On 8 June 2026 — World Ocean Day — the government of Tuvalu will launch its first National Ocean Policy. The launch falls into Edition 003 of this publication, but the document and its provisions are public, and the framework it establishes is significant enough to warrant coverage in advance.
Tuvalu is one of the lowest-lying countries in the world. The four reef islands and five true atolls that constitute the nation rise no more than five metres above sea level at any point, and the working assumption in the country's long-term planning is that the territory as currently inhabited will not be habitable through to the end of this century. The Tuvaluan government has been developing legal and diplomatic frameworks designed to preserve Tuvaluan statehood, sovereignty, and citizenship even in the event that the physical territory ceases to be functionally available — including a 2023 constitutional amendment that establishes the permanence of Tuvalu's statehood independent of its land area.
The National Ocean Policy launching on World Ocean Day extends this work into the ocean-resource domain. Its principal provisions establish climate-mobility protocols (formal frameworks for the international relocation of Tuvaluan citizens with continuing rights of nationality and ocean-resource access), ocean-resource sovereignty assertions consistent with the ICJ Advisory Opinion endorsed by the General Assembly last week, and integration with the 7-hectare reclaimed-land project that has been under construction since 2017 and is designed to remain above projected sea levels beyond 2100.
The reclaimed land project, supported by the United Nations Development Programme, uses high-resolution bathymetric and topographic data to engineer terrain that the country's National Adaptation Plan models as remaining viable beyond projected end-of-century sea level rise. Approximately 7.3 hectares of new land have been constructed to date. The land sits in the capital, Funafuti, and includes infrastructure for government continuity, archival storage, and the kinds of facilities a nation needs to continue existing as a nation even when much of its prior territory does not.
The combination of these elements — the constitutional permanence of statehood, the diplomatic framework, the legal ocean-resource assertions, and the physical land construction — is unprecedented. No other nation has previously attempted to engineer its own continuity at this level of legal and physical specificity in the face of an existential threat to its land base. Whether the framework holds — whether the international community honours statehood claims for nations whose territory has ceased to be habitable, whether the reclaimed land is sufficient, whether the diplomatic protections function in practice — is a question that will be answered over the coming decades.
What can be said now is that a country of approximately 11,000 people is doing serious, unglamorous, legally rigorous work to engineer its own survival, and that the work is being done largely outside the attention of the world that is contributing to the conditions making it necessary.