Publication: On the Front Line of Climate Change and Displacement: Learning From and With Pacific Island Countries

Pacific Island countries are internationally regarded as a barometer for the early impacts of climate change. Their geophysical characteristics, demographic patterns and location in the Pacific Ocean make them particularly vulnerable to the effects of global warming. Small Island Developing States, a UN-established category which includes most Pacific Island countries, are characterized by a high ratio of shoreline to land, low elevation, settlement patterns concentrated in coastal areas and a narrow economic basis—all of which put them at heightened risk. Perhaps more

than in any other region, the populations and governments of Pacific Island countries are keenly aware that they face severe and multifaceted risks as a result of climate change. Their lives and livelihoods are linked to the Pacific Ocean; rising sea levels and other effects of global warming threaten not only their physical assets and coastal zones, but also their way of life and perhaps their national identities.

In the Pacific Islands, this acute awareness

of the potential impact of climate change comes not only from books and studies, but from first-hand knowledge and ongoing experiences with the effects of the world’s changing climate. The value and relevance of these experiences are not confined to the Pacific Islands, but are relevant for the world at large. This paper aims to conceptualize and distill some dimensions of these experiences, in light of the discussions and presentations made at the ‘Regional Workshop on Internal Displacement caused by Natural Disasters and Climate Change in the Pacific’ (May 2011) organized by the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement in conjunction with the UN Humanitarian team in

the Pacific. The synthesis report on the workshop’s proceedings contains additional information in support of the issues outlined and examined in the paper “On the Front Line of Climate Change and Displacement: Learning From and With Pacific Island Countries.”

Comments

  • Erika Schmidt

    The UN Emergency Relief Coordinator and other aid agency heads underlined the need to help communities become more resilient, so they could face extreme climate events rather than being forced to flee their homes permanently. Holmes said other mechanisms to raise money to help poor countries would have to be found. “Let’s face it,” he told IRIN, the amount needed will not be put on the table by the rich countries in Copenhagen.
    However, Walter Kälin, Representative of the UN Secretary-General on the Human Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, said the message to donors was that they should rather fund initiatives to help poor countries adapt now, as “it will be much cheaper.”
    Holmes, Kälin and António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, who also addressed a press briefing in Copenhagen, have been in the front line of providing assistance to people displaced by climate-related natural disasters, which are projected to become more frequent and intense in future. So-called environmentally induced migration is multi-level problem. According to Essam El-Hinnawi definition form 1985 environmental refugees as ―those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural or triggered by people) that jeopardised their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life. The fundamental distinction between `environmental migrants` and `environmental refugees` is a standpoint of contemporsry studies in EDPs.
    According to Bogumil Terminski it seems reasonable to distinguish the general category of environmental migrants from the more specific (subordinate to it) category of environmental refugees.

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