Island Studies Journal 9(2), Book Reviews
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Climate change and atolls: yet again.It is remarkable how a topic balloons.Fifteen years ago, James Lewis was perhaps the main author discussing this subject within an academic book, although there were plenty of papers and reports being published.Now, there are books each year discussing climate change and islands.Atoll island states and international law, though, is important for tackling the underrepresented niche of law.But not just law for practising lawyers.Instead, it provides a solid background on the legal questions, debates, and prospects aimed at a wide readership.The book has a wealth of technical detail, which does not make it light reading; but nor should it be light reading.The international law implications of low-lying island states affected by climate change are not a light topic, with important yet labyrinthine intricacies affecting entire countries, nations, and cultures.Kudos to the authors for taking on the challenge of providing a comprehensive reference and discussion for the legal options available and the ambiguities thereof.This purpose is lucidly described at the beginning of Chapter 1, the Introduction, which also maps out the volume systematically and logically.Chapters 2 and 3 set the scene for atolls and climate change from a physical science standpoint.Extensive details are provided about the physical and ecological aspects.People are dealt with mainly at a macroscale and, even then, only briefly through topics such as insurance and migration.Chapters 4 and 5 cover the main international law relevant to atolls under climate change.Chapter 4 describes climate change mitigation, which is reducing sources and increasing sinks of greenhouse gases, by focusing on AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island States which represents small island developing states (SIDS) in United Nations negotiations.Climate change adaptation, which is addressing climate change's negative effects and exploiting its positive effects, is covered in Chapter 5 though highlighting UNCLOS, the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.Creative and intriguing ideas are presented, suggesting potential technical approaches for preserving islands in the face of climate change, such as elevating or floating islands to keep them above the rising seas.Deeper exploration of the social and cultural implications of each proposal would have added to the discussion; along with considering the technical and social feasibility of mobile, artificial island states, maintaining a population and livelihoods while roaming the seas, free from a fixed location.Chapters 2 through 5 set the stage for the potential threat to sovereignty which the atoll states could experience; while being honest regarding the strong uncertainties surrounding island futures.The next two chapters consider the future in the context of wider, contemporary international law regimes and proposals.The full power of the authors' creativity comes to the fore, analysing and evaluating several possibilities for different modes of island state sovereignty or autonomy alongside the existing and potential international law mechanisms for islanders moving in the context of climate change.Chapter 6 explores legal aspects of different sovereignty modes.The legal meaning of statehood and statehood recognition, along with the description of some precedents of altering statehood, provide background for options.Examples which atoll states could consider are This book is recommended reading, if anything for the alleged 'wonderful eccentricity' on which the premise of Shetland's almost 700-year independence is based.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.135 | 0.037 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".