As author Sudhit Chella Rajan explains, “one of the main consequences of climate change will be rising seas, which will cause tens to hundreds of millions of people
to be flooded out of their homes in coastal areas and in many low-lying atoll nations, some of which will become untenable as states or entirely disappear. This paper discusses disproportionate accumulation, delayed effects and asymmetrical impacts of greenhouse gases to advance ethical arguments concerning why and how the global community of nations
Etienne Piguet, a professor at Universite de Neuchatel in Switzerland, published a paper in the Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, Volume 1, Issue 4.
In it, he claims that although many agree that climate change will induce migration, few, if any at all, can prove to what degree. He lays out a typology identifying six research method families: ecological inference based on area characteristics, individual sample surveys, time series, multilevel analysis, agent-based modeling (ABM), and qualitative/ethnographic studies. He also calls for a coordinated international effort to improve the quality
and variety of data that could be used with existing research methods in order to significantly improve our understanding of the migration-environment nexus.
I have posted before about one of the fastest growing “megacities” in the world, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Nearly 500,000 migrants flow into the capital city
each year, many motivated by environmental pressures. Erik German and Solana Pyne of GlobalPost examine the future of Dhaka in a five-part multimedia special report. This series is currently shown on PBS Newshour, with the first part aired on September 8, 2010.
The video posted above is part three, as its focus is on both slow onset and sudden distasters resulting in individuals and families migrating to the urban sprawl of Dhaka in search of a better life. Click here to be taken to the main page of GlobalPost series where you can access the videos and news report for all five parts.
Cara Nine of the University College Cork recently submitted the paper “Ecological Refugees, State Borders, and the Lockean Proviso” to the Journal of Applied Philosophy. In this essay she expounds on the term “ecological refugee,” which we might better understand as environmental or climate-induced migrant. She analyzes the question: what may the people of an ecological refugee state legitimately claim on the basis of their right to self-determination?
She also answers the questions: should we redraw state borders to accommodate a New Tuvalu? She argues that a plausible position regarding territorial rights is that when (1) a people clearly is (or recently was) self-determining and has a legitimate claim to continue to be self-determining, and (2) the self-determination of a people is existentially threatened because the people lacks territorial rights, that (3) the people becomes a candidate for sovereign over a new territory. The result is that existing state borders may need to change to accommodate something like a New Tuvalu.
She also examines the principles of the system of territorial states. Because the system of territorial states is a system of exclusive rights over goods, especially land, it is possible that it is subject to the conditions of a Lockean proviso mechanism. This paper is dedicated mainly to adapting a version of the Lockean proviso for use in territorial rights theory. First, she argues that the Lockean proviso mechanism applied to territory should be employed to protect the interests of self-determining groups. Second, she develops a version of the Lockean proviso appropriate for use regarding territorial entitlements— and argues that the proviso mechanism applied to territorial rights should not be interpreted as a constraint on the acquisition of rights over territory, but rather it should be understood as a restraint on current territorial holdings. Finally, she develops some suggestions from the Lockean proviso
mechanism regarding the location and conditions involving the establishment of something like New Tuvalu.
(ClimateWire) August 23, 2010 – Rising ocean levels brought about by climate change have created a flood of unprecedented legal questions for small island nations and their neighbors.
Among them: If a country disappears, is it still a country? Does it keep its seat at the United Nations? Who controls its offshore mineral rights? Its shipping lanes? Its fish?
And if entire populations are forced to relocate — as could be the case with citizens of the Maldives, Tuvalu, Kiribati and other small island states facing extinction — what citizenship, if any, can those displaced people claim?
Until recently, such questions of sovereignty and human rights have been the domain of a scattered group of lawyers and academics. But now the Republic of the Marshall Islands — a Micronesian nation of 29 low-lying coral atolls in the North Pacific — is campaigning to stockpile a body of knowledge it hopes will turn international attention to vulnerable countries’ plights.
“At the current negotiating sessions and climate change meetings, nobody is truly addressing the legal and human rights effects of climate change,” said Phillip Muller, the Marshall Islands’ ambassador to the United Nations.
“If the Marshall Islands ceases to exist, are we still going to own the sea resources? Are we still going to be asked for permission to fish? What are the rights that we will have? And we are also mindful that we may need to relocate.
We’re hoping it will never happen, but we have to be ready. There are a lot of issues we need to know the answer to and be able to tell our citizens what is happening,” he said.
Frustrated by the dearth of answers to the questions he was posing, Muller said, Marshall Islands leaders contacted Columbia Law School. Michael Gerrard, who leads the law school’s Center for Climate Change Law, picked up the challenge and issued a call for papers.
This is a great blog post I found on The Hill’s Congress Blog. It is by Alice Thomas, Climate Displacement Programme Manager for Refugees International, and encapsulates the Pakistan crisis with a climate change and migration viewpoint.
(The Hill’s Congress Blog) August 18, 2010 – The devastating floods in Pakistan have claimed the lives of at least 1,500 people and rendered millions more homeless and displaced. According to the United Nations, the deluge’s human toll, which has reportedly affected 14 million Pakistanis, is worse than the 2004 tsunami, the January earthquake in Haiti, and the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan combined. The record-breaking floods – along with other recent unprecedented climate-related catastrophes such as the heat wave in Russia and torrential rains and subsequent mudslides in China – are in line with the predictions of climate scientists that global warming will cause an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events.
According to climate vulnerability indices, Pakistan is one of the world’s most at-risk countries due not only to its exposure to climate-related hazards such as flooding and droughts, but also its human vulnerability in terms of the capacity of individuals, communities, and societies to effectively respond to such hazards based on a combination of natural, human, social, financial and physical factors.
Yet getting the public and policy makers to see the Pakistan floods and other recent disasters not only as a portent of things to come but also as an indication that climate change is already occurring is likely to prove challenging. This is due in part to the inability of scientists to prove that
any one storm, drought or flood was caused
by global warming, as opposed to a variety of other factors that affect weather. Thus, while meteorological data show that the number of extreme weather events has tripled since the 1980s, and that 2010 is on track to be the warmest since reliable records began in the mid-19th century, there is a hesitancy to discuss the recent catastrophes in the broader context of the implications of climate change.
