“This risk, while recognised, has been inadequately dealt with by the international community,” admitted John Crowley, who heads the ethics of science and technology section at UNESCO, the body that currently chairs the Global Migration Group, a U.N. interagency group on migration issues.

Under today’s international law, “climate refugees” as a category are not formally recognised, and as such they have no right to asylum or other assistance. But an agreement at the U.N. climate summit in Cancun last year for the first time urged countries to accept that “climate change-induced displacement, migration and planned relocation” should be considered in plans to adapt to climate change.

That may open the door to migration costs being funded under the emerging Green Climate Fund, which is expected to disperse a promised $100 billion a year, starting in 2020, for climate adaptation and emissions reduction efforts in the world’s most vulnerable nations, said Koko Warner, an expert on environmental migration issues at the U.N. University.

Still, planning for predicted large-scale migration as a result of climate impacts remains preliminary, particularly regarding the politically perilous issue of migration across national borders.

Lack of preparation doesn’t mean migration won’t happen, however, experts warned.

“In some countries, there is no space (to resettle migrants), some countries might even go down under the water (and) in others, population pressure is so high that people cannot move (elsewhere in the country),” noted Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad, a Bangladeshi economist and contributing author to several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

“Therefore, it’s extremely important we find ways of moving them out of the country and into regional countries if possible, or into countries where the number of people is small and there is huge land area,” he said. He admitted that “this is a difficult subject”.

One particular difficulty in dealing with climate-induced migration is that much of it is likely to be gradual. In many cases, it is predicted to be the result of an increasing burden of problems – poor harvests, bad weather, insufficient income – that make it difficult for families to stay in their homes, rather than the result of a single disaster, something international agencies are more practiced at addressing.

“We are good at emergency response but bad on progressive, gradual phenomenon,” UNESCO’s Crowley said. “And climate change will be largely a progressive, gradual phenomenon. There won’t be anything to launch an appeal for, no specific event. There will just be growing pressure to migrate.”

Migration Needs To Be An Option

Keeping families in their homes as long as possible, through measures like promoting crops more tolerant of extreme weather, or better rainwater harvesting techniques, will be vital, the experts said. But there may also be some ways of helping those who have no choice but to leave.

First is to recognise migration as an effective kind of adaptation in some circumstances, rather than a failure of adaptation.

“Migration isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We have to recognise migration as an adaptation strategy, and make it an option available to the most vulnerable,” Crowley said.

But migration also needs to be carefully planned and managed to ensure migrants don’t end up becoming even more vulnerable, by moving to flood-prone urban slums, for instance, or provoking conflict with their new neighbours, he said.

That may require reworking government safety net programmes to direct money to families displaced by climate pressures, or carrying out land reform to effectively settle landless people.

Changing immigration laws will also be important. Australia, for example, has a new visa category to accommodate displaced people from the region, experts said.

But many nations have steadfastly resisted giving environmental migrants refugee status.

“The problem with refugees is they have a claim to asylum. That’s why states are reluctant to expand the (refugee) regime,” Crowley said.

What’s worth remembering, experts say, is that migration usually happens as a last resort, to families who would prefer to remain where they are.

“People want to stay home. They have a profound spiritual tie to their homeland. But if they can’t, we need to make sure they can migrate in safety and dignity,” Warner said.

Source: AlterNet

After assembling on November 15, 2011 the GMG has adopted the following stance on the impact of climate on migration:

The GMG is concerned about the consequences of climate change for human migration and human development. While there is mounting evidence that climate change has the potential to contribute to substantial movements of people, the response of the international community has so far been limited at best.

Climate change and environmental factors are rarely the sole cause of migration. People tend to move for a variety of reasons, including economic and social factors. Moreover, the environment has always been a key factor in migration dynamics, either because of the direct impact of environmental degradation or disasters on human mobility or through its impact on socioeconomic conditions. While the precise effect of climate change on migration is therefore difficult to isolate, let alone to quantify, most observers agree that it will affect the lives and human rights of people, especially women and girls, whether in terms of livelihood, employment, housing, health or sanitation, and that migration and displacement are coping strategies, often of last resort,to adapt to these changes.

The impact of climate change on migration is multifaceted. Sea level rise may degrade living conditions in river deltas and other densely populated low-lying regions in the world and is already causing internal relocation and displacement in some countries. Rising sea levels may lead to significant loss of territory in some small-island States. Climate change is also associated with droughts and desertification, which affect the livelihoods of families, particularly those of subsistence farmers. Finally, climate change can contribute to the increased frequency of extreme weather events and natural disasters, including cyclones, storms and floods.

Climate change impacts mobility patterns in a variety of ways. Sea level rise is likely to make lowlying areas uninhabitable, and permanently displace populations. In contrast, droughts may at first lead to circular or temporary migration, enabling households to diversify sources of income. The majority of those displaced are likely to move short distances and to return as soon as circumstances permit. In some cases however, short-term internal displacements may pave the way and contribute to long-term international movements. Such movements are also likely to fuel urbanization and the challenges associated with it.

Of particular concern is the impact of climate change on migration in developing countries. Least developed countries often lack the resources to adapt to or manage the consequences of human displacement associated with climate change. Moreover, climate change is taking place in a global context marked by inequalities both within and between countries. It disproportionately affects the economically and socially disadvantaged segments of a population, exacerbating vulnerabilities relating to gender, ethnicity, health or socioeconomic status, and can have serious repercussions for the rights and welfare of women, girls, children, youth, the elderly and indigenous people.

Climate change and its consequences may also translate into conflicts over resources that in turn lead to displacement and migration. They may also generate human security concerns, both for those who are displaced and who may encounter new forms of vulnerability, including discrimination, human rights violations or risks related to smuggling of migrants and trafficking in persons, and for the residents of the communities that receive them. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by such risks, particularly as far as human trafficking, sexual exploitation and forced labour are concerned.

