“This risk, while recognised, has been inadequately dealt with by the international community,” admitted John Crowley, who heads the ethics of science and technology section at UNESCO, the body that currently chairs the Global Migration Group, a U.N. interagency group on migration issues.

Under today’s international law, “climate refugees” as a category are not formally recognised, and as such they have no right to asylum or other assistance. But an agreement at the U.N. climate summit in Cancun last year for the first time urged countries to accept that “climate change-induced displacement, migration and planned relocation” should be considered in plans to adapt to climate change.

That may open the door to migration costs being funded under the emerging Green Climate Fund, which is expected to disperse a promised $100 billion a year, starting in 2020, for climate adaptation and emissions reduction efforts in the world’s most vulnerable nations, said Koko Warner, an expert on environmental migration issues at the U.N. University.

Still, planning for predicted large-scale migration as a result of climate impacts remains preliminary, particularly regarding the politically perilous issue of migration across national borders.

Lack of preparation doesn’t mean migration won’t happen, however, experts warned.

“In some countries, there is no space (to resettle migrants), some countries might even go down under the water (and) in others, population pressure is so high that people cannot move (elsewhere in the country),” noted Qazi Kholiquzzaman Ahmad, a Bangladeshi economist and contributing author to several Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

“Therefore, it’s extremely important we find ways of moving them out of the country and into regional countries if possible, or into countries where the number of people is small and there is huge land area,” he said. He admitted that “this is a difficult subject”.

One particular difficulty in dealing with climate-induced migration is that much of it is likely to be gradual. In many cases, it is predicted to be the result of an increasing burden of problems – poor harvests, bad weather, insufficient income – that make it difficult for families to stay in their homes, rather than the result of a single disaster, something international agencies are more practiced at addressing.

“We are good at emergency response but bad on progressive, gradual phenomenon,” UNESCO’s Crowley said. “And climate change will be largely a progressive, gradual phenomenon. There won’t be anything to launch an appeal for, no specific event. There will just be growing pressure to migrate.”

Migration Needs To Be An Option

Keeping families in their homes as long as possible, through measures like promoting crops more tolerant of extreme weather, or better rainwater harvesting techniques, will be vital, the experts said. But there may also be some ways of helping those who have no choice but to leave.

First is to recognise migration as an effective kind of adaptation in some circumstances, rather than a failure of adaptation.

“Migration isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We have to recognise migration as an adaptation strategy, and make it an option available to the most vulnerable,” Crowley said.

But migration also needs to be carefully planned and managed to ensure migrants don’t end up becoming even more vulnerable, by moving to flood-prone urban slums, for instance, or provoking conflict with their new neighbours, he said.

That may require reworking government safety net programmes to direct money to families displaced by climate pressures, or carrying out land reform to effectively settle landless people.

Changing immigration laws will also be important. Australia, for example, has a new visa category to accommodate displaced people from the region, experts said.

But many nations have steadfastly resisted giving environmental migrants refugee status.

“The problem with refugees is they have a claim to asylum. That’s why states are reluctant to expand the (refugee) regime,” Crowley said.

What’s worth remembering, experts say, is that migration usually happens as a last resort, to families who would prefer to remain where they are.

“People want to stay home. They have a profound spiritual tie to their homeland. But if they can’t, we need to make sure they can migrate in safety and dignity,” Warner said.

Source: AlterNet

After assembling on November 15, 2011 the GMG has adopted the following stance on the impact of climate on migration:

The GMG is concerned about the consequences of climate change for human migration and human development. While there is mounting evidence that climate change has the potential to contribute to substantial movements of people, the response of the international community has so far been limited at best.

Climate change and environmental factors are rarely the sole cause of migration. People tend to move for a variety of reasons, including economic and social factors. Moreover, the environment has always been a key factor in migration dynamics, either because of the direct impact of environmental degradation or disasters on human mobility or through its impact on socioeconomic conditions. While the precise effect of climate change on migration is therefore difficult to isolate, let alone to quantify, most observers agree that it will affect the lives and human rights of people, especially women and girls, whether in terms of livelihood, employment, housing, health or sanitation, and that migration and displacement are coping strategies, often of last resort,to adapt to these changes.

