In the blog posts leading up to now, I have explored scientific literature pertaining to how climate change drives – and will continue to drive – individuals, families, and populations away from their homes. The cases and stories I have found have convinced me that we, as an international community, need to answer some very fundamental questions about environmental justice and the burden of responsibility that governments have to help people resettle as they face the disintegration of their homes, land, and cultures.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre published statistics revealing that, since 2008, a staggering 26.4 million people on average are displaced from their homes every year due to natural disasters such as droughts, floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. Some of these people are displaced within their own country, others across borders. This amounts to one person displaced every second since 2008. Overwhelming scientific consensus predicts that climate change will increase both the frequency and intensity of these natural disasters in the coming years.
The World Bank report on Internal Climate Migration predicts that, without significant action, up to 143 million humans could be displaced within their own countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America alone. This represents 2.8% of their total population, which in itself represents 55% of the developing world’s population.
Other populations will not have the ‘luxury’ of internal displacement. Low-lying atoll nations in the South Pacific, such as Kiribati or Tuvalu are facing rising sea levels and saltwater inundation that threaten the tenability of the ground beneath their feet. Whole countries will be forced, by none of their own making, to migrate across borders to higher ground.
What is clear is that more action is needed to safeguard those who are most vulnerable to being forced from their homes. This echoes the sentiments of a recent European Parliament briefing
“So far, the national and international response to this challenge [protecting displaced peoples] has been limited, and protection for the people affected remains inadequate.”
The title of this briefing is The concept of 'climate refugee' Towards a possible definition. This is where an underlying controversy exists in the activist and international humanitarian communities. The burden that the world’s most significant carbon consumers puts on the most vulnerable populations, forcing them to migrate, has led some to propose that we define them as ‘climate refugees’. This would mean recognising people displaced due to climatic factors under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. Under this convention a refugee is defined as:
“someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”
Currently, the term ‘climate refugee’ is not recognised under any existing international law. Furthermore, extending the 1951 UN Refugee Convention could be problematic. The majority of climate induced migration will be internal, rather than across borders. Refugees, by their very nature, must be seeking protection by a government other than their own. This precludes the projected 143 million people who’ll be displaced internally by 2050.
For those who do face international migration, the reasons are often multifaceted, with climate representing a significant driving force for the decision to migrate, but rarely the sole reason (see blog post on Migration Theory). Would the definition cover, say, a family who’s farming business was destroyed by drought brought on by climate change? Surely this family needs protection and assistance, but are they refugees? For those displaced by disasters such as hurricanes, it is extremely difficult to decide whether any particular hurricane would have occurred without anthropogenic climate change. This is obviously not an argument to not help the migrants, but to question whether ‘refugee’ is the correct status to bestow.
For populations facing international migration, where anthropogenic climate change is the sole factor, the term ‘climate refugee’ applies with less ambivalence. Many hundreds of thousands of South Pacific Islanders face this reality. However, do they ‘want’ to be classed as refugees? Many don’t. And the ex-president of Kiribati, Anote Tong, resisted the idea during his presidency, wanting to reject any connotations of victimhood that are associated with the term.
So, what is being done?
The EU briefing notes that the 1998 UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement provide a framework that could be extended to include cross-border migrants, if they are implemented correctly, and become legally binding.
The UN Refugee Agency too recognises that there are gaps in the international legal framework that may leave some climate migrants underrepresented. They support the Platform on Disaster Displacement, an initiative on cross-border displacement. Rather than calling for a legally binding international convention and defining ‘climate refugees’ as a concept, the PPD are tasked with implementing a toolkit designed on effective practices for cross-border disaster-displacement at a State and regional level. They are working to help states improve their own frameworks.
It seems that there is a disconnect between the media, who want to use the term ‘refugee’ in order to convey the severity and urgency that the issue of climate migration demands, and the international humanitarian community, who want a framework that works for Bangladeshis who are forced inland as well as Tuvaluans forced overseas. But there is subtextual consensus, and that needs to surface in order for us to move forward.