Next Thursday, August 19, is World Humanitarian Day. This day, celebrated across the world, aims to raise public awareness about humanitarian work provides insight of what it means today to be an aid
worker. The 19th of August has been chosen by the United Nations to commemorate the work of humanitarian workers as it marks the
day when 22 employees of the UN, including the UN Special Representative Sergio Vieira de Mello, were killed in a bomb attack in 2003 in Baghdad. This year, focus will be on the actual work and achievements of humanitarian workers in the field. This year’s theme is “We are humanitarian workers”. Details of events that will mark the Day will be posted as they become available. There is also a Facebook page for more info.
This year, World Humanitarian Day comes at a time
when the international humanitarian community has been called upon to assist the countless number of people affected by the devastating floods in Pakistan, which some are calling the worst humanitarian disaster in recent history.
Below is The 2010 World Humanitarian Day project. It is a collaborative film shot in over 40 countries in under 9 weeks, on a shoestring budget – with the goal of showing the enormous diversity of places, faces and endeavors of humanitarian aid workers in 2010. It was filmed by humanitarian staff and freelance filmmakers from around the globe (over 50 contributors in total) with all time donated.
Environmental migration is not new. Nevertheless, the events and processes accompanying global climate change threaten to increase human movement both within States and across international borders. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted an increased frequency and severity of climate events such as storms, cyclones and hurricanes, as well as longer-term sea level rise and desertification, which will impact upon people’s ability to survive in certain parts of the world.
This book brings together a variety of disciplinary perspectives on the phenomenon of climate-induced displacement. With chapters by leading scholars in their field, it collects in one place
a rigorous, holistic analysis of this phenomenon, which can better inform academic understanding and policy development alike. Governments have not been prepared to take a leading role in developing responses to the issue, in large part due to the absence of strong theoretical frameworks from which sound policy can be developed. The specialist expertise of the authors in this book means that each chapter identifies key issues that need to be considered in shaping domestic, regional and international responses, including the complex causes of movement, the conceptualisation of migration responses to climate change, the terminology that should be used to describe those who move, and attitudes to migration that may affect decisions to stay or leave. The book will help to facilitate the creation of principled, research-based responses, and establish climate-induced displacement as an important aspect of both the climate change and global migration debates.
She includes chapters by familiar and influential migration, human rights, environmental, and legal scholars:
“Climate Change-Induced Mobility and the Existing Migration Regime in Asia and the Pacific” by Graeme Hugo
“Migration as Adaptation: Opportunities and Limits” by Jon Barnett and Michael Webber
“Climate-Induced Community Relocation in the Pacific: The Meaning and Importance of Land” by John Campbell
“Conceptualising Climate-Induced Displacement” by Walter Kälin
“‘Disappearing States’, Statelessness and the Boundaries of International Law” by Jane McAdam
“Protecting People Displaced by Climate Change: Some Conceptual Challenges” by Roger Zetter
“International Ethical Responsibilities to ‘Climate Change Refugees'” by Peter Penz
“Climate Migration and Climate Migrants: What Threat, Whose Security?” by Lorraine Elliott
“Climate-Related Displacement: Health Risks and Responses” by Anthony J McMichael, Celia E McMichael, Helen L Berry and Kathryn Bowen
“Climate Change, Human Movement and the Promotion of Mental Health: What have we Learnt from Earlier Global Stressors?” by Maryanne Loughry
“Afterword: What Now? Climate-Induced Displacement after Copenhagen” by Stephen Castles
We have yet to read the book, but it seems set to be an
essential part of any climate change and migration reader’s diet.
A new movie on climate change and migration arrived at the 14th annual DocuWeeks called Sun Come Up. You can watch the film between Friday, July 30 and Thursday, August 5 in New York City.
Synopsis:
Sun Come Up follows the relocation of some of the world’s first “environmental refugees,” the Carteret Islanders – a community living on a remote island chain in the South Pacific Ocean.
When rising seas threaten their survival, the islanders face a painful
decision: they must leave their beloved land in search of a new place to call home.
The film follows the Carteret’s relocation leader, Ursula Rakova, and a group of young islanders led by Nick Hakata as they search for land in
Bougainville, an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea 50 miles across the open ocean.
The move will not be easy as Bougainville is recovering from a 10-year civil war. Many Bougainvilleans remain traumatized by the “Crisis” as the civil war is known locally. Yet, Sun Come Up isn’t a familiar third world narrative. Out of this tragedy comes a story of hope, strength, and profound generosity.
San Kamap (Sun Come Up) means sunrise in pidgin and reflects this sentiment – the resilience of the community, and the hope that’s present at the start of a new day.
(The New Republic) July 27, 2010 – Will a hotter climate mean more immigration? In some places, yes,
that’s quite possible. Earlier this week, a team of researchers led by Princeton’s Michael Oppenheimer published a study suggesting that as global warming causes agricultural yields in Mexico to decline, an additional 1.4 million to 6.7 million Mexicans could migrate to the United States by 2080. (The team analyzed data on emigration, crop yields, and climate from 1995 to 2005 in order to make their forecasts.)
