A brief overview of the effects of climate change and the environment on migration opens the study, but the real meat comes in at page 36 when legal and policy implications are discussed. In sum, they suggest the European Union become a leader in determining solutions.

As at the international level the legal debate is unlikely to be solved in the near term, the EU may decide to be one of the pioneers in this field, in particular because there are already attempts at the political level to consider environmentally displaced individuals under the Common European Asylum Policy. In light of the above, we put forward the following

recommendations to the European Parliament  with the aim of offering different possible mechanisms to be considered by the EU in dealing with environmentally displaced individuals:

• EU may wish to start with the complementary protection regime first, as an ad hoc mechanism and depending on the further evolution to guarantee primary protection to environmental displaced individuals. The national provisions analyzed can be used as a model for the European legislator in amending the content of the Qualification Directive. As long as the reasons listed in the Article 15 shall be applicable to qualify for subsidiary protection, an amendment  to its paragraph (c) might include, in addition to armed conflict, also environmental disasters.
• There are strong arguments that, in the case  of  a  mass  influx  of  environmentally displaced individuals, the  financial and political mechanisms available under the Temporary Protection Directive might be applicable. However, a more flexible and at the same time more objective mechanism  to activate the directive should be considered, as the directive currently can only be activated upon a commission proposal and a related decision by the Council.
• A holistic approach covering all the aspects of environmentally induced migration is a more relevant approach, engaging a comprehensive instrument for environmentally displaced individuals that  would regulate the procedure and method, including the rights and obligations, for granting protection to victims of environmental displacement.
• The EU should consider ad hoc mechanisms informed by a rights-based approach and existing instruments regarding legal and irregular migration (for example prolongation of residence titles for third-country nationals whose countries have been affected by environmental disasters, postponement of removal, etc).
• The EU should promote the resettlement of individuals from countries that have experienced environmental disasters and further develop the Joint EU Resettlement Programme.

Under the Global Approach, third countries affected by climate change related phenomena should be assisted in order to support the national institutions in dealing with adverse environmental change. Measures may comprise strengthening the adaptation and resilience capacities of third countries to reduce the vulnerability of affected populations and enhancing the protection of environmental displaced individuals outside the European Union. The EU should consider providing support to local governments to address migration as an adaptation strategy and to facilitate migration while ensuring that the rights of the migrants are protected during the whole migration cycle. The mobility partnerships would be, in principle, a relevant instrument to bilaterally cooperate on all sorts of measures regarding environmentally displaced.

This two-day conference will bring together leading international experts, policymakers, and government officials from affected countries to discuss:

• Conceptualizing climate change-related movement
• The nature of movement: what does the evidence tell us?
• International legal frameworks
• International governance
• Adaptation and ‘migration with dignity’
• Relocation and land tenure
• Climate change migration and (human) security
• Institutional responses: where to from here?

Register online: http://www.gtcentre.unsw.edu.au/events/climate-change-and-migration-asia-pacific-legal-and-policy-responses

Cost: $150 for both days (including lunch, morning tea & afternoon tea).  Single day registration is not possible.

Contact: gtcentre@unsw.edu.au

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

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

Main messages to come out of the event included:

• Displacement is likely to be a significant consequence of global climate change processes of both a rapid and slow-onset nature, but there is a need for better understanding and research of these processes as well as the impacts and scale of displacement related to climate change.
• Responses to climate-related displacement need to be guided by the fundamental principles of humanity, human dignity, human rights and international cooperation. They need furthermore to be guided by consent, empowerment, participation and partnership and to reflect age, gender and diversity aspects.
• While the 1951 Convention and some regional refugee instruments provide answers to certain cases of external displacement related to climate change, and these ought to be analyzed further, they are limited.
• The terms of “climate refugee” and “environmental refugee” should be avoided as they are inaccurate and misleading.
• There is a need to develop a global guiding framework or instrument to apply to situations of external displacement other than those covered by the 1951 Convention, especially displacement resulting from sudden-onset disasters. States, together with UNHCR and other international organizations, are encouraged to explore this further. Consideration would need to be given to whether any such framework or instrument ought also to cover other contemporary forms of external displacement.
• The Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, as a reflection of existing to situations of internal displacement caused by climate-related processes. Thus, there is no need for a new set of principles in relation to internal displacement in the context of climate change.
• Although designed to address internal displacement, the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement contain a number of principles that may be applicable in external displacement situations. In addition, there are other relevant standards – for example, those developed in response to mass influx of refugees – which could be considered.
• Climate-related displacement – both internal and external – is likely to take different forms and to require diverse responses at national, sub-regional, regional and international levels to address the specificities of different situations, guided by basic universal principles.
• National legislation, policies and institutions are central to developing appropriate responses to both the internal and external dimensions of climate-related displacement.
• Pre-existing regional and sub-regional governance forums and arrangements, including mechanisms promoting free movement, could be explored further to determine the extent to which they apply to climate-related displacement and migration.
• In relation to small island and/or low-lying coastal states, the legal presumption of continuity of statehood needs to be emphasized and the notion and language that such states will “disappear” (i.e., lose their international legal personality) or “sink” ought to be avoided.
• Migration is widely acknowledged as a rational adaptation strategy to climate change processes and needs to be supported as such.
• Given the magnitude of the issues involved, there is a need for a collaborative approach based on principles of international cooperation and burden- and responsibility-sharing. UNHCR’s expertise on the protection dimensions of displacement makes it a particularly valuable actor.

