Posted by Kayly Ober on July 27th, 2010 | 
(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.
Continue reading this post »
Posted by Kayly Ober on July 22nd, 2010 |
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.
Posted by Kayly Ober on July 19th, 2010 |
The European Science Foundation is hosting 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.
Continue reading this post »
Posted by Kayly Ober on July 12th, 2010 |
(Reuters) July 12, 2010 – Rising seas from global warming, coming after years of coral reef destruction, are forcing thousands of indigenous Panamanians to leave their ancestral homes on low-lying Caribbean islands.
Seasonal winds, storms and high tides combine to submerge the tiny islands, crowded with huts of yellow cane and faded palm fronds, leaving them ankle-deep in emerald water for days on end.
Pablo Preciado, leader of the island of Carti Sugdub, remembers that in his childhood floods were rare, brief and barely wetted his toes. “Now it’s something else. It’s serious,” he said.
The increase of a few inches in flood depth is consistent with a global sea level rise over Preciado’s 64 years of life and has been made worse by coral mining by the islanders that reduced a buffer against the waves.
Carti Sugdub is one of a handful of islands in an archipelago off Panama’s northeastern coast, where the government says climate change threatens the livelihood of nearly half of the 32,000 semi-autonomous Kuna people.
The 2,000 inhabitants of Carti Sugdub plan to move to coastal areas within the Kuna’s autonomous territory on the Panama mainland. They are eyeing foothills a half-hour walk from the swampy beach areas.
“The water level is rising. The move is imminent,” said Preciado, who has been leading a group of villagers clearing tropical forest for the new settlement.
Continue reading this post »
Posted by Kayly Ober on July 7th, 2010 |
The Government of the Republic of the Marshall Islands has approached Columbia Law School’s Center for Climate Change Law to explore creative approaches to the legal issues facing these nations. Among the legal questions that need to be explored are the implications of the loss of inhabitable physical territory for statehood, for maritime governance, for property, fishing and mineral rights, and for the legal status of displaced persons. International law, human rights law, environmental law, and admiralty law are just a few of the fields that may be implicated. If you’d like to learn more, visit Columbia Law School’s website here.
If you are interested, please e-mail abstracts of 300 words or less to Michael Gerrard, Director of the Center for Climate Change Law, at michael.gerrard@law.columbia.edu by September 1, 2010.
Michael B. Gerrard
Andrew Sabin Professor of Professional Practice
Director, Center for Climate Change Law
Columbia Law School
435 West 116th Street
New York, New York 10027
Tel: 212-854-3287
Fax: 212-854-7946
michael.gerrard@law.columbia.edu
Posted by Kayly Ober on July 2nd, 2010 |
The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) has released eight background papers that investigate climate-induced migration. These background papers are a product of GMF’s Transatlantic Study Team on Climate-induced Migration (led by Dr. Susan E. Martin, Georgetown University, and Dr. Koko Warner, UN University). The Study Team consists of scholars, policymakers, and practitioners from the migration and environmental communities. You can find links to the papers below.
Developing Adequate Humanitarian Responses by Sarah Collinson
Summary: Diverse and dynamic patterns of internal and cross-border mobility, migration and displacement are the norm in most countries affected by chronic or recurrent humanitarian crises, which often makes it difficult to distinguish between forced and voluntary migrants because different people adopt highly varied strategies to cope or survive, or to respond to new opportunities. The most negative human impacts of climate change will be reflected in sudden and large-scale forced migration.
Many so-called “fragile states” already fail to provide adequate social protection to poor and vulnerable populations, so any climate-related deterioration in human security has the potential to generate extreme welfare needs that are far beyond the capacities or willingness of these states to address. The sheer scale and complexities of displacement will continue to stretch and challenge the normative, institutional and operational frameworks and capacities of the international humanitarian system and national humanitarian actors. Greater priority needs to be given to flexible humanitarian funding and programming suited to addressing chronic as well as acute humanitarian needs and vulnerability in countries where formal climate change adaptation policies are unlikely to be developed. Superficial climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction efforts in countries affected by complex and interacting processes including population growth, economic stagnation, conflict, urbanization and environmental stress, are unlikely to influence the deeper dynamics of vulnerability associated with distress migration.
Continue reading this post »
|
|
