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.

I came across this excellent blog post by Jared Banks, a US Foreign Service Officer and a member of the International Migration Office in the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration. He is part of the GMF Transatlantic Study Team investigating the impact of climate change on migration patterns around the world. Recently, he has traveled to Senegal to study first-hand the impacts that the environment has on the vulnerable population.

You can check out his brief blog post here. A final report by GMF, providing a review of findings and recommendations to policymakers and stakeholders will be published in June, 2010.

In addition to assessing the impacts of climate change on migration across the entire region, a number of case studies are carried out in particular hot spots, such as Bangladesh–India, the PRC, and the Pacific. Smaller case studies use secondary data in Central Asia, Indonesia, the Mekong, Nepal, and Thailand.

In Chapter 2, the study looks at the evidence linking climate change and migration followed in Chapter 3 with a brief look at the nature of migration in the region. Chapter 4 then presents the potential hot spots of climate change in Asia and the Pacific, leading into the Chapter 5 discussion of the possible impact on migration (projecting the numbers of people who will be vulnerable). The implications for policy are than analyzed in Chapter 6, closing the study with a series of recommendations dealing directly with migration and the possible effects of climate change.

Click here to access the full report »

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Source: PreventionWeb

EJF’s ‘No Place Like Home’ campaign is dedicated to arguing the case of those displaced by climate climate change, putting the call to governments and our political leaders for a new agreement on environmental refugees, guaranteeing them rights and assistance and a fair claim to our shared world (ejfoundation.org).

The EJF also argues the need for the new international agreement to address the sheer scale and human cost of climate change, and secure fairer and more equitable long-term solutions. In the report, Professor Frank Biermann and Ingrid Boas of Vrije University in Holland, proposed five points to be included in a new convention:

• Planned and voluntary resettlement and reintegration as opposed to ad hoc emergency relief responses
• Climate refugees to be treated the same as permanent immigrants
• Any convention must be tailored to an entire group of people, including entire nations
• Support for national governments to protect their people
• Protection of climate refugees must be seen as a global problem and global responsibility

The article concludes with recomendations for ways forward for both climate change mitigation and adaptation. According to the report, “…as a necessary first step, the international community should explicitly recognise within climate change negotiations that the right to a secure environment is a fundamental human right that must be upheld”.

Click here to access the full report »

According to the report, “Nearly one billion – or one out of seven – people are migrants. The 2009 Human Development Report demonstrates that migration can improve the lives of millions of people: the ones who move, those in destination communities and others that remain at home. The findings in this Report cast new light on some common misconceptions on migration, proposing a series of migration policies that can allow migration – both within and between countries – to increase people’s freedom and improve the lives of millions around the world.”

The report comes at a time when experts and researchers from the international community are urging policymakers to reject misconstrued fears about environmental migration, instead adopt a more positive view towards people displaced by the effects of climate change by accommodating for future populations through increased development of destination hubs and also resilience programs at migrant origins. Here is a link to related news stories about the 2009 HDR from countries around the world, and the views on the findings. Below is a great introduction video which highlights the theme of the report with interviews of migrants from various countries.

Click here to access the report »

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Source: UNDP on YouTube

Photo credit: IRIN

(IRIN) September 9, 2009 – Many recent studies have put the number of climate-change-related migrants at between 200 million and one billion by 2050, but critics say given insufficient data it is impossible to estimate the number. Some say inflated figures have spurred “fear-of-migration” rhetoric from policymakers and leaders.

“It seems unlikely the alarmist predictions of hundreds of millions of environmental refugees moving as a result of climate change,” says Cecilia Tacoli, senior researcher with London-based NGO the Institute of Environment and Eco-Development. Tacoli will publish a study ‘Crisis or adaptation? Migration and climate change in a context of high mobility’ in October.

“What is more likely is that we will see current high mobility trends continue and intensify, linked to income diversification.”

Projected migrant figures are based on estimates of the number of people living in areas most likely to be affected by climate change, rather than the number of people who are most likely to move, Tacoli says.

A study released 4 September by the UK government’s Governance and Social Development Resource Centre (GSDRC), notes: “Climate change is an extremely complicated and complex process. Migration is equally a study in its own right. Drawing any direct causal relationships is not only methodologically wrong, it is dangerous.”