Too often, attention is solely focused on the immediate consequences of sudden-onset disasters, such as floods, cyclones or hurricanes. Yet, in the long run, the silent crisis generated by slow-onset environmental degradation will also affect many people.

In view of these challenges, the GMG calls on the international community to recognize that migration and displacement induced by environmental degradation and climate change require urgent action. Specifically, the GMG recommends:

• To adopt gender-sensitive, human rights- and human development-oriented measures to improve the livelihoods of those exposed to the effects of climate change and increase their resilience, in order to counter the need for involuntary movements.
• To pay particular attention to the human rights situation of all people affected by the consequences of climate change, regardless of their legal status: international human rights law, including the fundamental principle of non-discrimination, as well as specific instruments such as the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, should guide States’ action towards people who are displaced as a result of environmental factors.
• To explore the complex interrelations between climate change and human mobility in order to collect data, develop expertise and build capacity to address this challenge, and to achieve close cooperation between the climate and social sciences communities to this end.
• To address the migration impacts of both sudden and slow-onset effects of climate change.
• To recognize migration as an adaptation strategy to environmental risks and to make migration an option available to the most vulnerable. Immigration policies could take into account environmental factors in the likelihood of cross-border movement and consider opening new opportunities for legal migration.
• To assist the least-developed countries in responding to climate change by mainstreaming migration and mobility in national adaptation plans.
• To incorporate the relationship between climate change and migration in Poverty Reduction Strategies and national development strategies.

In the long term, States may wish to review existing legal instruments and policy framework to identify possible new solutions to the situation of those who move in relation to climate change. This would address normative gaps, enable a more focused and specific approach and possibly improve the governance of this issue. Yet, the development of a comprehensive normative framework should not hinder the immediate search for workable policy options to face the challenges raised by climate change, migration and displacement.

The GMG recognizes the difficulty of identifying a special category of migrants that could be quantified separately from other categories. In the absence of internationally agreed definitions, it notes the existence of different terms, including ‘environmental migration’, ‘migration related to climate change’ or ‘climate-related mobility’. Irrespective of their different merits and weaknesses, the GMG wishes to discourage the use of labels such as environmental or climate ‘refugee’, because the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees does not as such consider environmental factors as a basis for granting refugee status.

The GMG welcomes the initiatives already taken by the Global Forum on Migration and Development and the Conferences of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, including the Cancun Adaptation Framework, adopted in 2010 at COP 16 in Cancun. It also notes the Nansen Principles adopted in 2011 at the Nansen Conference on Climate Change and Displacement in the 21st Century. It encourages these intergovernmental processes to further address the relationships between climate change, migration and displacement. Additionally, it calls on the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (“Rio+20”) that will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 2012, to incorporate these challenges in its global
commitment to sustainable development.

Long before the Pacific will rise to a level that will leave its estimated 30,000 islands submerged, most of them might be severely affected by frequent flooding and storms.

Thousands of people living on islands scattered across the world’s largest ocean are already fleeing their homes and lands because of altered climate conditions.

Still, “an extraordinarily cold or warm winter in a region or even globally is not proof of climate change,” said Mary-Elena Carr, biological oceanographer at the Earth Institute in New York. Real climate change can only be concluded from shifting weather conditions observed over 20 to 30 years.

Carr, associate director of the Columbia Climate Centre, spoke with IPS U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about the human impact on rising sea levels, how islanders will be affected and what can be done to mitigate adverse consequences for people in the Pacific.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Is it still arguable that the increased natural disasters we are seeing are due to climate change?

A: At this point, we cannot attribute any weather event to climate change, anthropogenic or natural. The climate system is extremely complex and there are many factors that determine what we experience from day to day.

While we can assert that climate change due to greenhouse gas emissions will lead to changes in the patterns of rainfall or temperature, we cannot assign a single cause to any specific event like a flood or a hurricane.

Q: From a scientific perspective, who or what is responsible for the rising sea levels and how do human actions contribute to them?

A: Globally rising sea level is a consequence of a warmer planet, which is due to increased amounts of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs). Historically, developed nations are responsible for the current levels of GHGs in the atmosphere. However, rapidly developing nations are increasingly contributing to GHG emissions.

At a local level, land use choices can directly impact the relative height of ocean and land: groundwater extraction, destruction of coral reefs, construction choices, can all lead to local sea level rise.

Q: How do sea levels change and why does this harm human life?

A: Sea level changes when there is a change in either the mass or the volume of water in the ocean. If we imagine the ocean basin like a very large bathtub, you can change the total mass by adding or removing water; in the ocean, that would be through evaporation or precipitation, or when water flows from land to sea, either as rivers or ice.

The mass of seawater in the bathtub can change its location due to currents or winds. The same mass of seawater changes in volume, expanding when it warms or freshens.

Sea level also changes with vertical land motion (if the sides or bottom of the bathtub were to sink or rise). Such motion can occur over very long time scales. Land also undergoes vertical motion over short time scales, due to groundwater extraction or tectonic activity.

While all of these processes have occurred throughout the history of the earth, humans impact sea level rise directly, by manipulating the flow of ground and surface water, and indirectly, through GHG emissions which raise the average global temperature.

This warming affects both the mass and volume of seawater primarily due to increased melting of land ice and higher ocean temperatures, both of which translate into a global rise in sea level.

Global average sea level measured by tide gauges and altimeters was relatively constant between 1900 and 1930. Since that time, sea level has not only risen, but the rate of sea level rise has also increased: tide gauges estimate sea level rising about 1.8 millimetres per year between 1930 and 2000, while the altimeters measured approximately 3.1 millimetres per year between 1993 and 2009.

Q: Do you see a certain time when islands could be below the sea level?

A: The answer to that depends on the elevation of the island and on the tidal range in addition to storm activity and sea level rise. Both storm activity and sea level rise are affected by climate change. Even the orientation of the island relative to prevailing winds affects the likelihood of flooding.

