Tessie Eria Lambourne’s bright smile belies a deeper sense of unease for which she as the secretary of Kiribati’s foreign ministry is responsible for imparting to the wider world. Lambourne is entrusted with no small task; she and her government face a choice no government should ever have to make. Fight or flight? The issues her government faces are both unprecedented and extraordinarily complex.

Ms Lambourne’s brief essentially entails nothing less than determining whether to fight for the very survival of her homeland or to pursue options overseas for the country’s threatened citizens. This is the new dilemma in a world where ever more people are facing the prospect that their homes and lands will be lost forever. Especially so in the case of atoll nations such as Kiribati and Tuvalu. The choice to battle the rising seas or set one’s families up in larger, distant nations is a very real one facing everyone in these two lands.

Ms Lambourne is not alone in her fight. Officials in nearby Tuvalu also grapple with the same questions. The unparalleled political wrangle of securing the best possible future for the entire populations of both countries, while watching rising seas from dwindling shorelines, is a mighty one.

Interestingly, though, while Kiribati is pursuing a multi-dimensional policy, combining the protection of shorelines, the construction of new neighbourhoods to ease overcrowding in the capital Tarawa, and labour-mobility programmes designed to provide improved employment options to those choosing to relocate to countries such as New Zealand or Australia, it appears that Tuvalu, at the government level at least, is taking a stand to stay and fight until the bitter end.

Lack of resources

Two of the smallest countries in the world, Kiribati and Tuvalu are also the ones with most to lose. Sadly, they have access to few resources to overcome the threats already evident along their shores. Additionally, in-migration from outer islands to the urban settlements of Betio in Kiribati and Funafuti in Tuvalu complicate an already strained environment.

The emergence of squatter settlements have increased densities, exacerbated health problems, put extraordinary pressure on limited water and sanitation systems, and compromised customary obligations of responsibility for extended family. The reason, as in all countries, is the perception that livelihoods, social opportunity and access to development opportunities are greater in urban contexts, and the result follows urbanisation trends globally.

The nexus of urbanisation and climate change, whatever the causes, is happening in both countries. Measurable changes in meteorological systems producing stronger and more frequent storms; disruption of rainfall patterns; rising sea temperatures – all contribute to increased vulnerability in every country in the world, and are particularly acute in the fragile slivers of crowded land that make up atoll countries such as Kiribati and Tuvalu.

Perhaps no other nations are as comprehensively threatened by climate change as these two. Preserving them, and protecting the full spectrum of human rights of the people of these tiny specks of green in the middle of the Pacific, is a challenge to which we all must rise.

Migration

Apula, a seafarer returning home to Tuvalu after nine months on the high seas, sees things differently though. A former government conservation officer, Apula left home for the maritime salary that could guarantee his wife and children future prosperity in New Zealand, which he could never acquire in the islands. Like him, many within the younger generation of Tuvaluans are increasingly inclined towards migrating to New Zealand or Australia than building up the nation’s defences against increasing erosion, higher seas and consequent deepened risk from more frequent tsunamis, king tides and severe weather.

Source: The Ecologist

Author Cara Nine

Cara Nine of the University College Cork recently submitted the paper “Ecological Refugees, State Borders, and the Lockean Proviso” to the Journal of Applied Philosophy. In this essay she expounds on the term “ecological refugee,” which we might better understand as environmental or climate-induced migrant. She analyzes the question: what may the people of an ecological refugee state legitimately claim on the basis of their right to self-determination?

She also answers the questions:  should we redraw state borders to accommodate a New Tuvalu? She argues that a plausible position regarding territorial rights is that when (1) a people clearly is (or recently was) self-determining and has a legitimate claim to continue to be self-determining, and (2) the self-determination of a people is existentially threatened because the people lacks territorial rights, that (3) the people becomes a candidate for sovereign over a new territory. The result is that existing state borders may need to change to accommodate something like a New Tuvalu.

She also examines the principles of the system of territorial states. Because the system of territorial states is a system of exclusive rights over goods, especially land, it is possible that it is subject to the conditions of a Lockean proviso mechanism. This paper is dedicated mainly to adapting a version of the Lockean proviso for use in territorial rights theory. First, she argues that the Lockean proviso mechanism applied to territory should be employed to protect the interests of self-determining groups. Second, she develops a version of the Lockean proviso appropriate for use regarding territorial entitlements— and argues that the proviso mechanism applied to territorial rights should not be interpreted as a constraint on the acquisition of rights over territory, but rather it should be understood as a restraint on current territorial holdings. Finally, she develops some suggestions from the Lockean proviso mechanism regarding the location and conditions involving the establishment of something like New Tuvalu.

