The Nation Ex-Situ: On climate change, deterritorialized nationhood and the post-climate era

It is plausible that the impacts of climate change will render certain nation-states uninhabitable before the close of the century. While this may be the fate of a small number of those nation-states most vulnerable to climate change, its implications for the evoluation of statehood and international law in a "post-climate" regime is potentially seismic. Burkett argues that to respond to the phenomenon of landless nation-states, international law could accommodate an entierly new category ofinternational actors. She introduces the Nation Ex-Situ as a status that allows for the continued existence of a sovereign state, afforded all of the rights and benefits of sovereignty amonst the family of states, in perpetuity. In practice this would requite the creation of a government frameowrk that could exercise authority over a diffuse people.