For just $105,000 (USD), the nation is offering “golden passports” that grant citizenship to holders – as well as visa-free entry to some 89 countries, including the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United Arab Emirates, and Hong Kong, the government announced on February 25. 

But Nauru insists this is more than just a gimmick. “This programme isn’t just about acquiring another passport,” Edward Clark, who runs the country’s new Economic and Climate Resilience Citizenship Program, told AFP this week. “It’s about joining a community dedicated to pioneering solutions for global challenges.”

So, why announce this scheme? Put simply, the cost of dealing with climate change is too high for current funds to cope with. 

Nauru, like all the island nations of the Pacific, is at risk from climate change on a level that’s almost incomprehensible to those of us in the West: it has practically zero access to fresh water outside of rainfall, so it’s particularly vulnerable to freak weather events; it has a hot, humid climate, so temperatures dangerous to the human body are expected to become regular occurrences; and it’s highly dependent on fishing and the local marine ecosystem, both of which are in something of a death spiral as the oceans continue to morph into a hot, acidic soup.

And yet, it’s none of those issues that the passport scheme is aimed at tackling. Instead, the goal is to raise funds for one specific climate countermeasure: the mass relocation further inland of the island’s 13,000 residents.

Here’s the thing: if you’re an island nation roughly the size of an airport, extremely low-lying, and with more than 90 percent of your residents living within one kilometer (0.62 miles) of the ocean, then rising sea levels are less of an abstract concept and more of an imminent existential threat. Nauru has all of those problems, plus one more: there, sea levels are rising up to three times as fast there as the global average, with almost every day of the year projected to be a flooding day by the end of the century.

But moving nine out of every 10 citizens to a new home is costly, and the government estimates such a program would require more than $60 million for the first phase alone. Existing funds are just “not sufficient” to pay for it, Clark told AFP: “Debt financing places an undue burden on future generations,” he said, “and there is not enough aid.”

If successful, however, the new citizenship-by-investment scheme may bring in $5.7 million in the first year, Clark said, which would equate to about 66 successful applications. Eventually, it’s hoped that figure might reach $43 million, or about 500 successful applications – which may not sound like much, but it would account for an almost 20 percent increase in government revenue.

While the scheme may sound wacky – and the numbers may seem speculative at best – the fact is that these kinds of citizenship-by-investment programs are nothing new, especially in Oceania. It’s not even Nauru’s first passport-selling rodeo: citizenship of the island nation was first made available to purchase back in 1997, only being halted in 2003 when it turned out members of the terrorist group Al-Qaeda had reportedly been traveling on Nauruan passports.

It’s for that reason that the reemergence of the idea might make more developed nations uneasy – though Clark stressed that the passports would only be available to investors who passed “the strictest and most thorough due diligence procedures.”

Nevertheless, Clark said, the scheme is an “innovation” – one that Nauru, and nations like it, deserves to be able to exploit, as such countries “have both a need and a right to be prosperous,” he said.

“It is well known that developing climate-vulnerable countries are disproportionately affected by climate change,” Clark said, “and there is therefore an urgent need to ensure they disproportionately benefit from climate innovation.”