One danger of inflating migrant figures, Tacoli says, is that it foments “fear” rhetoric among national leaders, many of whom now frame climate change as a national security issue.

Rhetoric of fear

An August report by the US Department of Defense said climate-induced crises and related mass people movements could topple governments, feed terrorist movements or destabilize entire regions.

The UK Ministry of Defence’s Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre (DCDC) states in a global trends 2007-2036 scenario: “Food and water insecurity will drive mass migration from some worst-affected areas and the effects may be felt in more affluent regions through distribution problems, specialized agriculture and aggressive food-pricing.”

And the European Union High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy, Javier Solana warned in 2008 that climate-change-related migration “may increase conflict in transit and destination areas. Europe must expect substantially increased migratory pressure.”

Reality

Crisis-led population movements are more complex and less predictable than the methodology in these estimations reflects say the reports by Tacoli and the GSDRC, but some trends have emerged. A 2009 UK-based Refugee Studies Centre report by James Morrissey notes one-off extreme events tend to generate short-term, short-distance migrations; while longer-term environmental changes tend to generate longer-distance, more permanent migrations.

Past climate-change-related displacements have tended to remain within country borders, with long-distance international movement the least likely scenario, according to researchers. And in most cases it is the most well-off who travel the farthest, while the poorest populations are often unable to move, several researchers say.

However a number of renowned researchers and institutions still predict high climate-migrant numbers, while a debate on the legal status of  “climate refugees” is emerging at international climate change talks. A policy paper by the UN University Institute for Environment and Human Security Section notes climate change is already contributing to displacement and migration and projects that in the densely populated Ganges, Mekong, and Nile River deltas, a sea level rise of 1m could affect 23.5 million people.

Way forward

To reframe the debate, rather than looking at environmental “hotspots” as potential migrant sources, it is more useful to think of “hot systems” where vulnerability is high based on several factors: a community’s social dynamics, natural resource management, demographic growth, inter-community tensions and poverty, says the GSDRC.

Given the dearth of accurate data, GSDRC recommends moving forward on a case-study basis and learning from past experience. It highlights as useful models the EU’s environmental change and forced migration scenarios and a study of migration responses to natural disasters by the Norwegian Refugee Council’s Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

Determining more accurate patterns and routes could lead to more appropriate adaptation responses, such as building up infrastructure and basic services like sanitation, piped water, electricity, health clinics and schools in small towns in developing countries, which may turn into destination hubs, researcher Tacoli says.

“Small towns in agricultural areas are especially important to provide livelihoods to the poorest groups, who are often landless and do not have the means to migrate to larger cities.”

Source: IRIN

When you lose your home due to rising sea-levels, creeping desert sands, or harsh hurricane winds; you probably don’t have much time to stop and think: where will I go next? Fortunately, over the past few years, academics from all over the world have taken on the task of deciding not specifically “where next,” but “what next” for those displaced by climate change. Contributions to the legal debate have ranged from the defeatist to the pragmatic, but they have the advantage of always being interesting and adding to the discourse.

In October 2008, for instance, Jane McAdam and Ben Saul wrote a piece for the Sydney Centre for International Law called “An Insecure Climate for Human Security? Climate-Induced Displacement and International Law”. Most notably, the paper examines the concept of “human security” as a potential rally point for legal intervention. Human security is a relatively new term that defines security on a more micro scale, using the individual as a basis for the definition of security rather than the state; and according to the UN Development Programme more specifically guarantees “freedom from fear…and want, including safety from such chronic threats as hunger, disease, repression as well as…from sudden and hurtful disruption in the patterns of daily life” (p. 17). What human security affords climate migrants, McAdam and Saul write, is “flexible political solutions which can respond to immediate needs and provide much-needed domestic legitimation” (p. 2) and the possibility of the intervention of the UN Security Council, under the auspices of Chapter VII of the UN Charter in response to non-traditional threats.

Certainly, using the UN Security Council as a vehicle to legitimize climate migrants and as a response mechanism would be beneficial to both parties – climate migrants would gain a more binding legal status and institutions supporting the security agenda would gain traction in the developing world (p. 19). However, the authors also acknowledge that the use of human security as a legal reference may undermine current human rights law and “replace them with more ambiguous, non-binding, discretionary political agenda” (p. 22). In the end, the ability of existing international law, or new concepts such as human security, to extend full legal rights to climate migrants is dubious.

