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EBEYE, Marshall Islands — Linber Anej waded out in low tide to haul cement chunks and metal scraps to shore and rebuild the makeshift sea wall in front of his home. The temporary barrier is no match for the rising seas that regularly flood the shacks and muddy streets with saltwater and raw sewage, but every day except Sunday, Mr. Anej joins a group of men and boys to haul the flotsam back into place. “It’s insane, I know,” said Mr. Anej, 30, who lives with his family of 13, including his parents, siblings and children, in a four-room house. “But it’s the only option we’ve got.” Standing near his house at the edge of a densely packed slum of tin shacks, he said, “I feel like we’re living underwater.” Worlds away, in plush hotel conference rooms in Paris, London, New York and Washington, Tony A. deBrum, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, tells the stories of men like Mr. Anej to convey to more powerful policy makers the peril facing his island nation in the Pacific as sea levels rise — and to shape the legal and financial terms of a major United Nations climate change accord now being negotiated in Paris. Mr. deBrum’s focus is squarely on the West’s wallets — recouping “loss and damage,” in negotiators’ parlance, for the destruction wrought by the rich nations’ industrial might on the global environment. Many other low-lying nations are just as threatened by rising seas. In Bangladesh, some 17 percent of the land could be inundated by 2050, displacing about 18 million people. But the Marshall Islands holds an important card: Under a 1986 compact, the roughly 70,000 residents of the Marshalls, because of their long military ties to Washington, are free to emigrate to the United States, a pass that will become more enticing as the water rises on the islands’ shores. The debate over loss and damage has been intense because the final language of the Paris accord could require developed countries, first and foremost the United States, to give billions of dollars to vulnerable countries like the Marshall Islands. Senior Republicans in Congress are already preparing for a fight, they say on behalf of the American taxpayer. “Our constituents are worried that the pledges you are committing the United States to will strengthen foreign economies at the expense of American workers,” 37 Republican senators wrote last month. “They are also skeptical about sending billions of their hard-earned dollars to government officials from developing nations.” “It does not make sense for us to go to Paris and come back with something that says, ‘In a few years’ time, your country is going to be underwater,’” Mr. deBrum said in an interview at his seaside home in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands. “We see the damage occurring now. We’re trying to beat back the sea.” In the global fight over climate change, leaders of vulnerable low-lying island nations have long sought to draw attention to their plight. They have staged symbolic events like an underwater cabinet meeting, gone on hunger strikes and delivered anguished speeches to the United Nations. Those efforts have had little impact on the substance of the energy and economic policies that dictate governmental response to climate change. In the meantime, Mr. Anej and millions like him cope with the fallout while stranded on disappearing shores. “I’m the oldest — I can’t leave my parents,” he said. “But I don’t want my kids to drown here.” Within the world of high-level climate negotiators, however, Mr. deBrum has made inroads. He manages to get into meetings of the Major Economies Forum, a group of 17 world powers convened by Secretary of State John Kerry to talk energy policy ahead of the Paris meeting. He is widely credited with either introducing or significantly strengthening crucial points in the draft accord set to emerge from Paris — in particular, putting a price on the destruction caused by climate change. He has pressed to require meetings every five years after the Paris summit meeting to ratchet up the stringency of international carbon-cutting policies. Mr. deBrum notes that the environment minister of Brazil, one of the world’s largest carbon polluters, has cited the tiny Marshall Islands’ plan to reduce its carbon footprint as an influence on Brazil’s ambitious plan to do the same. For Mr. deBrum, a warming planet is not abstract. As the burning of fossil fuels increases heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, the planet warms, and the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt into the oceans. Sea levels are projected to rise one to four feet across the globe by the end of the century, a series of major international scientific reports have concluded. Most of the 1,000 or so Marshall Islands, spread out over 29 narrow coral atolls in the South Pacific, are less than six feet above sea level — and few are more than a mile wide. For the Marshallese, the destructive power of the rising seas is already an inescapable part of daily life. Changing global trade winds have raised sea levels in the South Pacific about a foot over the past 30 years, faster than elsewhere. Scientists are studying whether those changing trade winds have anything to do with climate change. But add to this problem a future sea-level rise wrought by climate change, and islanders who today experience deluges of tidal flooding once every month or two could see their homes unfit for human habitation within the coming decades. In neighborhoods like Mr. Anej’s, after the sewage-filled tides wash into homes, fever and dysentery soon follow. On other islands, the wash of saltwater has penetrated and salinated underground freshwater supply. On Majuro, flooding tides damaged hundreds of homes in 2013. The elementary school closed for nearly two weeks to shelter families. That same year, the airport temporarily closed after tides flooded the runway. Such travails, voiced by Mr. deBrum, have meaning in Washington because what happens on the Marshall Islands affects the United States — on immigration policy, national security and taxpayer dollars. The two countries have a complicated history. During the Cold War, the United States military detonated 67 nuclear bombs on or close to the nearby Bikini Atoll and Enewetak Atoll — after first relocating the Bikini Islanders to different locations around the Marshalls.
