You're listening to a CNA podcast. The passport you hold is so important to your mobility, where you can travel, what visas you need, etc. What if you could just get a new one, buy a new one by helping another country out with their fight against climate change? It's happening. Today we look at why and where passports are being handed out in the face of climate calamity. Hello, welcome to Climate Conversations. I'm Jack Broadley. Link Tan is back for more. How's your week been? Hello,
Jack. It's been spectacular. Thank you for asking. How has your week been?
My week has been great. I've just been on holidays, so I'm pretty happy with that. Ready to go. Ready to get into today's topic. Now, have you heard of this before, this idea of golden passports? How keen would you be to have a little sneaky second passport in your hands?
I don't think I'm allowed to talk about that, Jack. Singapore does not allow dual citizenship. It's illegal and a very bad thing to do. Can you
get a government is not listening, don't worry, not listening.
Um, what about you? Can you get a sneaky second passport in Australia?
Yeah, we're allowed to have dual citizenship. And I actually am in the process of trying to get a second passport as we speak. So stay tuned, whether that is successful. Is that a golden passport? It's not a golden one. It's just a very regular one, and I'm not paying for it. But having a second passport, wow, it's super useful. Ops up the world for sure. OK, let's get into the quiz. Lee Ling, do you enjoy? Checking out those passport power rankings that seem to come
out every year. Every time they come out makes a little headline. Do you look at those?
Uh, no, not really. I mean, it's there, it's peripherally there because people talk about it and Singapore's passport is normally usually right up there in the top 5 or top 10 rankings, if not right at the top spot. Mm.
Yeah, I think that's why. I think it's just, it always pops up in, in our news every year because the Singapore passport's always staying so strong. OK, the question today isn't really climate related, but can you put these four countries' passports in order from the most to the least powerful, and this is based on. Global mobility caused by the passport index. Your four options, Singapore, of course, Australia, the UAE and Switzerland. I've got different continents covered there. What
do you think? I remember Singapore, of course. Japan and South Korea were also, I think in the top 3 spots, but that's all I recall. I need to kind of go back into my memory bank. Have a
think, and so we'll be at the end. And now for our main story this week. You might know about this, countries offering citizenship or residency in exchange for financial contributions. It's often called citizenship by investment, or CBIs. Now it's not new, countries have been doing this for a while. Go back to Saint Kitts and Nevis in 1984, small Caribbean nations searching for foreign capital shortly after it became independent.
The country came up with a novel plan, offering citizenship in exchange for an investment or a donation to government funds or real estate projects. By the 2000s, it had become extremely popular as the United States and Canada, nearby countries, curbed some of their foreign immigration programs. It still functions today though as a CBI. Other countries tried it too. Most flamed out due to corruption, money laundering, a lack of transparency or public backlash. Look at Ireland, Tonga,
the Marshall Islands. But today, these schemes continue. Increasingly, they're being used by small climate vulnerable nations desperate for help and finances. To fund their efforts to stave off the impacts of climate change.
The most recent example we have, which I think is really interesting, is one of those small island nations you're talking about, Nauru. Now ask the average person to find it on a map, Nauru, and well, good luck. It's a tiny.
I think I can find it. Yeah,
that's because you're you and you look at maps as bedtime reading. So. It's a tiny phosphate rock plateau in the South Pacific, northwest of the Solomon Islands, and it too in the past, had a golden passport scheme that went badly awry. Now at one point in the 1990s it was handing out hundreds of passports, many to dodgy individuals from Russia and the Middle East. It became a money laundering issue, and when it was discovered, Nauru had sold passports to
members of al Qaeda in the early 2000s. Well, the scheme stopped. Why are you laughing?
Well, that seems like a good way to stop. Good reason to stop your scheme. You sold passports to al
Qaeda. Yeah, bad idea. Now, you might recall that after that, Nauru then allowed its land to be used for a controversial immigration detention center under the management of your government. Now that reaped millions of dollars for the country. And then fast forward to today. Now, Nauru is back with a new plan. This time, linked to climate change. The country is extremely vulnerable to rising sea levels, no question, with minimal freshwater resources, highly degraded land due to decades
of phosphate mining and limited food security. All of this leads to a real lack of economic options.
I think it makes sense that they're looking for financing options. And that means getting your hands on a Nauru passport. So how much do we think that would cost? It's not cheap. The government says it will cost a minimum of $105,000 US dollars and certain criminals would be excluded this time. So then I have questions about who would pay for
that and why would they do it. The benefits for an individual now with the Nauru passport is you get visa-free access to 89 countries, including the UK, including Hong Kong, the UAE and Singapore. So, these people who would invest in Nauru's scheme might not ever step on the country, but it does give them global access to other more strategic places for their lifestyle or their business ventures. Interesting, right? So,
you can be a citizen of the country without ever having stepped foot there? OK. Well, yeah, sure. That's interesting. But, you know, a lot of this is about survival, right? So, that leads to what Nauru needs the money for. It plans to move 90% of the island's population of around 12,500 people and move them to higher ground.
