As rising sea levels threaten to drown Pacific island nations, regional leaders are scrambling to draw up survival plans that contend with a painful reality: how to prepare for a future where countries become increasingly uninhabitable and their people must leave.

As rising sea levels threaten to drown Pacific island nations, regional leaders are scrambling to draw up survival plans that contend with a painful reality: how to prepare for a future where countries become increasingly uninhabitable and their people must leave.

Their answer is now coming into sharper focus as some of the world’s most vulnerable nations, including the Marshall Islands and Tuvalu, unveil national strategies and policies for how they plan to confront a challenge that could endanger their very existence. It also comes as a major COP28 draft deal, released on Monday after days of grueling negotiations, omitted again critical language on phasing out fossil fuels, sparking fierce pushback from Pacific island nations and underscoring just how dire their path forward may be.

“The scale of the challenges [island nations are] facing is hard to even imagine,” said Katharine Hayhoe, a climate scientist and the Nature Conservancy’s chief scientist. “They are facing the loss of huge, proportionally huge, areas of land and in some cases the entire country.”

For nearly a century and a half, the Earth has warmed as civilizations have burned fossil fuels, overhauled agricultural systems, and built the vast network of roads, shipping lines, and railways that underpin global transportation today. Some 90 percent of that heat has been absorbed by the world’s........

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