While it may be more than 150 years before sea level is three or four metres higher than in the late 20th century, islands with average elevations of four metres will undergo flooding because tides and storms raise sea level on top of the global average rise.

Predictions vary depending on both the island characteristics and projections for sea level rise, but it is likely that in the early 21st century there will be frequent flooding in most small island states.

Q: What must be done to mitigate the impact of climate change for island inhabitants around the world?

A: To mitigate climate change we should reduce emissions. To adapt to the impacts of sea level rise, we need careful land use choices and adaptable infrastructure. Coastal vegetation such as mangroves can help reduce the impacts of flooding. Conservation of coral reefs also plays a huge role in protecting atolls.

Q: Is climate change an unstoppable phenomenon of contemporary times?

A: We are committed to warming, and sea level rise, even if all emissions stop today, because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere for hundreds of years. If we continue emitting GHGs without any reduction, the climate change impacts will be greater and last much longer.

Source: Inter Press Service

The study, published in Remote Sensing last month (7 September), says that about 650,000 people and almost 1,000 buildings in the three communities in the Dansoman area of Accra will be vulnerable to permanent flooding by 2100, as the shoreline recedes by more than 200 metres.

The study says natural and industrial sites will be submerged, and buildings made of commonly used sandcrete — building material made of cement and sand — will be destroyed by flooding. This will cause disease outbreaks, population displacements, loss of land and biodiversity, and decreased fishing catch and earnings, it says.

Based on a SimClim — a computer model system for examining the effects of climate variability and change over time and space — it says this scenario is likely to affect negatively the nearby Densu Ramsar wetland zone, a multi-million dollar salt industry, and local fisheries and farms. The study also revealed that local communities have no systems in place to help them adapt to the problem.

Kwasi Appeaning-Addo, the lead author from the University of Ghana, toldSciDev.Net that the study was mainly motivated by a public outcry over perennial high tides. His team wanted to contribute to knowledge about providing sustainable management and development strategies that deal with the problem.

The study could inform policy planning, said Appeaning-Addo. “The time to act is now,” he added.

According to Ghana’s Hydrological Services Department, the ocean claims 1.5 – 2 metres of Ghana’s 539 kilometre coastline annually, with the most risky areas recording four metres.

Kwabena Kankam-Yeboah, the principal research scientist at the Water Research Institute, in Ghana, said that the main way of dealing with surges of the sea predicted in the study is to adhere strictly to land-use policy and scientific engineering.

But he added the model used in the study was designed elsewhere for climatic conditions different from those in Ghana, which raises questions about its applicability.

Carl Fiati, officer in-charge of marine resources and coastlines in the Ghana Environmental Protection Agency, said that, although climate change is real, studies have not yet proved that rising sea levels and high tidal waves experienced in Ghana are caused by rising temperatures and changing climate.

Link to full paper in Remote Sensing.

Source: SciDevNet

The 25-year-old woman is one of thousands of native people who migrate every year from the municipality of Tlapa and its surroundings in the southern state of Guerrero, to pick fruit and vegetables in the north of the country.

Tlapa, one of the poorest places in Mexico, is ravaged by deforestation, intermittent drought and torrential rains, so that farming is not an economically viable occupation for local people.

Regions like Tlapa illustrate the possible relationship between climate change and migration, an issue that is coming under scrutiny in Mexico, a country that is vulnerable to the effects of phenomena like prolonged droughts, soil degradation, devastating rainstorms, lack of water and rising sea levels.

“Migration patterns are changing as a result of climate change which is having increasing impacts. In a number of states, more people are emigrating,” Andrea Cerami, a lawyer with the independent Mexican Centre for Environmental Law (CEMDA), told IPS.

Together with factors like poverty, lack of job opportunities and high crime rates, environmental degradation has become an additional element driving migration, both within the country and abroad.

Every year some 500,000 people emigrate from Mexico to the United States, where some eight million Mexicans are living without the necessary legal documents, according to specialist agencies.

The National Institute for Statistics and Geography reports that the areas receiving the largest numbers of internal migrants are Mexico City, the western state of Jalisco, Baja California on the border with the United States, and the southeastern state of Quintana Roo, while the centre, south and mid-west of the country are the major sources of migrants.

The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) defines environmental migrants as “persons or groups of persons who, for compelling reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their habitual homes, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad.”

“Climate change isn’t necessarily people’s main reason for leaving,” Patricia Romero Lankao of the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) told IPS. “They leave in search of job opportunities that are not available in their places of origin, and because they have a network of contacts. Climate change is still not the chief reason, but it does play a part.”

Romero Lankao and her colleagues Hua Qin and Melissa Haeffner are working on a research project titled “Displacement or Adaptation? Climate Change and Migration in Mexico”, presented in June at an international conference in Oslo on Climate Change and Displacement in the 21st Century.

In 2010 and the first half of 2011, Mexico as a whole suffered intense drought, while in the south and southeast torrential rains and flooding destroyed crops, human settlements and infrastructure.

Four powerful hurricanes have struck the country since 2005, leaving 650,000 Mexicans homeless, while floods displaced 500,000 people between 2003 and 2010, according to the NCAR research project.

Several recent research studies appear to have identified a link between climate phenomena and the movement of people in Mexico.

In their study presented this year, “The Environmental Dimensions of Emigration from Rural Mexico”, Lori Hunter, Sheena Murray and Fernando Riosmena of the University of Colorado at Boulder found that “households subjected to drought conditions are far more likely to send a migrant as compared to those subjected to wet conditions.”

The scientists examined data collected between 1987 and 2005 from 24,132 households comprising a total of 117,040 people, from 66 rural communities in 12 different states.

They found substantial variation in rainfall patterns, with approximately 23 percent of the sample subjected to drought in the year of the survey.

Moreover, 13 percent of the sample suffered drought the year before the survey, and 3.6 percent were subject to drought in both the previous and the survey years.