The impact of climate change on migration is multifaceted. Sea level rise may degrade living conditions in river deltas and other densely populated low-lying regions in the world and is already causing internal relocation and displacement in some countries. Rising sea levels may lead to significant loss of territory in some small-island States. Climate change is also associated with droughts and desertification, which affect the livelihoods of families, particularly those of subsistence farmers. Finally, climate change can contribute to the increased frequency of extreme weather events and natural disasters, including cyclones, storms and floods.

Climate change impacts mobility patterns in a variety of ways. Sea level rise is likely to make lowlying areas uninhabitable, and permanently displace populations. In contrast, droughts may at first lead to circular or temporary migration, enabling households to diversify sources of income. The majority of those displaced are likely to move short distances and to return as soon as circumstances permit. In some cases however, short-term internal displacements may pave the way and contribute to long-term international movements. Such movements are also likely to fuel urbanization and the challenges associated with it.

Of particular concern is the impact of climate change on migration in developing countries. Least developed countries often lack the resources to adapt to or manage the consequences of human displacement associated with climate change. Moreover, climate change is taking place in a global context marked by inequalities both within and between countries. It disproportionately affects the economically and socially disadvantaged segments of a population, exacerbating vulnerabilities relating to gender, ethnicity, health or socioeconomic status, and can have serious repercussions for the rights and welfare of women, girls, children, youth, the elderly and indigenous people.

Climate change and its consequences may also translate into conflicts over resources that in turn lead to displacement and migration. They may also generate human security concerns, both for those who are displaced and who may encounter new forms of vulnerability, including discrimination, human rights violations or risks related to smuggling of migrants and trafficking in persons, and for the residents of the communities that receive them. Women and girls are disproportionately affected by such risks, particularly as far as human trafficking, sexual exploitation and forced labour are concerned.

Too often, attention is solely focused on the immediate consequences of sudden-onset disasters, such as floods, cyclones or hurricanes. Yet, in the long run, the silent crisis generated by slow-onset environmental degradation will also affect many people.

In view of these challenges, the GMG calls on the international community to recognize that migration and displacement induced by environmental degradation and climate change require urgent action. Specifically, the GMG recommends:

• To adopt gender-sensitive, human rights- and human development-oriented measures to improve the livelihoods of those exposed to the effects of climate change and increase their resilience, in order to counter the need for involuntary movements.
• To pay particular attention to the human rights situation of all people affected by the consequences of climate change, regardless of their legal status: international human rights law, including the fundamental principle of non-discrimination, as well as specific instruments such as the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, should guide States’ action towards people who are displaced as a result of environmental factors.
• To explore the complex interrelations between climate change and human mobility in order to collect data, develop expertise and build capacity to address this challenge, and to achieve close cooperation between the climate and social sciences communities to this end.
• To address the migration impacts of both sudden and slow-onset effects of climate change.
• To recognize migration as an adaptation strategy to environmental risks and to make migration an option available to the most vulnerable. Immigration policies could take into account environmental factors in the likelihood of cross-border movement and consider opening new opportunities for legal migration.
• To assist the least-developed countries in responding to climate change by mainstreaming migration and mobility in national adaptation plans.
• To incorporate the relationship between climate change and migration in Poverty Reduction Strategies and national development strategies.

In the long term, States may wish to review existing legal instruments and policy framework to identify possible new solutions to the situation of those who move in relation to climate change. This would address normative gaps, enable a more focused and specific approach and possibly improve the governance of this issue. Yet, the development of a comprehensive normative framework should not hinder the immediate search for workable policy options to face the challenges raised by climate change, migration and displacement.