If a new legal framework to address climate migrants was created, then their status would be less tenuous, argue Frank Biermann and Ingrid Boas in their November-December 2008 Environment article “Protecting Climate Refugees: The Case for a Global Protocol”. They contend that a “separate, independent legal and political regime created under a Protocol on the Recognition, Protection, and Resettlement of Climate Refugees to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change” (p. 51) would work best. Using a protocol to an already established convention has its advantages: namely, the protocol could, in theory, build political support from almost all signatory countries to the convention and it could use this support as a basis to agree upon common principles like responsibilities and funding. The authors operate on the premise that migrants can be identified based on the vulnerability of their state to the effects of climate change; and said state would apply formally through the protocol to receive aid money to relocate their most affected populations; and where an executive committee will be in charge of determining recognition, grant protection, and facilitating relocation. While the idea of adding a protocol to a convention is a step forward, it lacks a coherent structure (as in the idea that “novel income-raising mechanisms, such as an international air-travel levy” would help generate funds for the initiative) and includes a limiting definition of climate migrant – only those displaced by “proven” climate change phenomena like sea-level rise or extreme weather events would be recognized. Additionally, leaving the responsibility up to states to lobby for funds to protect their own people would, by design, exclude the participation of most rogue states like Zimbabwe and Myanmar. And, as other analysts are quick to point out (like those below); the UNFCCC’s mandate extends more to state-to-state relations and focuses on prevention and mitigation efforts rather than remedial actions.

Bonnie Dochery and Tyler Giannini, alternatively, offer a more complex and fleshed out solution in the paper they published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review, “Confronting a Rising Tide: A Proposal for a Convention on Climate Change Refugees”. Since this is the most recently published paper, available in June 2009, they had the advantage of critiquing and tweaking Biermann and Boa’s suggestion. Dochery and Giannini, both lecturers at Harvard Law School, instead advocate for the use of a stand-alone convention that guarantees assistance, spreads the burden of responsibility and establishes an independent administrative system. To be more specific, their proposal can be outlined under three broad categories like this (p.373):

1) Guarantees of Assistance
a. Standards for climate change migrant status determination
b. Human rights protections
c. Humanitarian aid

2) Shared Responsibility
a. Host state responsibility
b. Home state responsibility
c. International Cooperation and Assistance

3) Administration of the Instrument
a. A global fund
b. A coordinating agency

The proposed definition for “climate change migrants” would specifically encompass six key elements:

c. Forced migration;
d. Temporary or permanent relocation;
e. Disruption consistent with climate change;
f. Sudden or gradual environmental disruption; and
g. A “more likely than not” standard for human contribution to the disruption. (p. 372)

While the definition does not include Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) as a legitimate group to be aided by the convention, the authors do state their intention to create a “narrow enough [definition] to be legally defensible but inclusive enough to cover those refugees most affected by climate change” (p. 374).

Under the agreement of shared responsibility, the authors feel that “host states should bear the primary burden of implementing guarantees” (p. 379), and “home states should facilitate the processes of orderly departure and family reunion” (p. 380) and crisis prevention, which would consist of mitigation and adaptation efforts that would stem the need for migration (p. 381). They also call for the international community, which have “contributed most to climate change,” to support the convention financially in a global fund – and where each state’s contribution should be based on a proportional scale of the amount it has contributed to climate change and its capacity to pay (p. 379). The following graphic breaks it down more succinctly:

This graph illustrates a measured and laid out plan to facilitate a funding mechanism within a climate refuge convention, something other plans, like that of Biermann and Boas, fail to completely render. Thus, a separate climate migrant convention seems the most carefully thought out, and ultimately, most plausible solution. The authors leave us with the task of propelling a convention based on past experiences, much like the Oslo Process, where the leadership of a group of like-minded states and civil society fomented a formal treaty. The next step, therefore, should be to encourage key states to bring the idea of a climate migrant convention to the table at UN sessions to negotiate draft text for Copenhagen. The negotiation of such a text looks set to be an arduous process, unaided by current positions within the UN. Here’s to hoping that negotiations work at a faster pace than climate change.