Close to 28 percent experienced heavy rainfall in the survey year, while 23 percent had suffered a deluge in the previous year, and seven percent in both.

Meanwhile Shuaizhang Feng, Alan Krueger and Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton University in the U.S. state of New Jersey concluded that a 10 percent reduction in crop yields in Mexico leads an additional two percent of the population to emigrate. By approximately the year 2080, they estimated climate change would induce 1.4 to 6.7 million Mexicans to emigrate to the United States, because of declines in agricultural productivity.

Their research paper “Linkages among climate change, crop yields and Mexico-U.S. cross-border migration” was published in 2010 in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

By 2050 there could be a worldwide total of 200 million people who have migrated for environmental reasons, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body that reviews evidence related to global warming.

The categories of “environmental migrant” or “climate change refugee” are not included in the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, nor in the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees.

“Because measures to adapt to climate change have not been adopted by the Mexican state, people in this country who are adversely affected will have to move away and migrate, primarily to the United States,” CEMDA’s Cerami predicted.

“Mexico will be a very important laboratory. The empirical evidence we have reviewed tells us that, droughts and all, what causes farmers to leave their homes is markets and opportunities,” said Romero Lankao, whose work at NCAR uses a model that links the vulnerability of communities, capital, and life opportunities with migration. “Circular migration, where people eventually return to their communities, is more interesting, and deserves more research,” she said.

“We have to migrate, because there is no food, and no money,” said Santiago, who first became a migrant when she was seven years old and is now the mother of a four-year-old son. Her own mother was run over in mid-August on a road in the northern state of Chihuahua during the chili pepper harvest. (END)

The 1998 Guiding Principles on Internal Displacementcould serve as an interim model “until a more comprehensive solution is found”, says Jane McAdam, director of the International Refugee and Migration Law project at the Gilbert and Tobin Centre of Public Law, University of New South Wales, Australia.

“At the moment, if somebody crosses the border and says ‘I need protection, I fled the impacts of climate change’, there is no mechanism to provide that,” she explained.

Seeing the big picture of how climate change impacts on people’s livelihoods and their decision to migrate as an adaptation strategy is indispensable, McAdam stressed.

“Climate change overlays preexisting stressors that people face and it is about taking a multi-pronged approach to solutions at every level, from the sub-national through to the national, to the regional and international,” she said.

McAdam spoke to IPS U.N. correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about the pros and cons of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement for devising a further legal framework to protect climate-driven migrants worldwide.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Why is climate change such a difficult factor when we are talking about protection laws?

A: It is very difficult to single out “climate change” as “the” cause of movement. Climate change interacts with underlying stressors, such as poverty, environmental vulnerability, poor development practices, and so on.

For example, if you go to the slums of Bangladesh, to which many people from rural Bangladesh have moved, people will cite different reasons for why they have moved, even if the underlying conditions are very similar. You might have two people in front of you, and one says ‘I have come here because of the impacts of climate change on my environment’ and the other says ‘I have come here because I have no work opportunities at home anymore’, even though both might have fled areas exposed to frequent flooding, crop loss, and so on.

If you have a protection instrument that requires climate change to be singled out as the cause of movement, the person who can identify the climate impact would get protection and the other would not. Is this appropriate when their needs may be identical? Or because they articulate the reasons for their movement in different ways?

I think focusing solely on climate change can actually skew the way we understand migration, especially because the governance structures we put in place can in part determine the way people then characterise why they moving. I think that we need to be quite level-headed when we devise what will the process be.

Q: Seen from a legal perspective, what can be done?

A: One question is whether we want to talk about opening up the International Refugee Convention to renegotiation or alternatively constructing an additional protocol to it. I have concerns with this, because of the empirical nature of movement.

Legal definitions are constructed for a particular purpose, which is to filter who gets protection. So they are not going to adequately describe the complexity of movement. If they require climate change to be singled out as a cause of movement, they will require people to focus on the climate change aspect rather than on all the other underlying things as well.

The other thing with a refugee-like instrument is that it is remedial in nature. So, it does not assist people to plan movement in advance – as an adaptation strategy – but relies on them getting out and saying “now I need help”. A treaty is only useful in this context if you cross an international border.

Yet, the evidence shows overwhelmingly that most [climate-induced] displacement or migration will be internal, meaning most people who are going to be affected and who are going to have existing migration options are not going to have the resources to get themselves overseas and cross borders. That is why we perhaps need to be looking more closely at the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and perhaps supplementing them with guidelines that focus on other particular needs that might arise in a climate context.

Q: The Guiding Principles could be an interesting approach to find effective answers in terms of climate-induced migration, because they explicitly involve displacement by natural disasters and so on. Yet, so far just 30 countries have adopted them and they are not binding. What kind of problems are coming out of this situation?

A: There is no political appetite to draft a new international treaty, so I think the Guiding Principles may provide a useful first step. It might be more appealing to states to have an interim – non-binding – instrument before they get to formal, binding instrument: a precursor until a more comprehensive solution is found.

Furthermore, the fact that just few governments have adopted the Guiding Principles suggests that a treaty option would be even less likely to succeed at the international level.

The Guiding Principles were an initiative that occurred outside the normal state-to-state negotiating processes. They were drafted by experts and then presented to states and other actors as useful guidelines. They are not binding, but based on binding international law. So they draw together relevant bits of humanitarian, human rights and refugee law, and bundle them up and say that is what is relevant particularly to internal displacement.

The question is what else do we have? Even though a small number of countries have implemented the Guiding Principles, a much larger number are signatories to the international treaties on which they are based. So maybe it is a matter focusing on those international obligations and reminding states that they have agreed to respect them. The Guiding Principles simply distil them for this particular context.

Q: A prerequisite for effective legal protection measures is a notion of who is a climate-displaced migrant. Why is this so complicated?