Read the paper in its entirety here.

Male, the capital of the Maldives. With an average ground level of 1.5 metres above sea level, it is the country with the lowest highest point in the world, at 2.3 metres. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

(IRIN) October 5, 2009 – Up to half a million people in the Pacific will lose their homes and their countries to rising sea levels because small island nations cannot persuade the rest of the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently, campaigners say.

The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) is calling for a significant reduction in global emissions so the world’s temperature does not rise more than 1.5 degrees centigrade above pre-industrial levels.

But after a week of negotiations in Bangkok before the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, developed and developing world countries have been unable to agree anything at all on emissions cuts, AOSIS said.

“We are not working through the options as negotiations, we are simply restating our positions. So we may arrive in Copenhagen with the parties still very far apart. It’s really setting up Copenhagen for failure or an inadequate result,” Leon Charles, chairman of the AOSIS negotiating team, who is from the Caribbean island of Grenada, told IRIN.

AOSIS, whose members are among the most vulnerable to climate change, “can’t live with” global temperature rises of two degrees, a possible target mentioned in the Bangkok talks, Charles said.

“We want 1.5 degrees centigrade in terms of mitigation and significant scaled-up and easily accessible finance. It’s about our survival,” he said.

An AOSIS statement issued after a preliminary meeting in New York in September said members were “profoundly disappointed” by the lack of will in the negotiations to protect small island developing states from climate change impacts.

Relocation issues

Campaigners said AOSIS’s prospects were dim, calling instead for more attention on how and where people from submerged countries would be relocated.

“Copenhagen won’t be enough. The islands will sink. In the Pacific region, we are looking at about 500,000 people who will need to move. But the islands aren’t talking about the migration issue,” said Marstella Jack, a Micronesian former attorney-general, who was in Bangkok with observers from the Climate Action Network.

Jack said leaders were “too chicken” to address the issue. “They don’t have the leverage to fight the issue with the developed world. Migration will hit us in the face before we realise it. But what happens to the sovereign country of Tuvalu, for example, if the land is gone?”

Tuvalu, with a population of less than 12,000, is heavily flooded every spring by ever more destructive tides. The total land surface of Tuvalu, which comprises nine small coral atolls, is 26 sqkm and on average, it is less than 2m above sea level.

“We are just waiting, and when the time comes, we won’t be Tuvalans any more, just climate change refugees,” said Taukiei Kitara, of the Tuvalu Association of NGOs.

So far, only Mohamed Nasheed, president of the Maldives, has spoken openly about moving all 370,000 residents to another country if, as looks likely, rising waters cover the islands, most of which are less than 1.5m above sea level.

“There are tons of legal and sovereignty issues and we are negotiating aggressively. There are huge complications down the line and if we can avoid these through a strong climate change agreement, let’s do so,” said AOSIS’s Charles.

Losing identity

Any kind of displacement is a big issue in Pacific island culture, which links identity to land, Jack said. It is estimated that Micronesia’s low-lying islands, where most of the population lives, will be submerged by 2030.

“Our identity is tied to the tiny island we are from … So losing the land is losing our survival, because the very sense of survival is that piece of land,” she said.

“And once the island is gone, it’s gone for ever and there’s no identity left. That’s the biggest problem that we have, and we would have it even if the Australian government were to carve out a chunk of Queensland and say we could have sovereignty over it, which they aren’t likely to do.”

Some AOSIS members face different problems. The Caribbean island of Antigua and Barbuda has become so storm-wracked that 10 years from now, banks will cease insuring new projects, spelling an end to economic development, said Diann Black Layne, an ambassador in the islands’ Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

But for the Pacific Islanders watching the water slowly rise around their homes, climate change is no longer about economics.

“The world is thinking about trade. But that’s not what climate change is about – it’s about us living, not drowning,” said Jack

Source: IRIN

Photo credit: Creative Commons

(Inside Story) June 30, 2009 – For people on Kiribati and Tuvalu facing increasing climate pressures, the description “refugee” has too many negative connotations, write Jane McAdam and Maryanne Loughry.

Over the past decade a new term has entered the lexicon of policy makers and the media: climate change refugees. Human movement caused by environmental factors – drought, land degradation or significant climatic events (like cyclones) – is not new; what is new is the number of people now thought to be susceptible to such pressures. In a recent report, The Anatomy of a Silent Crisis, Kofi Annan describes millions of people suffering – and ultimately being uprooted or permanently on the move – because of climate change. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, it is becoming difficult to categorise displaced people because of the combined impacts of conflict, the environment and economic pressures.

