Life on a tiny South Pacific island might sound like bliss to some but residents on Nauru, threatened by climate change, are having to flee their homes for higher ground – and offer citizenship to outsiders via a golden passport scheme intended to raise money to help them do so.
Nauru is a 21-square-kilometre island, northeast of Australia in Micronesia. Previously prized and unusually-pure phosphates, that once gave the world’s smallest republic one of the world’s highest GDPs per capita, have been mined to exhaustion, leaving 80% of the territory uninhabitable and forcing the population to its coasts. Now that coastline is threatened by erosion, storm surge flooding, and rising sea levels of plus 15 to 30 cm by 2050, attributed to climate change. To enable the population of between 12,000 and 13,000 to move inland to higher ground, vast funds must be found.
Enter the idea of a golden passport scheme aimed at people who want access to the 89 countries that welcome Nauruans. Citizenship is on offer in return for an investment of approximately €100,000 giving entry to places such as Hong Kong, Ireland, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. It’s important that applicants do not intend to settle on Nauru, since the island’s habitable land is already more than five times overpopulated, according to Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO).
Target of 500 golden visa applicants
Just how many people will go for the scheme is uncertain. Nauru is aiming for just 66 successful applications in 2025 but its long-term vision is almost 10 times as ambitious. “We would like to achieve 500 applicants coming through the program,” totalling about €50 million, Edward Clark, the head of Nauru’s Economic and Climate Resilience Citizenship Programme told AFP.
If that goal were reached, the resulting income would amount to around 20% of Nauru’s state receipts and almost foot the entire €60-million bill for its citizens’ relocation, which Nauru’s President David Adeang has said includes enough margin not only to survive but to secure “a sustainable and prosperous future for generations to come.”
Previous notorious income efforts
The tiny island nation has raised funds in the past: through a now-notorious previous golden visa scheme in the early 2000s that inadvertently awarded citizenship to Al-Qaeda members who were later arrested in Asia; and through another controversial program, which saw asylum seekers denied entry to Australia detained on Nauru – an arrangement that earned the island both millions of dollars and widespread condemnation by humanitarian organisations, after 14 detainee deaths, numerous suicide attempts and at least six referrals to the international criminal court.
While international observers look on, Clark has said the island will only offer citizenship this time by following “the strictest and most thorough due diligence procedures”. He also called on the scientific community for help, noting that “developing climate-vulnerable countries are disproportionately affected by climate change, and there is therefore an urgent need to ensure they disproportionately benefit from climate innovation.”