A: There are so many different contexts that can be encapsulated in that single term that we need to look at the particularities of any given situation to ensure that solutions are crafted that speak to the needs of that community. I think there are important lessons to be learned. Focusing on just one thing like the Guiding Principles is dangerous.

We need to look at a whole range of solutions so that we deal with the different stages and nature of climate change-related displacement.

Source: Inter Press Service

“Climate change is looming as a potentially very serious and underappreciated complicating factor when it comes to international displacement,” said Erika Feller, the assistant high commissioner for protection in the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

More is needed from the international community to address this challenge “in a coordinated and pragmatic manner”, she told IPS.

Of paramount importance is that national authorities play a central role in developing appropriate responses to both the internal and external dimensions of climate-related displacement, while affected persons and communities must be made fully aware of their rights and given opportunities to participate in decision-making, Feller said.

“Decisions about where, when and how to relocate communities, for example, must be made in consultation with the affected populations and be sensitive to cultural and ethnic identities and boundaries to avoid possible tensions and conflicts,” she added.

Staying close to home

The overwhelming majority of people who are displaced by environmental factors become internally displaced persons (IDPs) within their own countries. Just a fraction will likely cross international borders, said Michele Klein-Solomon, director of the Migration Policy, Research and Communications Department at the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).

“[The latter group tends to move] from countries in the South, in the developing world, to other countries in the ‘less emitting world’, and it is also not likely to be the most vulnerable who move,” she explained.

More frequent and severe floods, storms, landslides or land degradation, droughts and water shortages – so called slow-onset natural and human-made disasters – can all be triggers for migration.

Those most in need of protection tend to lack sufficient resources to adapt to the new living conditions, and that can include an inability to move away or migrate to other countries.

Speaking at a conference at Columbia Law School in May on migration and climate change, Klein-Solomon stressed that it was important to grasp these facts to counter “the overwhelming fears of the developed world being awash with people who are coming into their countries, taking jobs and burdening social security mechanisms”.

Even under worst case scenarios, in which some 250 million people could be displaced due to climate change over the next 25 to 30 years, it still would be “a tiny portion of the world’s population”, she said.

“We are really not talking about enormous numbers relative to global populations and we are not talking about hordes of people flooding into the Western, industrialised, developed countries. We do not need further repressive legislation and xenophobic debates as a result of this discussion,” she added.

Few legal protections

Rapid-onset disasters attract far more attention from the media, policymakers and researchers than gradual environmental changes – such as the human consequences of rising sea levels, soil salination, deforestation and desertification.

Precise estimates on climate-induced migration are hard to come by. However, recent events such as last year’s nationwide flooding in Pakistan, severe mudslides following heavy rainfall in Brazil and Colombia this spring, and the ongoing humanitarian disaster in drought-hit Somalia show that millions of people are already being driven from their homes and property due to extreme weather patterns.

International protection strategies are often marked by a humanitarian focus on “the immediate need of the person without necessarily looking at the causes of the phenomenon nor to a response in a longer term,” said Paola Pace, acting head of the International Migration Law Unit at IOM’s International Cooperation and Partnerships Department.

When emergencies occur, immediate funding is provided which lasts about three to six months, but for the subsequent “recuperation phase” it is very difficult to find donor support. This wastes the knowledge acquired in the initial months and squanders an opportunity to “really tackle the causes that brought about that emergency”, Pace stressed in an interview with IPS.

The lack of a long-term strategy is a major problem for those seeking to protect and support affected populations. A better approach would go beyond basic needs – food, water, shelter – to address trauma and stress-induced illnesses, and provide opportunities for sustainable development in a new environment, she said.

The climate-displaced also face an uncertain legal situation. Neither international humanitarian law nor international refugee law has a legal definition for this group, making it difficult to hold governments responsible for their wellbeing.

Often, there are multiple, complex, interconnected factors at work, from extreme weather events to land degradation or sea-level rise, and identifying the exact culprit is impossible.

“[I]t is a bit like the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Jane McAdams, an expert on refugees and international migration law at the University of New South Wales.

“Climate change is never the only reason why people move, there are always other factors like underlying socioeconomic conditions, for example,” she told IPS.

Finding appropriate legal and policy responses requires a combination of strategies, “rather than an either/or approach”, she said.

While there is no single legal standard specifically addressing environmental migrants, the IOM’s Pace stressed that should not give a “wrong impression” that no framework applies.

“Before a person becomes a migrant she or he is a human being,” and entitled to every protection under human rights law, she said

Source: Inter Press Service

Syria’s political difficulties have lead to such problems as a stream of refugees fleeing to the Turkish border, exacerbated sectarian tensions and contributed to the deterioration of human rights in the region, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

And new stories about regional security and humanitarian troubles in Syria have been emerging, despite the Syrian government’s intensive media blockade. But what rarely gets commented upon is the devastating drought that has gripped Syria since 2006 and reportedly driven more than 1.5 million people from the countryside to cities in search for food and economic normality.

Compounding the problem are the country’s so-called market reforms that have resulted in cutbacks in subsidies for food and fuel. Even as the political future of Syria and its President Bashar al-Assad remain uncertain, what is arguably a source of greater political instability in the long-term are the problems associated with drought and resource scarcity-induced migration that show no signs of abating.

WHEAT BEFORE JASMINE

Long before the start of the Jasmine Revolution that erupted earlier this year in Tunisia and Egypt, nearby Syria – the birth place of wheat and barley – has been experiencing severe livestock and crop loss.

More than a year before the current political turmoil started in the country, Syrian farmer Ahmed Abdullah, living in a ragged burlap and plastic tent with his wife and 12 children, remarked to an American journalist that “he once had 400 acres of wheat, and now it’s all desert. We were forced to flee. Now we are at less than zero – no money, no job, no hope”.

Ahmed Abdullah and his family are unfortunately not alone. Olivier De Schutter, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food observed in a reportearlier this year:

“The losses resulting from these repeated droughts have been significant for the population in the North-eastern part of the country, particularly in the governorates of El-Hassakeh, Dayr-as-Zawr and Ar-Raqqa. In total, 1.3 million people have been affected … 800,000 of which were severely affected.

