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Nauru selling citizenship for $105,000 to save itself from rising seas

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Citizenship of Nauru, an island nation spanning just 8 square miles in the southwest Pacific Ocean, can be yours for $105,000. The tiny, low-lying island has launched a “golden passport” initiative with the aim of raising money to fund climate action.

Nauru faces an existential threat from rising sea levels, storm surges and coastal erosion as the planet warms. But the world’s third smallest country lacks the resources to protect itself from a climate crisis disproportionately driven by wealthy countries.

The government says selling citizenship will help raise the funds needed for a plan to move 90% of the island’s around 12,500-strong population onto higher ground and build an entirely new community.

Golden passports are not new but they are controversial; history is littered with examples of them being exploited for criminal actions. Yet as developing countries struggle to get the money they need to deal with escalating climate impacts — a funding gap likely to be exacerbated by the US withdrawal from global climate action — they are being forced to find new ways to raise cash.

“While the world debates climate action, we must take proactive steps to secure our nation’s future,” Nauru’s President David Adeang told CNN.

The passports will cost a minimum of $105,000, but will be prohibited for people with certain criminal histories. A Nauru passport offers visa-free access to 89 countries including the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.

Few of these new passport holders are likely to ever even visit remote Nauru, but citizenship allows people to lead “global lives,” said Kirstin Surak, associate professor of political sociology at the London School of Economics and the author of The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires. This can be particularly useful for those with more restrictive passports, she told CNN.

For Nauru, this program is being pitched as a chance to secure the future of the island, which has a difficult, dark history.

Nauru was strip mined for phosphate from the early 1900s. For nearly a century, the landscape was gouged by miners, leaving the center of the island a near barren landscape of jagged rocks.

It has left around 80% of the island uninhabitable, meaning most people now live clustered along the coastlines, exposed to sea level rise, which has been increasing here at a faster rate than global average.

Once the phosphate ran out, Nauru looked for new revenue sources. Since the early 2000s, it has served as an offshore detention site for refugees and migrants attempting to settle in Australia — a program scaled back after detainee deaths.

Now, the island is at the center of a controversial plan to mine the deep sea for materials for the green transition.

Nauru was even in the sights of now-disgraced cryptocurrency entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried, who floated a plan to buy the island and build a bunker to survive an apocalypse, according to 2023 filings in a lawsuit against him.

For the people who live there, however, Nauru feels anything but future-proofed.

“A lot of people residing on the coast have already lost land — some have had their entire houses engulfed by king tides and they have lost everything,” Tyrone Deiye, a Nauruan national and a researcher at Monash Business School in Australia, said in a statement.

Selling citizenship has the potential to make “an absolutely enormous” economic impact for micro-states like Nauru, LSE’s Surak said.

Nauru expects to make around $5.6 million from the program in its first year, eventually scaling that to around $42 million a year. It will be built up gradually “as we assess for any unintended consequences or negative impact,” said Edward Clark, CEO of Nauru Economic and Climate Resilience Citizenship Program. Ultimately they hope the program will make up 19% of total government revenue.

The success of the program will depend on how “revenues are channeled into the country, and what they are used to do,” Surak said. That means vetting and transparency on where the funds go, and preventing people who would otherwise be prohibited from being granted passports from paying officials off the books to get one, she added.

An earlier program to sell citizenship in the mid-1990s was mired in scandal, including the 2003 arrest in Malaysia of two alleged Al Qaida terrorists carrying Nauru passports.

The government says the program’s vetting will be stringent and exclude those 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,” said President Adeang.

Nauru is not the first country to look to fund climate action by selling passports. The Caribbean nation of Dominica, which has been selling citizenship since 1993, recently said it was using some of the proceeds to fund its “commitment to be the world’s first climate resilient country by 2030.”

It may be a route other countries consider as the burden of dealing with the costs of climate change far outweigh their economic resources, all while international climate funding appears to be drying up.

“Nauru highlights the opportunities for climate vulnerable countries to become testing grounds for climate innovation,” Clark said.

(CNN)

World

Last hospital in North Gaza governorate evacuated after Israeli order

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The last hospital providing health services in the North Gaza governorate is out of service after the Israeli military ordered its immediate evacuation, the facility’s director has said.

Dr Mohammed Salha told the BBC patients were evacuated from al-Awda hospital in Jabalia on Thursday evening after “two weeks of siege”, and there was now “no health facility working in the north”.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is yet to respond to enquiries.

It comes as efforts continue to secure a ceasefire. Hamas says it is “thoroughly reviewing” a US plan, which the White House has said has been “signed off” by Israel.US President Donald Trump said on Friday he believed a deal was “very close”. But Hamas has said the plan does not satisfy its core demands including Israel’s commitment to ending the war.

The deal would reportedly involve a 60-day pause in fighting, with Hamas releasing 28 hostages – alive and dead – in the first week, with the remaining 30 hostages freed once a permanent ceasefire is in place. More than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners would be released, while humanitarian aid would be sent to Gaza via the United Nations and other agencies.

Israel has continued its military operation in the territory – at least 72 people were killed in strikes over the past 24 hours, Gaza’s Hamas-run health ministry said on Friday.

On Thursday evening, the Israeli military ordered the evacuation of areas including the al-Awda hospital, saying there was terrorist activity in the region which warranted the IDF to “expand its offensive activity”.

(BBC News)

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India says over 1,000 nationals deported by US since January

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More than a thousand Indians have “come back or [been] deported” from the United States since January, India’s foreign ministry has said.

Spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said that around 62% of them came on commercial flights, without providing more details.

This comes in the wake of President Donald Trump’s campaign against undocumented migrants to the US. Trump had earlier said that India “will do what’s right” on the deportation of illegal migrants.

In February, the US had deported more than hundred Indians on a US military flight, with reports saying some of them were brought back shackled.

“We have close cooperation between India and the United States on migration issues,” Mr Jaiswal said during the ministry’s weekly briefing, adding that India verifies nationalities before “we take them back”.

In total, the US is said to have identified about 18,000 Indian nationals it believes entered the country illegally.

Earlier this month, the US Embassy in India issued a warning that overstaying in the US could lead to deportation or a permanent ban on entry in the country, even for those who entered legally.

Mr Jaiswal also spoke about the Trump administration’s updated policy on student visas which is likely to impact Indian students planning to enrol in US universities.

The US had announced on Thursday that it had halted the scheduling of new visa interviews for foreign students as it considered expanding the screening of their social media activities.

“While we note that issuance of a visa is a sovereign function, we hope that the application of Indian students will be considered on merit, and they will be able to join their academic programs on time,” Mr Jaiswal said.

Mr Jaiswal also said that 330,000 Indians students had gone to the US for studies in 2023-24 – which makes India the largest source of international students in the country.

On Thursday, expanding its new visa policy, the US further announced that it was working to “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields”.

(BBC News)

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US trade court blocks Trump tariffs

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A US federal court has blocked President Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, in a major blow to a key part of his economic policies.

The Court of International Trade rules that the emergency law invoked by the White House does not give the president unilateral authority to impose tariffs on nearly every country.

It also blocks the separate levies the US imposed on China, Mexico and Canada.

Within minutes the Trump administration lodged an appeal, saying: “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency”.

So there will be no change at the border just yet, business reporter Katie Silver writes – as the decision goes through the appeals process.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of five small businesses that import goods from abroad.

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