If you are a more visual person, the graphic below summarizes the key concepts discussed above.

Kayly Ober works at the Environmental Change and Security Program. The views expressed within this blog post are her own and not that of ECSP or the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She is also a contributor at The New Security Beat.

The ongoing theme of this document is the need to encourage more research and reflection on the humanitarian and displacement challenges that climate change will generate. It opens with a quote from António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees:

“Although there is a growing awareness of the perils of climate change, its likely impact on human displacement and mobility has received too little attention.”

The paper makes a huge advances in the recognition of environmental migrants from the October 2008 version, stating:

“While environmental factors can contribute to prompting cross-border movements, they are not grounds, in and of themselves, for the grant of refugee status under international refugee law. However, UNHCR does recognise that there are indeed certain groups of migrants, currently falling outside of the scope of international protection, who are in need of humanitarian and/or other forms of assistance.”

The paper is divided into four sections and examines the following:

1) foreseeable displacement scenarios,
2) their implications for UNHCR,
3) terminology and the 1951 Refugee Convention,
4) suggestions for the way forward.

According to the paper, UNHCR admits that it “might take some time to reach an agreement on the appropriate way forward” and “more work is needed to analyze the likely human displacement scenarios which climate change will cause, and to identify and fill any legal and operational gaps”. In the meantime, UNHCR “encourages the international community to adopt approaches based on respect for human rights and international cooperation”. UNHCR also believes that “the need for advocacy on climate change issues will remain in various fora into 2010 and beyond”.

Click here to access the policy paper »

Photo credit: Cameron Feast/Oxfam

(Oxfam Australia) July 27, 2009 – An Oxfam Australia report published today highlights the urgent need for next week’s Pacific Islands Forum in Cairns to address the dramatic effects of climate change within the region.

The Future is Here: Climate Change in the Pacific finds that Pacific Islanders are already feeling the effects of climate change and need greater support now. People are facing increasing food and water shortages, losing land and being forced from their homes, dealing with rising cases of malaria, and coping with more frequent flooding and storm surges.

The report argues that unless wealthy, developed countries like Australia take urgent action to curb emissions, some island nations face the very real threat of becoming uninhabitable.

Pacific leaders will raise the issue of climate change with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at the Pacific Islands Forum from 4 – 7 August.

Oxfam Australia Executive Director Andrew Hewett said with only months to go until the crucial UN negotiations in Copenhagen in December, it was clear Australia needed to show Pacific leaders it was willing to do its fair share to address one of the most pressing challenges in the region.

“People are already leaving their homes because of climate change, with projections that 75 million people in the Asia-Pacific region will be forced to relocate by 2050 if climate change continues unabated. Not all will have the option of relocating within their own country, so it’s vital that the Australian Government starts working with Pacific governments to plan for this now,” Mr Hewett said.

The report details how Pacific Islanders are already adapting to their changing climate. Fijians, for example, are taking steps to ‘climate-proof’ their villages by trialling salt-resistant varieties of staple foods, planting mangroves and native grasses to halt coastal erosion, protecting fresh water wells from saltwater intrusion and relocating homes and community buildings away from vulnerable coastlines.

Elsewhere, the Malaita provincial government in the Solomon Islands is looking for land to resettle people from low-lying outer atolls, while people living in the outer atolls of the Federated States of Micronesia are facing food and water shortages and moving to higher ground.

The report argues that the fairest and most cost-effective way of dealing with climate change is to ensure the most extreme impacts are avoided altogether, as Australia would be called on to respond to more emergencies in the region. As the wealthiest country in the region and the highest per capita polluter, Australia must prevent further climate damage to the Pacific by urgently adopting higher targets – reducing emissions by at least 40 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020 – and urging other developed countries to do the same.

The Government’s commitment of $150 million to help Pacific Islanders adapt to climate change needs to be at least doubled to meet the most urgent adaptation needs in the Pacific. This must be in addition to Australia’s existing aid commitments so that crucial poverty alleviation efforts are not compromised.

Source: Oxfam Australia

Related Links:
“The Future is Here: Climate Change in the Pacific” – Oxfam Australia