In the future, climate change is likely to become a major cause to forced environmental migration. In this paper I ask the question of what kind of rights environmental migrants can claim qua environmental migrants? I will focus on the suggestion that the rights of environmental migrants should be understood as collective entitlements to territory based on a right to collective self-determination. The argument reviewed is that in circumstances where ecological disaster threatens a state’s possibility to remain self-determining, a proviso is triggered. This proviso requires of other states that they give up parts of their territory to the threatened state. I question the radical implications of this argument by observing an interesting fact: Even if a territory becomes inhabitable, in one sense it never disappears completely. Even a vanished island is still there, beneath the ocean surface, and there will be territorial sea where the island once was. An environmental migrant state could continue to be self-determining in a normatively relevant sense by exercising sovereign control over the abandoned territory. It could claim sovereign control over the territorial sea as a so called “exclusive economic zone”, and it would thereby possess sovereign rights over the natural resources of the waters and sea bed in that zone. Economic gains from these natural resources could be used to establish some limited form of justice within the environmental migrant group and they would thereby retain some measure of self-determination.