Read the full summary here »

“While there is growing interest in the issue of climate change and displacement, there doesn’t seem to be consensus about the ‘entry point’ into the debate. Many have tried to estimate the potential scale of displacement, with widely varying results resulting from different assumptions and methodologies. Others have analyzed the legal gaps, particularly for those who cross international borders because of the effects of climate change. Still others have sought to analyze the potential for increased conflict resulting from the effects of climate change.

Following on the observation by Jane McAdam and others that climate change is likely to produce different displacement scenarios requiring different policy solutions, I would like to reflect on one type of displacement which is likely to occur as a result of climate change: the relocation or resettlement of communities from areas which are no longer habitable because of environmental consequences of climate change. In particular I will focus on the relevance of experiences with development-forced displacement and resettlement (DFDR) in providing guidance for national policy-makers and international organizations likely to be involved in designing and implementing such relocations.

Although people displaced by development projects are considered IDPs in the definition of the Guiding Principles and in the new African Union Convention on Protection and Assistance of IDPs in Africa, and although there is a huge field of anthropologists and sociologists who have been working in this area for several decades, I think it’s fair to say that this field is almost unknown by most humanitarian actors working with refugees and IDPs. Planning for the resettlement of people to be affected by the construction of a massive dam has seemed very distant from the work of humanitarians setting up refugee camps to deal with people fleeing civil conflict or constructing temporary shelters for those displaced by natural disasters.

Moreover, development and humanitarian actors have different cultures and language which sometimes impedes communication; for example, the word ‘resettlement’ has very different meanings for UNHCR and for the World Bank. And yet as humanitarian agencies begin to consider the consequences of climate change-induced displacement, there are opportunities to learn from the experiences of colleagues working in the development field.”

Read the entire contribution here.

Climate Change and Conflict

The United Nations has estimated that there could be ‘millions’ of environmental migrants by 2020. Various think tanks, government agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) have produced reports that argue that migration can be a major risk factor in the chain of effects that link climate change and violent conflict. The expectation is that climate migration will result in tensions between those displaced within their own country and the communities into which they move, as well as between so-called climate ‘refugees’ (who cross an international border) and the states that receive them.

Various triggers for conflict have been identified — competition for scarce resources or economic support (or jobs); increased demands on social infrastructure; and cultural differences based on ethnicity or nationality. All of this is thought more likely in countries or regions that already suffer from other forms of social instability and that possess limited social and economic capacity to adapt.

Climate change-related migration is most likely to be a slow process. The language in the climate security and climate migration literature, on the other hand, conjures up the image of climate change-induced migration that is likely to be out of control and therefore highly threatening. The implication is that countries in the developed ‘North’ will somehow be threatened directly by the alleged ‘influx’ of climate refugees (the term itself is nevertheless contentious) or indirectly by instabilities that might arises in regions of strategic interest.

Indeed, some of those reports worry about a likely increase in demands on the military capacity of the richer countries. Yet there is little convincing evidence that climate migration, if and/or when it does occur, will result in social unrest, conflict and regional instability. This is not to deny that migration might be a source of tension. Rather it is to question the inevitability of this relationship in the absence of reliable evidence about causal chains.

Human Insecurity

What is more certain is that both the impacts of climate change that might impel people to move and the consequences of migrating are human security issues and should be addressed as such. In Southeast Asia, as elsewhere, it is people and their communities who are most at risk from climate change and from the instability, incapacity, social and economic stress that might occur. A human security model, which takes people (or peoples) as the security referent, questions the ‘taken for granted’ assumptions and analyses within the policy community about climate change, migration, threat and (in)security.

It suggests that we should think about forced migration from unsustainable or uninhabitable lands as a source of insecurity for those whose lands and homes can no longer sustain them. Migration also generates other human insecurities, including loss of income, loss of social capital, disruption to traditional coping mechanisms and increased vulnerability for already marginalised groups, including the poor, women and children. We should worry about the way that climate-related food insecurity, malnutrition and an increased disease burden destroys lives and livelihoods, and exacerbates poverty and misery for the millions of people who are affected, rather than worrying about this only as a trigger for civil unrest and potential extremism.

Desecuritising Climate Migration

The important human security question, then, is how can we protect and assist people whose lives are disrupted by climate change. Migration is not the only response strategy. People may, for example, choose to stay in their communities and adapt to the impacts of climate change; or they may choose to stay, accept the costs of climate change and do nothing. Even if those who are most vulnerable have no choice but to move, migration does not necessarily have to implicate unrest or violence. Therefore we need to have a better understanding of the complexities of migration as a response or adaptation strategy in the face of the social, economic and environmental consequences of climate change.

We need to know what factors impel migration, as well as the factors that enable individuals and communities to adapt in ways other than moving or migrating. We need to know what kinds of governance and institutional approaches are best suited to anticipating, preventing and, where necessary, managing climate-change induced migration. And we need to think about adaptation as a security strategy that has the potential to save lives, increase individual adaptive capacity, build societal resilience and lessen the chances of conflict.

This move from a politics of security to a politics of adaptation and building resilience can be read as a process of de-securitisation of climate migration in the region. Reading this move instead as human securitisation (or perhaps even counter-securitisation) has the potential to sustain the tactical attractions of the language of security. It also brings urgent attention to the problem and redirects security policy to securing the lives, livelihoods and, wherever possible, the lands and homes of those in the region who are most vulnerable to and most insecure from the threats of climate change.

Lorraine Elliott is Professor of International Relations at the Australian National University and Senior Project Adviser in the Climate Change, Environmental Security and Natural Disasters Programme of the Asia Security Initiative, Centre for Non-Traditional Security (NTS) Studies, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University.

Source: Eurasia Review

As her book summary outlines:

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.

“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.