The GMG recognizes the difficulty of identifying a special category of migrants that could be quantified separately from other categories. In the absence of internationally agreed definitions, it notes the existence of different terms, including ‘environmental migration’, ‘migration related to climate change’ or ‘climate-related mobility’. Irrespective of their different merits and weaknesses, the GMG wishes to discourage the use of labels such as environmental or climate ‘refugee’, because the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees does not as such consider environmental factors as a basis for granting refugee status.

The GMG welcomes the initiatives already taken by the Global Forum on Migration and Development and the Conferences of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, including the Cancun Adaptation Framework, adopted in 2010 at COP 16 in Cancun. It also notes the Nansen Principles adopted in 2011 at the Nansen Conference on Climate Change and Displacement in the 21st Century. It encourages these intergovernmental processes to further address the relationships between climate change, migration and displacement. Additionally, it calls on the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (“Rio+20”) that will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 2012, to incorporate these challenges in its global
commitment to sustainable development.

“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

The paper begins by examining the elements of statehood under public international law. While there is a strong presumption of continuity for established states, the possibility of a total loss of territory for natural reasons, or the total displacement of a population and/or government, is entirely novel, and would present a heightened risk of statelessness. The paper goes on to specifically examine the situation of low-lying island States, and the risk of statelessness that might result from their submersion. The paper concludes by exploring possible actions to prevent statelessness.

Read the paper in its entirety here.

But now the UN is distancing itself from the forecast: “It is not a UNEP prediction,” a UNEP spokesman told SPIEGEL ONLINE. The forecast has since been removed from UNEP’s website.

Official statistics show that the population in areas threatened by global warming is actually rising. The expected environmental disasters have yet to materialize.

In October 2005, UNU said: “Amid predictions that by 2010 the world will need to cope with as many as 50 million people escaping the effects of creeping environmental deterioration, United Nations University experts say the international community urgently needs to define, recognize and extend support to this new category of ‘refugee.

It added that “such problems as sea level rise, expanding deserts and catastrophic weather-induced flooding have already contributed to large permanent migrations and could eventually displace hundreds of millions.”

In 2008, Srgjan Kerim, president of the UN General Assembly, said it had been estimated that there would be between 50 million and 200 million environmental migrants by 2010. A UNEP web page showed a map of regions where people were likely to be displaced by the ravages of global warming. It has recently been taken offline but is still visible in a Google cache.

‘What Happened to the Climate Refugees?’

The UNEP spokesman said the map had been produced for a newspaper “based on various sources.” He said the map had been taken off the UNEP website “because it was causing confusion and making some journalists think UNEP was the source of such forecasts.”

Given the UN’s warnings of a tide of environmental refugees, the Asian Correspondent, a news and comment website, published an article this month titled “What Happened to the Climate Refugees?”

Bloggers then pounced on the prediction and heaped scorn on it. But they have encountered the same problems that scientists did in trying to forecast the impact of climate change: It is very difficult to define the term climate refugee.

Scientists have been claiming for years that some 25 million people have already been displaced by adverse environmental conditions. Drought, storms and floods have always plagued parts of the world’s population. The environmentalist Norman Myers, a professor at Oxford University, has been particularly bold in his forecasts. At a conference in Prague in 2005, he predicted there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010.

“As far back as 1995 (latest date for a comprehensive assessment), these environmental refugees totalled at least 25 million people, compared with 27 million traditional refugees (people fleeing political oppression, religious persecution and ethnic troubles),” Myers said. “The environmental refugees total could well double between 1995 and 2010.”

“When global warming takes hold,” he added, “there could be as many as 200 million people overtaken by disruptions of monsoon systems and other rainfall regimes, by droughts of unprecedented severity and duration, and by sea-level rise and coastal flooding.” Myers’ report may have been the basis for the UN statements in 2005.

Forecasts in Doubt

But Myers’ forecasts are controversial in scientific circles. Stephen Castles of the International Migration Institute at Oxford University contradicted the horror scenarios in an interview with SPIEGEL in 2007. Myers and other scientists were simply looking at climate change forecasts and counting the number of people living in areas at risk of flooding, said Castles, author of the “The Age of Migration.” That made them arrive at huge refugee numbers.