The problem in low lying Nauru is that decades of phosphate mining has made much of the interior of their islands uninhabitable, and that's pushed people to live close to the coast, which of course is being eroded by rising sea levels. So Nauru expects to make around $5.6 million from the program in its first year. It's aiming for about 500 applications and a total of $43 million and that would go along. Way to covering the cost of the mass relocations that
it wants to conduct. Now, it's not the only country doing this. Others like Vanuatu, Dominica, and of course you mentioned Saint Kitts and Nevis earlier, and several others are doing it as well. And what do they all have in common? They're all small island developing states on the front lines of climate change.
These countries clearly have a need for climate adaptation financing. It's a huge and growing problem for them. And the international financing for these types of things is stalled to some extent. And of course, we know that the US is no longer an active player in terms of climate funding. So, nations on the brink are watching the clock. They're getting more desperate, and you can hardly blame them, right? This is all about survival, as you said.
I spent a few weeks in the Pacific region last year, not in Nauru, but other countries, Fiji, Kiribati. And Tuvalu, where you can really see firsthand the impacts of these rising sea levels. And Tuvalu is a country that is widely labeled, rightly or wrongly, the first country likely to disappear from climate change. So right now, it doesn't have a CBI, but these types of ideas have
been discussed in the past. And debate rages on there around this notion of migration with dignity, like, moving an entire population somewhere else, like Australia for example. So that raises these existential questions about what it means to be a citizen of Tuvalu, to be a Tuvaluan. And I think that's something that's deeper, it's more soulful, and this notion of belonging to a place, regardless of what your passport says.
So I have the questions about what we think about putting a price on sovereignty, essentially making belonging to a nation a commodity. And these are nations that sadly, potentially may not have a long future, given the way that the planet is heating up.
And I think, you know, we're talking about life and death, right? And when you ask the question of survival over sovereignty, the choice, I think is quite a simple one to make, especially when there is no land left to self-govern. This is depressing talk, Jack.
It is, but I can see, like, why the Nauru government wants to do this. Giving out 500 passports is essentially something they can do without really much impact on their own resources. Yet it gives them the money that they can't get from anywhere else to literally save their entire population, so. I can see it making sense whether these schemes work this time around, well, we'll wait and see, I guess. But you won't be getting one. That's, that's what we've established.
No, no.
I didn't realize that Singapore you can't.
You know, I had a Singaporean friend in Australia who had been holding two citizenships and then COVID happened, was required to get vaccinated, but his proof of vaccination was from Australia and it stated that he was a citizen there and so Singapore found out. And made him relinquish his Singapore citizenship.
I have a friend who's Singaporean. Her parents were in Australia. She was born in Adelaide, got an Australian passport, never been a Singaporean, even though she's then like lived her whole life in Singapore, but it has an Australian passport. Strange.
Yeah, so this golden passport thing could just change how a lot of things work as more countries start offering this or consider offering this as an option to finance their climate adaptation and mitigation strategies, right? So we'll see, we'll watch this space.
I'll let you know if I get my second passport.
It's
not Nauru. That's, that's all I'll tell you.
OK.
OK, back to our quiz question. To repeat it, can you rank these passports by their power? And we have Singapore, Australia, the UAE, and Switzerland.
OK, I think Singapore, obviously at the top. I remember seeing Switzerland on the list, and it, it, Switzerland has historically been included, of course, among the top spots. So Singapore, Switzerland. I don't remember seeing the United Arab Emirates on the list when I looked at it. So Singapore, Switzerland, then Australia 3rd, and then UAE last.
Oh, you did so well last week Neiling, but I'm sorry to tell you, all of them are in the wrong position. All
in.
The most powerful passport in the world is the UAE. UAE is the most powerful passport in the world. Uh, Singapore is 2nd on that list, not 2nd. The world, 2 on that list. And then came Switzerland, and Australia had the least powerful out of that little grouping.
Clearly, I'm recalling a different list.
Singapore was 3rd overall, Switzerland's what, 456789, 11th, and Australia, a little depressing way down, I would say it looks about, about 25ish I would say for the Australian passport. OK. OK. Wanna have a guess which is the least powerful passport?
There's got to be a conflict, some things that's In the midst of conflict. I'm gonna guess what? Yemen or maybe Iran because of the sanctions? Mm,
Afghanistan.
Oh
wow. OK. A complete blowout for you today. But that's all right. You've always got next week. There'll be another quiz for sure. All right. That's all for this episode of Climate Conversations. Thanks for joining us. Give us some feedback, a rating or a question if you're listening on Spotify, you can do it right in the episode description.
Catch you next week. I'm Li Ling Dun. Bye for
now. I'm Jack Board. Thanks as always to the team that put together this podcast, Saayen, Tiffany Ung, Janai Jahari, and Christina Roberts.