaysia of two alleged Al Qaida terrorists carrying Nauru passports.

The government says the program’s vetting will be stringent and exclude those from countries designated as high risk by the United Nations, including Russia and North Korea. Partnerships with international organizations including the World Bank will provide “expertise and oversight,” said President Adeang.

Nauru is not the first country to look to fund climate action by selling passports. The Caribbean nation of Dominica, which has been selling citizenship since 1993, recently said it was using some of the proceeds to fund its “commitment to be the world’s first climate resilient country by 2030.”

It may be a route other countries consider as the burden of dealing with the costs of climate change far outweigh their economic resources, all while international climate funding appears to be drying up.

“Nauru highlights the opportunities for climate vulnerable countries to become testing grounds for climate innovation,” Clark said.

Article written by Laura Paddison, CNN