Climate-displaced Persons Deserve a Dignified Transition

Undoubtedly, the recent Paris climate agreement achieved at COP 21 deserves recognition as the world’s first multilateral accord to curb climate change.

But weeks after the historic negotiations, it’s time to address something the final document failed to: the tens of millions of climate refugees expected to arrive at our collective doorsteps by 2050.

Governments such as China and Mozambique have already started displacing certain populations in anticipation of climate changes. But many vulnerable countries, such as Bangladesh, whose people will most likely  need  to move lack the resources to relocate entire populations to a new region or nation. Bangladesh is being ravaged by flooding, cyclones, storm surges, salination, erosion, rising seas and more. Of the country’s 64 districts, at least 24 are already producing climate-displaced people. At the same time, India is building a 2,500-mile (4,000-kilometer) barbed wire fence along the Bangladeshi border to dissuade migrants.

It’s difficult to predict how many people will be displaced around the world in years and decades to come. In 1985 the United Nations Environment Programme estimated that 30 million people had been displaced by environmental catastrophes. In 1995, British environment and development consultant Norman Myers estimated that 200 million people or more could be at risk of displacement by 2050, with 26 million from Bangladesh alone. More recent estimates of the number of “environmental migrants” to be expected by 2050 range from 150 million to 300 million.

Whatever the numbers, it is vital that refugees not be viewed as enemies at the gate, but as agents adapting proactively to climate anomalies beyond their control. In fact, it is in the world’s best interest — not just the refugees’ — to start considering human mobility as a climate adaptation tool under an international political framework. Using migration as an adaptation strategy will help the world avoid crises such as that occurring in Europe and elsewhere, where refugees fleeing Syria, in part due to climate-related anomalies that contributed to and escalated instability, have been met with a wide range of responses, from acceptance to hostility. Instead, future migrations could ensure climate refugees the right to a safe and planned transition in which they have a voice to advocate for themselves.

Debating the Definition

In order to accomplish this, it’s imperative that climate refugees receive the protections granted under international law to most other refugees. Environmental scientists and academics define climate refugees as people who can no longer guarantee safety or a secure livelihood in their own countries because of drought, soil erosion, desertification, sea-level rise or other environmental issues. But this is an academic definition, not a legal one.

Under international law, climate refugees are not refugees at all. The word “refugee” gives asylum seekers legal status under the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. But that definition only grants human rights protections to persons fleeing political persecution. Since climate refugees, as currently defined, are not fleeing political persecution, this convention can rarely protect them. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees tends to use the term “climate displaced persons” instead. Some support the term “climate migrants,” but this is problematic as well because “migrants” implies people move willingly.

But the reality is that climate displacement  is  a form of persecution, because globally, wealthy nations have contributed the bulk of greenhouse gases, and developing nations have suffered most of the consequences. As François Gemenne, researcher on environmental geopolitics and migration governance at Sciences Po, an international research university in France, put it at a side event at COP 21, “Most humans are the victims, not the agents, of climate change, so we should consider [climate change] a form of political persecution. … [C]limate change is just another form of violence we inflict upon them.”

Legalizing the term “climate refugee” under some sort of global governance system such as that of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is our best bet to close the legal gap in which climate-displaced people around the world have no name and no safety net in international policy-making. The term “climate refugee” gives human rights protections, legitimizes migration as an adaptation strategy and makes climate change grounds for political persecution.

Attached link

Taxonomy

• Environment
• Climate Change