"Atolling" Sovereignty

Marshall Islands

By Daniel Chu
climate crisis, pacific, environmental justice

A project exploring layered history and responses to the climate crisis on the Marshall Islands through maps.

In 2015, the Marshall Islands rose to the forefront of nations fighting climate change when it pushed for including global warming under 1.5 °C in the Paris Agreement through smart diplomacy and activism. However, the islands have been dealing with a lineage of the climate crisis for much longer.

The islands experience a history of environmental disasters that are rooted in militarized colonialism. From the ravages of World War II between United States and Japan to the dozens of nuclear weapons tested in Marshallese waters, these histories add to the impacts of contemporary anthropogenic climate change.

This project seeks to present the layered histories that amplify climate crisis in Marshallese communities at home and abroad, and provide an outlet for further connections between Marshallese and outside activists communities in a web platform. This platform educates the pubic on this ecological lineage and allow Marshallese activists to tell their own stories. Upon completion of the platform and after more prototypes, the goal is turn some of the functionalities over to Cofa Alliance National Network (CANN), an organization that is fighting for better social rights for Compact of Free Association migrants in the United States.

The process required me to create much of the data needed for these maps. Some data sources I used include the Pacific Data Hub and Wikipedia (such as list of all nuclear explisions). A mix of vector and raster maps were used to create this platform. I used glitch, carto, javascript, and mapbox as the main methods for creating the project.

One of the main challenges of doing this project has been understanding different syntaxes for creating a platform like this. A deadend that I am still trying to overcome is making or adapting files that touches the antimeridian, where traditional projections and popular mapping platforms could not accommodate. Further work could also be done in refining the categorization of data in Mapbox.

An example of a map the crosses the antimeridian

Though the project as I want to turn over to CANN is very much unfinished, this current point presents a complete vision and prototype of what I image the components and potential for a collaborative platform centered around Marshallese communities’ connection with environmental justice could be.