“Most effected are small-scale farmers, the situation of many of whom has further worsened in 2010 as a result of the yellow rust disease affecting the soft wheat production; and small-scale herders, who often lost 80-85 percent of their livestock since 2005.”

The situation in Syria is in many ways a microcosm of an issue that the international community will be confronting in the future: what can be done about migration and other related complex humanitarian problems brought on by climate change and water scarcity concerns.

According to the 2009 report In Search for Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration and Displacement by CARE International, climate change is already contributing to displacement and migration.

Mexico and Central American countries are already experiencing the negative impacts of climate change, both in terms of less rainfall and more extreme weather, such as hurricanes and floods. Rainfall in some areas is expected to decline by as much as 50 percent by the middle of this century, “rendering many local livelihoods unviable and dramatically raising the risk of chronic hunger.”

As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of natural hazards such as cyclones, floods, and droughts, the number of temporarily displaced people will rise. This will be especially true in countries that fail to invest now indisaster risk reduction and where the official response to disasters is limited.

WHAT’S IN A NUMBER?

While the numbers of current and predicted displaced people are a source of great contention, the International Organisation for Migration estimates that there are now several million “environmental migrants”, and that this “number will rise to tens of millions within the next 20 years, or hundreds of millions within the next 50 years”.

Whether the actual number for climate change induced migration – or what some people refer to as “environmental migrants”  - is several million people or in the tens of millions of people, the actual number may be less important (beyond the news media headlines) than improving our understanding of the complex social-ecological relationship between human migration and environmental conditions.

Here are a few reasons why. First, there are many well-established examples of environmental and resource drivers of human migration and displacement. Some notable examples from a 2004 analysis of global warming and human migration include, among others:

•  The 1930s dust bowl in North America, which was caused by exploitative agriculture systems.

•  The drying out of Lake Aral in Central Asia, which was caused mainly by water diversion for large-scale irrigation schemes in the Soviet Union.

•  The Sahel drought and famine, which has transformed a huge arid zoneinto an extremely vulnerable region.

•  Rural exodus in many countries, worldwide, in both industrialized and non-industrialized countries: a long-term environmentally induced process, often linked to decreasing economic security and climate change.

• The structural insecurity in the Horn of Africa: a complex emergency with, at its roots, desertification, drought, conflict over land, war, and economic and political instability.

MIGRATION MANIA

Second, although there are still many important, as yet unanswered, questions about the climate change and resource scarcity-induced human migration process (e.g., whether climate change-induced migrants deserve different or special legal protection under international law), there is a strong contemporaryacademic scholarship on the environmental dimensions of human migration and displacement.

In fact, the modern conception of what subsequently became known as climate change-induced migration and displacement began in the mid-1970s with a publication on global population co-authored by Lester Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute.

Former executive director of the United Nations Environmental Programme, Mostafa Tolba, wrote in a 1989 Bioscience journal article that “as many as 50 million could become environmental refugees if the world did not act to support sustainable development” while British environmentalist Norman Myers wrote a number of reports, journal articles, and books in the 1990s and more recently, about the growing problem of climate change-induced migration and displacement.

One important development that allowed the term “environmental migrants” to go viral as a global policy concern was the release of the World Disasters Report in 2001 by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which reported that an average of 211 million people were killed or affected by natural disasters – seven times greater than the figure for those killed or affected by traditional military and political conflicts for each year from 1991 to 2000.

Another important policy development occurred when the International Organization for Migration (IOM) took the step of defining environmental migrants as “those displaced by extreme environmental events but also those whose migration is triggered by deteriorating environmental conditions”, although IOM makes it clear that the use of the term “environmental refugees” should be discouraged and currently does not have any legal standing in international refugee law.

HERE AND NOW

Third, even as we discuss the wisdom of using “environmental refugees” and debate whether there will be one million or tens of millions of cases of climate change induced migration and displacement in the future, the drought and other resource scarcity conditions that forced Syrian farmer Ahmed Abdullah and his family to live in plastic tents and to lose any meaningful hope for the future are producing humanitarian disasters impacting 10 million people across a wide stretch of Africa in such countries as Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda.

In a country like Somalia, a complex interplay of high food prices, domestic insecurity and drought has caused more than 2.5 million people in the south of the country (including 1 in 3 children) to currently require emergency humanitarian assistance.

Even as the scientific case for climate change being a “factor” in intensifying the complex humanitarian dilemmas in Syria and in the Horn of Africa remain strong, it would be difficult if not impossible to establish a direct cause-effectand the possibility of having some kind of incontrovertible DNA evidence of a climate change-migration and displacement link seems highly unlikely.

On the ground, the true test of the international community’s willingness to help the world’s poor rests less on generating emergency food supplies and more on helping farmers like Ahmed Abdullah and his counterparts in the Horn of Africa to make sure that they have some hope for food and resource self-sufficiency and resilience.

There is strong evidence, for example, that climate risk management techniques like drought insurance could have worked in Africa even as far back as 2007, before the drought problem had the potential to turn the risks of hunger to full-blown famine in the Horn of Africa.

There is an old saying in the health care field that the big difference between medicine and poison is dosage. That is, that medicine one might take to contain heart disease can just as easily kill the patient if the wrong dosage is used.

In a similar fashion, the difference between sustainable and unsustainable climate change adaptation may not only be the types of policy approaches used, but also when the adaptation assistance can be applied in the problem cycle. And that means, diagnosing the problem early and accurately: after all, prevention is better than cure.

Source: AlertNet

This was not the first such catastrophe: Majuro has grown used to battling a major tidal event every decade or so. However, as global carbon emissions continue to increase, sea levels rise and tropical weather events become more numerous and intense, these events will become ever more common. The Marshallese people can respond to such crises every few years, but they cannot respond every few months, and it is possible (indeed probable) that life as they know it will become untenable by the end of the century. This fact raises serious questions about the continued viability of these nations, as well as protections for individuals who may need to relocate.

