Island nations just won the right to exist

Philip Davis, the prime minister of the Bahamas, has watched his country's shoreline shrink for years — 'our landmass is less than 3 meters above sea level,' he says. This week the UN General Assembly unanimously passed the first-ever declaration on sea-level rise: island nations will keep their statehood and their ocean territory even if the land itself disappears beneath the waves. The declaration, driven by the Alliance of Small Island States, locks in what courts had only presumed — no nation can simply vanish. It also presses wealthy countries to open adaptation funds for seawalls, mangrove restoration and relocation.