As always, caveats abound. The social consequences of global warming are always the hardest things to predict. Immigration rates are never driven by physics alone, but depend on plenty of other factors, such as U.S. border policies or the changing structure of Mexico’s economy. And it’s always difficult to tie specific social trends to climate change. People in rural areas have been migrating for a long time, whether to seek out work or because the rainfall’s dried up or the soil’s eroded. Global warming will exacerbate these pressures, yes, but it’s hard to attribute any single event—or single migrant—to man-made climate change. That’s one reason why forecasts of “climate refugees” vary so wildly.
Still, climate-driven migration is a concept that’s received a lot of attention in recent years. As the planet heats up, droughts spread, and sea levels rise, millions of people are going to be uprooted from their homes and farms and move elsewhere. According to a 2007 World Bank report, the vast bulk of this migration is expected to take place within developing countries, with people moving from rural villages to urban centers. One big concern here is that places like Lagos or Dhaka are already swelling exponentially, and their infrastructure can barely keep up, which is why so many “megacities” now sport massive slums.
But there’s also likely to be a fair amount of migration between countries—and the consequences there are much harder to predict. As the rising oceans chomp away at Bangladesh, for instance, as many as 15 million people may have to abandon their towns and villages by mid-century. Partly in response, India has been constructing a 2,100-mile long fence to barricade itself against the predicted influx of climate refugees. This old Greenwire piece by Lisa Friedman features a number of national security experts in India openly fretting about how rising seas will destabilize the borders between the two countries.
Jane McAdam, Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, University of New South Wales, Australia; and Research Associate, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, published a paper that calls for a new international treaty for ‘climate refugees’ or ‘climate migrants’. Drawing in part on field work undertaken in Kiribati and Tuvalu, it examines some conceptual and pragmatic difficulties in attempting to construct a refugee-like instrument for people fleeing the effects of climate change, and critiques whether there are legal, as opposed to political, benefits to be gained by advocating for such an instrument.
“Human movement caused by environmental factors is not new. Natural and human-induced environmental disasters and slow-onset degradation have displaced people in the past, and will continue to do so in the future. Such movement is a normal part of adaptation to change. The ‘newness’ of displacement triggered (at least in part) by climate change is its underlying anthropogenic basis, the large number of people thought to be susceptible to it, and the relative speed with which climate change is to occur, which may hamper people’s traditional adaptive patterns that historically were able to develop over time. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, it is becoming difficult to categorize displaced people because of the combined impacts of conflict, the environment and economic pressures. While the term ‘refugee’ describes only a narrow sub-class of the world’s forced migrants, it is often misapplied to those who move (or who are anticipated to move) for environmental or climate reasons. As explored below, this is not only erroneous as a matter of law, but is conceptually inaccurate as well. In contexts such as the so-called ‘sinking islands’ of Kiribati and Tuvalu in the South Pacific, movement is less likely to be in the nature of sudden flight, and more likely to be pre-emptive and planned. This does not mean it is not ‘forced’, but rather that top-down policy
responses and normative frameworks that predicate forced migration on a particular notion of exodus may not match up to realities of movement. Furthermore, while ‘development-induced displacement’ and ‘conflict-induced displacement’ describe primary motivations for movement in certain contexts, field research in Tuvalu and Kiribati highlights the difficulties of describing human movement from these States as exclusively ‘climate-induced displacement’…” To read more, go here.
a conference on “Environmental Degradation and Conflict: From Vulnerabilities to Capabilities,” December 5-9, 2010 in Bielefeld, Germany. The conference aims to shed light on the complex dynamics of environmentally induced migration and the associated societal processes. Toward this end, they seek to further the interdisciplinary debate and exchange of knowledge from the fields of migration, climate change, disaster, development, and others. Connecting vulnerability, capability and transnational approaches will help to link existing research and open new research venues for the future. The conference is structured along seven issue areas.
(1) Analyzing the debate on “climate refugees” and its shortcomings from the point of view of migration studies. The central question is: What are the contentious issues of the environment migration debate? In particular, the question needs to be addressed how migratory strategies are embedded within the broader livelihood context, and beyond climate change.
(2) Reflecting the vulnerability context in accordance with the sustainable livelihood approach from the natural science perspective. The central question is: What do we know about climate and environmental change in developing and developed regions of the world? Contributions should seek to make climate change projections, including the uncertainties of climate change modulation, accessible to participants from the social sciences.
(3) Reflecting the vulnerability context in light of the sustainable livelihood approach from a social scientific perspective. The guiding question is: What impact do climate and environmental change have on the livelihoods of vulnerable groups? The discussions focus on the basic categories of areas and persons which have been identified as highly affected by climate change. The categories include fields crucial for livelihood such as food and water systems, basic services such as health and housing systems, and income generation.
