A considerable number of people live less than one meter above sea level in the Asia-Pacific region. For most of them, the word “relocation” still designates an option. For the inhabitants of Tuvalu or the low-lying islands of Fiji, it designates something more brutal: the end of a territory. The Asian Development Bank’s Asia-Pacific Climate Report 2026 documents this disconnect between the rhetoric of climate adaptation and what adaptation means concretely when you have nowhere else to go.
The essentials
- Small Pacific island states have no “refuge land”: planned relocation is a last-resort adaptation measure, which also involves constraints of space and land availability.
- In January 2024, nearly 50 Fijian villages were being considered for potential relocation over five to ten years; Tuvalu created 7.3 hectares of artificial land in Funafuti at a total cost of $38.9 million, according to the Green Climate Fund, or approximately $12,500 per estimated direct beneficiary.
- Coastal damage in Asia-Pacific could rise from $27 billion in 2025 to over $500 billion by the end of the century, according to the Asian Development Bank.
- Poor households suffer this damage more severely than wealthy households, due to lack of insurance, savings, and mobility.
- International climate financing remains far below needs: the gap between what is promised and what is delivered is the central political variable of the next decade.
Fiji: when relocation is not becoming safe
The list is long. A growing number of villages are being considered for potential relocation; in July 2025, the Fijian government clarified that 43 communities had been shortlisted for evaluation and did not constitute confirmed sites. A few have already moved: Vunidogoloa in 2014, Togoru in 2020. Photographs show new houses, higher up inland. The official narrative is one of resilience.
But relocation costs vary considerably depending on the project. The Fijian government, for example, estimated Nabavatu’s relocation at approximately $5.9 million. Available land inside the islands is often subject to land disputes or too steep for subsistence agriculture. And the list grows faster than relocations happen: the tropical storms of 2023 and 2024 struck villages that were not yet on the list.
The structural problem is simple to state. Fiji is an archipelago. Total land area is limited, a large share of the population lives near the coasts, but Fiji’s lands are predominantly volcanic islands and are not predominantly flat, and the high interior lands belong to clans whose customary rights complicate any rapid acquisition. In Fiji, a relocation can have effects on host communities and create new vulnerabilities, depending on the site chosen, land rights, and access conditions to services. The ADB indicates that poor households have fewer resources to prepare for, absorb, and overcome losses, particularly because they often live in the most exposed areas.
This is a matter of managing constraints, not adaptation.
Tuvalu: 7.3 hectares to save a nation
Tuvalu is the extreme case. Nine atolls, eleven thousand inhabitants, a maximum elevation of four meters. Rising sea levels pose a serious threat to Tuvalu’s habitability and demand urgent adaptation strategies.
Tuvalu’s response to this fate is one of the boldest ever attempted by a coastal government: build land. In Funafuti, the capital, 7.3 hectares were artificially created through dredging and land reclamation as part of the TCAP, at a total cost of $38.9 million according to the Green Climate Fund. The reproducibility of this solution must be evaluated based on local conditions, actual costs, and available financing.
In 2023, Tuvalu signed an agreement with Australia that allows its citizens to migrate and retain their Tuvaluan nationality, even if their island is submerged. This is the first time a state has legally accepted the possibility of its own geographic erasure while preserving its nominal sovereignty. The agreement is a remarkable institutional innovation. It prevents nothing on the physical level.
The international community applauded. Additional funding followed: TCAP II secured $17.5 million for new protections and recovery of eight hectares.
The cost of inaction exceeds the cost of adaptation
The ADB Climate Report 2026 provides a projection that deserves to be taken seriously. Annual coastal damage in Asia-Pacific currently reaches approximately $27 billion. By 2050, according to the Asian Development Bank’s scenarios, this figure could reach between $172 and $199 billion. By 2100, between $519 and $739 billion.
These figures encompass the entire region, from the Bangladeshi deltas to the megacities on Asia-Pacific’s coasts. But for small island states, the report is different: their losses are measured not only in economic damage. They are measured in permanently lost habitable land, in cultures and languages that disappear with villages, in sovereignty that erodes with each cyclone.
The comparison between the cost of preventive adaptation and the cost of cumulative damage always argues for early investment. Protecting one kilometer of coastline with mangroves or dikes costs a fraction of what reconstruction costs after a major flood. But this trade-off assumes you have the resources to invest now. The ADB estimates coastal resilience needs for small island states at approximately 2.4–3.9% of their GDP. Small developing island states represent approximately 0.6% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The arithmetic injustice is striking. The same mechanism of structural exclusion reproduces itself here, but at the scale of entire states rather than rural populations.
