(Adnkronos) – Nauru, an island nation spanning less than 13 square kilometers in the southwestern Pacific Ocean, is selling citizenship for $105,000 (almost €100,000). The asking price for a ‘golden passport’ from the small Micronesian island 4,000 kilometers northeast of Sydney is very high, but the purpose is noble: the goal is to raise funds to finance projects against climate change, which threatens to wipe out the island due to rising sea levels, storm surges and coastal erosion.
The third smallest nation in the world does not have the resources to protect itself from the climate crisis. According to the government, the sale of citizenship will help raise the funds needed for a plan that aims to relocate 90% of the island’s approximately 12,500 inhabitants to higher ground and build an entirely new community.
“While the world debates climate action, we must take proactive measures to ensure the future of our nation,” Nauru President David Adeang told CNN. Passports will cost a minimum of $105,000, but will be prohibited for people with certain criminal records. A Nauru passport offers visa-free access to 89 countries, including the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. Few new passport holders are likely to visit remote Nauru, but citizenship will allow them to lead “global lives,” said Kirstin Surak, associate professor of political sociology at the London School of Economics and author of The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires. This can be especially helpful for those who have more restrictive passports, she told CNN.
For Nauru, this program is being presented as an opportunity to secure the future of the island, which has a difficult and dark history. Nauru has been strip-mined for phosphates since the early 1900s. For nearly a century, the landscape has been dug up by miners, leaving the center of the island an almost barren landscape of jagged rocks. About 80% of the island has become uninhabitable, meaning most people now live concentrated along the coasts, exposed to rising sea levels, which are rising here at a faster rate than the global average. Once the phosphate ran out, Nauru sought new sources of income. From the early 2000s, it served as an offshore detention site for refugees and migrants attempting to settle in Australia, a program scaled back after the deaths of detainees. Now the island is at the center of a controversial plan to extract materials useful for the green transition from the seabed.
According to filings in a 2023 lawsuit against Sam Bankman-Fried, the now-disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur had hatched a plan to buy the island and build a bunker to survive an apocalypse. However, for the locals, Nauru doesn’t seem like a future-proof destination at all. “Many people residing on the coast have already lost a lot of land, some have had their homes completely submerged by the tides and have lost everything,” Tyrone Deiye, a Nauru citizen and researcher at Monash Business School in Australia, said in a statement.
Nauru expects to raise about $5.6 million (about €5.2 million) from the program in its first year, eventually reaching about $42 million (almost €40 million) a year. It will be gradually increased “as we assess any unintended consequences or negative impacts,” said Edward Clark, CEO of the Nauru Economic and Climate Resilience Citizenship Program. The success of the program will depend on how “revenues are channeled into the country and what they are used for,” Surak said. That means scrutiny and transparency on where the funds go and preventing people who would otherwise be prohibited from obtaining the passport from paying off officials under the table to get one, she added.
A previous citizenship-by-investment program, launched in the mid-1990s, was engulfed in scandal, with the arrest in 2003 in Malaysia of two suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in possession of Nauru passports. The government says vetting for the program will be rigorous and will exclude those who come from countries designated as high-risk by the United Nations, including Russia and North Korea. Partnerships with international organizations, including the World Bank, will provide “expertise and oversight,” President Adeang said. Nauru is not the first country to try to finance climate action by selling passports. The Caribbean nation of Dominica, which has been selling citizenship since 1993, recently said it is using some of the proceeds to fund its “commitment to becoming the world’s first climate-resilient country by 2030.”