The spectre of climate change has also focused attention on the small Pacific nations of Kiribati and Tuvalu. Straddling the equator, these former British colonies – once known as the Gilbert and Ellice Islands – gained their independence only three decades ago. In recent years they have featured in media reports as “sinking islands” that will be uninhabitable by the middle of this century, with their people becoming the world’s first “climate refugees.” Kiribati has a population of around 100,000, while Tuvalu, with only 10,000 people, is the world’s smallest state apart from the Vatican.

As researchers with an academic interest in forced migration, we recently visited Kiribati and Tuvalu. As we drove along the main road on the central Kiribati atoll of Tarawa, with the lagoon on one side and the ocean on the other, the sense of vulnerability was palpable – and that feeling is magnified when there is an extreme event like a cyclone or king tide. But are the apocalyptic projections about these two nations, and their people, accurate?

While they face very similar challenges, Tuvalu and Kiribati are not identical in their approach to the pressures generated by climate change. But in both countries we found a wholesale rejection of the “refugee” label, at both the political and community levels. For the people of these small Pacific nations, the term refugee evokes a sense of helplessness and a lack of dignity that contradicts their very strong sense of pride.

It’s important to remember that people at risk of environmental or climate displacement are not “refugees” as a matter of law. A refugee is someone who has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership of a particular social group, who is outside their country of origin and whose government is unable or unwilling to protect them.

Even as a merely descriptive term, the refugee label is at best pre-emptive, and at worst offensive, for those to whom it is applied. In both Kiribati and Tuvalu people resoundingly reject it. At first, we could not grasp why, despite its legal inaccuracy. As scholars of forced migration, we view refugees as very resilient, capable people who have overcome adverse situations to secure protection for themselves and their families. Many refugees make a significant contribution to their new societies, including some who have achieved fame in their fields of endeavour: politician Madeleine Albright, Czech writer Milan Kundera, scholar Edward Said and artist Judy Cassab, for example.

But in these small Pacific countries, which are not themselves signatories to the Refugee Convention and whose languages do not even have a word for refugee, the term has many negative associations. We wondered whether this was partly a response to the draconian policies implemented under the Howard government, particularly the Pacific Solution. (Tuvalu, for example, was approached as a site for an offshore detention centre, but declined.) But the reaction seems to run far deeper than that. Interestingly, it highlights some of the central failures of the international system for providing protection to refugees and other displaced people, most notably the failure of many countries to provide assistance and accommodation, leaving millions of refugees in camps or leading precarious lives in bordering countries.

In part, the discomfort with the refugee label stems from the fact that, by definition, refugees flee their own government, whereas the people of Kiribati and Tuvalu have no desire to escape from their countries. (The exceptionally low rate of visa overstayers from Kiribati in Australia suggests that these are people who like being at home.) They say it is the actions of other countries that will ultimately force their movement, not the actions of their own leaders. (These countries have some of the lowest emissions rates in the world.) There are also fears that the refugee label connotes victimhood, passivity, and a lack of agency. In Tuvalu and Kiribati refugees are viewed as people waiting helplessly in camps, relying on handouts, with no prospects for the future. To be a refugee, in their eyes, is to lack dignity. Some men told us that for them, being in such a situation would signal a failure on their part to provide for and protect their family. Tuvaluans and i-Kiribati people don’t want to be seen like that – they want to be viewed as active, valued members of a community.

For this reason, the president of Kiribati is trying to secure options for labour migration to Australia and New Zealand so that those who want to move have an early opportunity to do so, and can gradually build up i-Kiribati communities abroad. This long-term strategy would see gradual, transitional resettlement so that, if and when the whole population has to relocate, communities and extended family networks would already be functioning in their new home countries. The president hopes that in this way, i-Kiribati culture and traditions will be kept alive, and that his people will also be able to adapt to new cultures and ways of life.

Nevertheless, the government of Kiribati also recognises that migration schemes will eventually need to be accompanied by humanitarian options. It is keen to secure international agreements in which other governments recognise that climate change has contributed to Kiribati’s predicament and acknowledge that they are obliged to assist with relocation. The government of Tuvalu, on the other hand, does not want relocation to feature in international agreements. It fears that industrialised countries may simply think that they can solve problems like rising sea levels by relocating affected populations rather than reducing carbon emissions, which would not bode well for the world as a whole.