In late May this year, legal and policy experts from around the world gathered at Columbia Law School to address these and other questions arising from the impacts of global climate change – particularly rising sea levels – on small-island nations.

Speaking at the event, panelist Mary Elena Carr, associate director of the Columbia Climate Center, highlighted the scientific consensus: that, without any remediating activity, the Marshall Islands and other low-lying island nations around the world could become uninhabitable in a matter of decades, a serious security risk which can no longer be ignored. Sea-level rise will be particularly acute in the Pacific and other island regions, where increased intensity and severity of weather patterns, including so-called “king tide” and “el niño” events, may overwhelm domestic infrastructure and water supplies, as well as local ecosystems.

To underscore the severity of this issue and the importance of adaptation generally, Carr warned that, even if everybody stopped emitting greenhouse gases now “we will still have warming for over 1000 years…[and] just from the warming of water, we will still have one metre of sea-level rise by 2100.”

This raises a fundamental question: what happens to the nations themselves if their islands become uninhabitable? On this point, Jenny Grote-Stoutenburg, visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, argued that “the international law of statehood is characterised by a tension between the principle of effectiveness [asking whether a state has a territory, population, government and independence] and another competing principle, the principle of legality…[which holds that] the extinction of states must not violate some fundamental norms of international legal order, called jus cogens norms.”

In other words, it is highly possible that some traditional requirements for statehood – permanent territory and population – may no longer be met by some of these countries, but that other nations will continue to recognise them for equitable reasons (and in fact may be legally obligated to do so), meaning the indices of statehood can likely be preserved. This might most effectively happen via some ex-situ arrangement, as outlined by University of Hawaii academic Maxine Burkett, whereby country representatives would manage and distribute national resources to a scattered population.

The extent of these resources depends heavily on nations’ ability to continue to access marine territories, which provide critical fishing and mineral rights. As currently set by the Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC), Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) – waters over which a state has special rights for exploration and resource-use – extend 200 nautical miles (just over 370 kilometres) from a nation’s low-tide mark. However, the convention is not clear regarding permanent boundaries, and so traditionally EEZs would recede along with the coast if sea levels rose.

Of more concern to small-island nations, substantial marine territory – as much as 40,000 square nautical miles (137,000 square kilometres) – could be threatened by the abandonment of a single island, because the LOSC clearly disallows marine territory for uninhabitable rocks. In response to this, David Freestone of The George Washington University notes that precedent elsewhere would support artificially bulwarking islands to preserve existing claims – most (in)famously, Japan has bolsteredOkinotorishma Island from a rock to a full base that serves as a basis for territorial expansion to the south. Although this has been repeatedly challenged by other nations, for equitable reasons they would be less likely to object to similar bulwarking by small-island nations.

If certain small-island nations become uninhabitable, their populations will have to move somewhere, but it remains unclear where they would go. Unfortunately, the patchwork of international protections for displaced peoples will not provide extensive guidance: refugee law as defined by the1951 Convention on Refugees probably would not apply to climate migrants (although subsequent clarifying agreements applying to Africa and the Americas might); and there is no international obligation for any particular country to take in such migrants. Similarly, protections in the United States and Europe for victims of environmental disasters are temporary, and leave no path to full residency.

In response, as New York University law professor Katrina Wyman has discussed, the best option for individual nations may be to rely on existing agreements and relationships with potential destination countries that allow migration for other reasons or purposes. Domestic immigration laws in certain countries may also be used.

Options also exist in international institutions to provide more aid and support to climate-displaced peoples. Traditional institutions that could be integral to this effort include the International Organization for Migrationand the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) may also be of potential use in organising resettlement activities. This is particularly true following last year’s climate negotiations in Cancún, which recognised the importance of “measures to enhance understanding, coordination and cooperation with regard to climate change induced displacement…at national, regional and international levels”. As Australian lawyer Ilona Millar suggested, the UNFCCC could perhaps be used to harness private-sector funding and insurance protection for vulnerable parties.

If people are forced to resettle, many have argued that they should be able to recover damages in court for harms received. However, the authority for such litigation remains unclear. Substantively, there are several possible bases for establishing a violation of international law, including breach of treaty claims under the UNFCCC, the human right of self-determination, the duty under the World Heritage Convention to “natural and cultural heritage” and theories in tort and certain other areas of the law. One particularly interesting possibility, as described by Dean Bialek, would to be to base a claim on ocean acidification, which could kill off tropical coral species, deplete fish reserves and potentially further undermine the physical stability of coral atolls.

A more difficult question is: which courts could hear such claims and enforce remedies, if such remedies are possible? The International Court of Justiceis the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, but has only limited powers. Certain treaties, including the UNFCCC, offer similarly advisory commissions which could perhaps hear such cases. Access to domestic courts in key major emitters is also uncertain; the United States, especially in recent caselaw, famously makes it difficult for foreigners to gain access to US Courts under the Alien Tort Claims Act.

However, at least one lawsuit initiated by the Federated States of Micronesia has had success fighting carbon emissions in Czech Republic courts, by challenging an environmental-impact assessment for a proposed coal-fired power plant on the grounds it failed to adequately account for transboundary (read: climate) impacts. The success of this case was largely based on Czech provisions that allow foreigners access to domestic courts, but similar provisions are being scouted out elsewhere in Europe and around the world, and may provide further options for establishing jurisdiction.

If resettlement becomes unavoidable, then that process must be organised. As Brad Blitz from UK-based Kingston University has emphasised, preparations should be made far in advance of any actual movement, and should focus on preserving both physical and financial security, and cultural norms. Basic housing and life-supporting infrastructure must be planned.

