Italy and Switzerland change their border following the melting of a glacier

Every Saturday we decipher climate issues with François Gemenne, professor at HEC, president of the Scientific Council of the Foundation for Nature and Man and member of the IPCC.

Near the Matterhorn (or Matterhorn), several segments of the border between Italy and Switzerland are determined by the ridge lines of glaciers. However, these glaciers are melting, and therefore their crest line is changing. This is why Switzerland and Italy set up a joint commission to draw a new border which takes into account these changes, which were recorded this week.

This is not the first time that a border has been changed: from time to time two countries change the course of their border peacefully, but usually for practical reasons. For example, in 2017, Belgium and the Netherlands redrew a border because they realized that an uninhabited peninsula did not belong to either country, that a corpse had been discovered there, and that we did not know whether it was the Belgian police or the Dutch police who should lead the investigation. But with climate change, we can easily imagine that many other borders will have to be redrawn, because many borders are based on natural elements: rivers, glaciers, etc. And climate change will obviously transform these elements.

Could this lead to tensions, or even border incidents or conflicts?

Difficult to exclude it. For the Matterhorn, we had set up a special commission, and it did not concern a very large area. But in other places, we can imagine that the territory concerned is much larger, and therefore the borders much more contested. In the case of rivers which dry up, or whose course changes, for example. But where it gets really tricky is with rising sea levels.

We are talking here about maritime borders, obviously, and in particular about the exclusive economic zone, or EEZ, which is a strip of sea located between territorial waters and international waters, and over which a State has exclusive rights. exploitation of natural resources. This zone is delimited by a distance of 200 nautical miles, or approximately 370 kilometers, from the coastline baseline. The problem is that rising sea levels are eating away at this coastline, and the baseline is receding, which shrinks the EEZs. And this greatly worries the small island states of the Pacific, whose EEZ is often the main wealth: in 2021, they sent an official declaration to signal to the UN that they would not agree to review the borders of their maritime zones .

Several small island states in the region, such as Tuvalu, Kiribati or the Marshall Islands, even risk losing their territory, which raises an important question: can a country that loses its territory retain its statehood? In the current state of international law, it is the territory which is the foundation of the State. Lawyers are starting to think about emergency solutions. Particularly to the idea of ​​creating deterritorialized states, virtual, as it were. It would be a Copernican revolution in the international order, of course: if this were done, certain States would no longer appear on the world map. It’s dizzying.

Dizzying, but still very distant, right?

Not so much. And we are directly concerned, in France, since we are the second maritime power in the world, with more than ten million km2 of maritime space. And the vast majority of these spaces are overseas, obviously, not in the Mediterranean… And several overseas territories are directly threatened by rising sea levels: Clipperton, Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, the Tuamotu and so on… Our maritime spaces could therefore also be reduced, with enormous consequences for fishing, our maritime sovereignty… and for local populations, of course.

Climate change, literally, will redraw our geographic maps. And in a country like ours, which is defined in official texts by its geographical shape, France, that should still do something to us…