Climate change and the limits of maritime jurisdiction

Among the most salient impacts on the oceans associated with climate change is potentially significant and, critically, rapid sea-level rise. Sealevel rise of this character would clearly pose potentially disastrous threats to numerous coastal States, especially those with large areas of heavily-populated, low-lying coastal territory. In light of long-standing and ongoing shifts in the concentration of global populations from rural to urban and from interior/highland to coastal/lowland contexts, concerns over the potential effects of sea-level rise on heavily inhabited areas are significant (Schofield 2011). Indeed, it has been estimated that a sea-level rise of 1 m would inundate the territory presently home to around 60 million people (Ananthaswamy 2009).