Equally important, the political relationships between displaced nationals and host states would need to be resolved, addressing communities’ relationship with host nations as well as their involvement in the planning process. The experience of Alaskan villagers’ resettlement in Newtok, where community leaders have successfully led the relocation process, as contrasted with less successful relocations of island populations in Chagosand elsewhere, suggests that community involvement is critical for the success of any relocation activity. This involvement is important largely because new communities must do more than provide housing; they should be structured to promote livelihoods and preserve critical familial and community bonds; and community leaders are best placed to structure their resettlement process accordingly.

To get ready for this changing world, small-island governments need to update existing institutions to prepare administratively for sea-level rise and possible relocation. At May’s conference, Justin Rose gave a summary of programmes under way to prepare island communities, including adaptation projects (such as planting and building defenses against saltwater inundation), educational schemes and more direct sets of incentives for good long-term planning. More of this should be done. In addition to community development, states will need to address property systems to account for changing landscapes, develop new budget priorities, establish targeted insurance regimes to allow for individual recovery and, above all, educate their populations in preparation for possible future resettlement.

However, at heart this is a global problem, and the burden to resolve these issues falls squarely on the world’s largest emitters. Through no fault of their own, entire civilisations could soon be lost to the ocean. These civilisations must attempt to ease the pain of any transition through legal innovations and active planning – but they will need help. And it is our moral duty as a society to help them prepare for the world to come.

Source: chinadialogue

Last year, 38 million people were displaced by climate-related disasters such as the flooding in Pakistan and China.

“Human displacement due to climate change is happening now. There is no need to debate it,” Jonas Gahr Støre, Norway’s minister of foreign affairs, told over 200 delegates attending the Nansen Conference on Climate Change and Displacement in the 21st Century in Oslo Jun. 6-7.

Governments and the humanitarian community need to understand this fact – and that it will get much worse in the coming decades, Støre said.

Without major emissions reductions, climate change could get far worse than anyone is prepared to think about.

“It may be more realistic to consider four degrees C of warming rather than two degrees C,” suggested Harald Dovland, former head of the Norwegian Delegation to the United Nations climate change negotiations.

The world has already warmed 0.8C and will rise to least 1.6 C even if all emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases ended today, James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told the conference.

A four-degree C warmer world is a very different planet and risks runaway climate change. Even two degrees C is not safe, Hansen said.

“The last time the planet was two degrees C warmer was during the Pliocene (five to 2.4 million years ago) and sea levels were 25 metres higher,” he said. “If we burn all the fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) we’re creating conditions that future generations will be unable to cope with.”

Even though a four-degree C warmer world “is choosing the suicidal path”, experts must avoid fuelling xenophobia with predictions of mass migrations and conflicts, says Francois Gemenne, research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris.

“This also feeds into a security agenda of panic and paranoia,” Gemenne said.

At least 20 percent of humanity will be at high risk of severe flooding due to sea level rise and extreme rainfall events in the coming decades.

“Too many people live in low-lying deltas and other parts of the world that are becoming too dangerous to live in,” said Gemenne. They will be forced to move and often this movement will be permanent.

Rather than building walls and barriers, countries and the international community need to encourage people to move to safer ground. “Lift the barriers so that people can use migration to adapt to climate change,” he urged delegates.

In most cases, migration is the last choice when it comes to coping with climate change. No one wants to be forced to leave their home and a great deal can be done to reduce the impacts of natural disasters, Gemenne and others repeatedly said. However, this is a new role for the international development and humanitarian community.

In 2010, new seasonal forecast tools accurately projected where the floods and droughts were likely to be a month or two in advance in parts of Africa and Asia, Madeleen Helmer, head of the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, told the conference.

“We could not get a cent from the donor community to help poor countries prepare,” Helmer said

“They said: ‘let’s wait and see what happens’,” Helmer said.

Requests for funding to help prepare Mozambique for flooding went unanswered prior to the devastating floods of 2000.

“Only 3.4 million dollars was needed for preparation. More than 98 million dollars ended up being spent on flood relief” illustrating the fact that it is far more cost effective to prepare than react, said Kelly David, head of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Regional Office of Southern and Eastern Africa.

David and others urged a major shift away from a focus on disaster assistance to adaptation and preparation. That means that development, including overseas development aidm needs to be part of this focus on adaptation to avoid building a school that might be destroyed by a future heavy rainfall event, for example.

“There has been a huge shift towards preparation by governments in Africa very recently,” said David. “They have become worried about large-scale civil disruption such as those in the Middle East.”

Governments everywhere have been slow to realise the devastating human and economic impacts of from climate-related disasters.

“These losses are accelerating and governments can’t absorb those losses anymore,” said Andrew Maskrey, coordinator of the Global Assessment Report released in Oslo this week and earlier in Geneva by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction Secretariat.

The Global Assessment Report (GAR) reports that while there are fewer deaths from flooding or cyclones in recent years, economic losses due to climate-related disasters are crippling low-income countries.

“The sheer scale of recurrent and probable maximum losses should be enough to shock governments into action,” the report concluded.

Damage to Indonesia’s schools and medical facilities has increased 1,000 percent in the last 20 years. Mexico is now losing 10 billion dollars worth of public infrastructure and assets annually due to storms and flooding.

“Most governments don’t know how much they’re losing,” Maskrey told IPS.

Land use planning that accounts for the potential for climate-related disasters is by the far the cheapest way to prevent these losses. Relocation and retrofits will also work but are three to four times more costly, he said.

“The number and sizes of losses are accelerating… I hope we can scale risk reduction to match what’s coming,” Maskrey said.

Development assistance is insufficient and organisations like the World Bank and countries in the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development are beginning to face the challenges of creating a global framework to enhance resilience of the planet, said Nansen conference chair Margareta Wahlström, United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction.

At the conference opening, Norway’s Crown Princess Mette-Marit quoted Fridtjof Nansen, this country’s most famous citizen and the world’s first High Commissioner for Refugees: “Charity is practical politics.”

Source: Inter Press Service