The limits of space: the Bangladesh lesson
Bangladesh is often cited as an example of successful adaptation under extreme constraint. The country has built thousands of cyclone shelters, developed early warning systems, and displaced populations from the delta to cities. Cyclone mortality has dropped dramatically since the 1970s.
But Bangladesh has something Tuvalu does not: a hinterland. The highland regions of the north and center absorb internal migration. The cities of Dhaka and Chittagong grow in part because the delta shrinks.
Possibilities for internal retreat are extremely limited in low-lying atolls, but they vary across island states. If climate impacts worsen, Tuvaluans have a voluntary pathway to live, study, or work in Australia, alongside efforts to enable them to remain in Tuvalu. And leaving often entails loss of access to subsistence fishing, family networks, language, and local cultural practices. International relocation is often perceived as an undesirable option rather than appropriate adaptation: it can entail loss of access to subsistence fishing, family networks, language, and local cultural practices.
The International Organization for Migration has documented what researchers call the “mobility trap”: many poor households lack the resources to leave and remain exposed by staying. They stay, on islands that shrink.
The trade-offs of the next decade
Between 2035 and 2050, the central question will be whether international climate financing reaches critical mass before decisions to leave become irreversible.
Two trajectories are emerging, neither yet locked in.
In the first, current financing mechanisms—the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund, and the new “loss and damage” fund created at COP27 in November 2022 and operationalized at COP28 in December 2023—scale up. Contributions to the fund remain invited or voluntary contributions; the COP28 decision does not make them binding. Small island states could benefit from streamlined access procedures to this financing. In this scenario, island states could fund their adaptation measures, and Commonwealth states could negotiate organized migration agreements that preserve the cohesion of displaced communities. Adaptation remains a policy, not a drift.
In the second trajectory, commitments remain symbolic. The “loss and damage” fund caps out at a few hundred million. The ADB estimates the region’s coastal resilience needs at approximately $20 billion per year; no equivalent allocation to the International Organization for Migration has been confirmed. Island states finance their resilience with heavy dependence on external financing, even as national public resources remain important, on fragile economies whose tourism and fishing are threatened by rising waters and coral bleaching. Communities leave in disorganized fashion, without resources to settle elsewhere in decent conditions.
The determining signal will come from COP30, scheduled for Belém in 2025, and subsequent negotiations: will the United States, the European Union, China, and Japan accept a contribution mechanism calculated on their historical emissions, or will they maintain the current system of voluntary contributions? This trade-off, more than any local adaptation plan, will determine whether small island states retain a future on their own lands or head toward exile.
No 2026 Commonwealth report establishing a cumulative need of $400 billion by 2050 has been confirmed. The ADB projects annual damage of $519 to $739 billion in 2100 across the region.
The innovations that shift the balance
It would be inaccurate to present the situation as frozen. Several movements are underway that are changing the situation, slowly but genuinely.
The first is legal. The International Court of Justice was seized in April 2023, following resolution 77/276 adopted on March 29, 2023, with a request for an advisory opinion on states’ obligations regarding climate change, initiated by Vanuatu and a coalition of island states. An ICJ advisory opinion is not binding, but it creates moral jurisprudence and can fuel litigation before other courts. It is a strategy of legal encirclement that takes time but shifts the balance of power in climate negotiations.
The second is technological. Techniques for artificial land construction are improving. The Netherlands, which has centuries of experience in this area, has engaged in technical cooperation with several Pacific states. Costs are falling, even if the scale of $12,500 per beneficiary in Tuvalu remains significant for generalization.
The third is diplomatic. The treaty between Tuvalu and Australia opened a path that other states are exploring. Kiribati and New Zealand have a partnership including climate cooperation and mobility links, but no agreement similar to the Falepili treaty has been confirmed. These organized migration agreements, which preserve the nationality and cultural rights of migrants, represent a partial but real response to the mobility trap.
These three movements do not solve the problem. They show that actors—island governments, lawyers, engineers, diplomats—are working on solutions that did not exist ten years ago. The distribution of resources is always political before it is mechanical. Climate financing for island states is too.
The open question is that of scale and speed. Relocations in Fiji, land creation in Tuvalu, and the Australia–Tuvalu mobility pathway exist and function on a small scale. Their capacity to deploy at the pace of rising seas has not yet been fully established.
Sources
- ADB Asia-Pacific Climate Report 2026: Coastal Risks on the Rise, Asian Development Bank
- International Organization for Migration (IOM), report on climate mobility in the Pacific, 2026
- Commonwealth Secretariat, report on climate financing for island states, 2026
- Government of Fiji, National Relocation Program, 2023–2024 data
- Tuvalu-Australia Partnership Agreement (PACER Plus Climate Mobility Treaty), 2023