Interestingly, despite the rejection of the refugee label, governments in both Tuvalu and Kiribati recognise that certain principles of refugee law might have a place in addressing questions about legal obligation, and that some features of the refugee protection regime are pertinent to the present problem. One government official in Kiribati conceded that a framework akin to that of the Refugee Convention, minus the refugee tag, would be welcomed.

Both governments have at various times sought relocation options in other countries, most notably Australia and New Zealand. Just this month it was reported that Indonesia had offered to rent out islands to countries affected by climate change. And the Maldives, another island state, has talked about buying up land in India or Sri Lanka. But there is much more to relocation than simply securing safe territory; those who move need to know that they can leave and re-enter the new country, enjoy work rights and health rights there, have access to social security if necessary, and be able to maintain their culture and traditions. They also want to know the citizenship status of children born there. At present, there is little in international law to prevent a host country from expelling people should it wish to do so. If en masse relocation to another country is being considered as a permanent solution, then the situation will be far more complex than a standard immigration plan. In the absence of territory formally being ceded to the affected country, there needs to be security of title and immigration and citizenship rights for those who move.

There is also a real question about what role climate change plays in this scenario. Neither of us is a climate change sceptic, but we recognise that movement from these countries involves multiple pressures that may affect individuals and families in different ways at different times. As one government official in Kiribati observed, climate change overlays pre-existing pressures – overcrowding, unemployment, environmental factors and economic development – which means that it may trigger a tipping point that would not have been reached in its absence.

The view is somewhat different in Tuvalu. There, some government officials worry that highlighting the complex and multifaceted dimensions of movement will shift the focus away from climate change, and that the magnitude of that problem warrants maintaining attention solely on its impacts. Yet we were intrigued to hear that whereas ten years ago any community meeting related to climate change would draw a large crowd, interest has died down in recent years. Perhaps this was because the doomsday scenarios advanced a decade ago have not eventuated. While people could describe recent changes to the environment, weather patterns and local resources – changes they attributed to climate change – they also felt that they could adapt to them over time. We were also confronted with the belief that God had promised Noah that there would be no more floods and God could be trusted to keep this promise today.

Certainly the impact of climate change on low-lying atolls must not be underestimated. But there is a risk that solely focusing on climate change obscures other social changes that together provide a more realistic explanation of why people act in particular ways, including whether they stay on their atolls or seek to migrate elsewhere. Such an approach acknowledges the role of climate change in exacerbating existing social, economic and environmental pressures.

This is not to suggest that complacency is an appropriate response. Rather, it is important to work with the people of Kiribati and Tuvalu to develop sustainable solutions that enable those who wish to remain to do so for as long as possible, and that facilitate the gradual movement of families and communities to help ease the transition for movement over time. While raising the profile of these countries and their future is crucial, so too is garnering international support, creating sustainable and harmonised solutions, and listening to the voices of those concerned so that migration can become part of a broader adaptation response.

Talk of sinking islands and climate change refugees may stimulate media interest and the popular imagination, but it is an oversimplification of the reality and suggests a situation of movement (or preparation for movement) which simply does not exist. The process itself is likely to be far less dramatic than the Atlantis-style predictions. People are not fleeing, but they are reluctantly recognising that at some point in the future their home may no longer be able to sustain them. Many have family or friends living abroad, and we quickly learnt that mobility is, as in many Pacific countries, a historical pattern that continues to this day.

Jane McAdam is Director of the International Refugee and Migration Law Project at the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law at the University of NSW and holds a three year Australian Research Council Grant, Weathering Uncertainty: Climate Change “Refugees” and International Law. Maryanne Loughry, Associate Director of the Jesuit Refugee Service (Australia), is a psychologist who researches the psychological and social effects of forced migration and is presently piloting a study on the human dimensions of climate change in the Pacific.

Source: Inside Story

She made it known that Tuvaluans prefer not to be called “environmental refugees”, as the term somewhat robs them of their dignity. However, she admitted that her and her people may have to abandon their island home in the future. Although Tuvaluans stress the dire need for legal status for migration to nearby countries like Australia and New Zealand, their primary request from the world is that climate change mitigation is to be taken seriously with responsible actions being taken where necessary, including the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol. This was stressed by Tuvalu Governor General Tomasi Puapua in his 2002 appeal to the United Nations General Assembly by saying:

“Taking us as environmental refugees, is not what Tuvalu is after in the long run. We want the islands of Tuvalu and our nation to remain permanently and not be submerged as a result of greed and uncontrolled consumption of industrialized countries. We want our children to grow up the way we grew up in our own islands and in our own culture.”

Below is a video by Oxfam Australia which highlights this request.

Source: Oxfam Australia on YouTube

Article by Dan DaSilva