Castles said people usually don’t respond to environmental disasters, war or poverty by emigrating abroad. That appears to be confirmed by the behavior of victims of last month’s devastating earthquake and tusnami in Japan. Many survivors are returning to rebuild their ruined towns and villages.

The UNU statement from 2005 highlights the difficulties involved in predicting the impact of global warming. The Yemeni capital Sanaa was cited as an example of the threat of climate migration. Sanaa’s ground water was falling “by 6 meters a year and may be exhausted by 2010, according to the World Bank,” the statement said.

In 2010, the IRIN news agency, a service of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, reported that Sanaa “may run out of economically viable water supplies by 2017.” Meanwhile the city’s population has increased: between 2004 and 2010, it expanded by 585,000 people to almost 2.3 million. Nevertheless, there is no sign of an exodus resulting from a shortage of water.

The same applies to other nations that were classified as particularly endangered on the UNEP map of the world, such as Bangladesh, the Cook Islands and Western Sahara. In these countries and others, the population numbers have increased, according to official data. Even the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu still has its 10,000 inhabitants, even though their relocation had already been planned. The reason may be that many low-lying Pacific islands are actually increasing in size despite the rise in ocean levels, because of a build-up caused by coral debris eroded from reefs and deposited on the islands by storms and sea currents.

Outlook for 2020

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which regularly issues a report summarizing the latest research, is vague when it comes to diagnosing environmental change. For example, the change in precipitation in the African Sahel zone has so far shown no clear trend. But the forecasts based on climate simulations for the next 90 years indicate drought for the region.

The UNEP spokesman said land degradation, the loss of forests and other environmental changes were accelerating, and that UNEP was concerned about the “impact such trends will have on lives and livelihoods and movements of people.”

Meanwhile a new forecast is doing the rounds. At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in February, Cristina Tirado, an environment researcher at the University of California in Los Angeles, warned of 50 million environmental refugees in the future. That figure was a UN projection she said — for 2020.

Source: Spiegel

Editor’s note: As proponents of recognizing the role the environment and climate change plays on migration, we acknowledge that hard evidence is hard to come by to bolster claims. We also recognize that people migrate for myriad reasons and environmental factors are but one of them. This is why it’s important to see this issue from every angle — and why we’ve reprinted this article. We’re in search of the truth and welcome all view points.

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 »

The United Nations Climate Change Conference starts tomorrow in Cancun and runs for two weeks. I am travelling right now where internet is limited so I will try my best keep the blog updated. I will be in Cancun during the second week to attend and cover a few of the related meetings. Below are some of the migration and displacement side events happening at COP16. If you know of any other events please contact me and I will add them to this post.

Displacement and migration: Examples of initiatives and activities to support resilience and adaptation
United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)
Tuesday, November 30 – 18:30—20:00
This event will focus on national and sub-national level policy and programme implementation, including assistance in the development of policies on displacement and climate change; advocacy on displacement; and dissemination of tools that specifically target vulnerable communities such as refugees, internally displaced persons and migrants.

Climate change and forced migration (organized with Bread for the World and UNU)
Stockholm Environemntal Istitiute/IIED/IISD
Part of the “Development and Climate Days at COP-16″
Sunday, December 5 – Day Two – 1:30 pm – 3pm. By RSVP only.
- Chair: Koko Warner, UNU
- Ferdausur Rahman, Network on Climate Change in Bangladesh (NCCB)
- Peter Emberson, the Pacific Conference of Churches
- Isabel Cruz Hernández, Mexican Association of Credit Unions from the Social Sector
- Resettlement needs in Papua New Guinea, Sophia Wirshing, Bread for the World
- Africa presentation tbc

Rights for climate induced forced migrants : Responsibility of international community
Coastal Association for Social Transformation Trust (COAST Trust)
Monday, December 6 -16:45—18:15
There will be 2 billion displaced people due to climate induced problems, alone in Bangladesh these figure will be 30 millions by the year 2010, they should have rights to life and livelihood in view different UN convenants.

Climate Change, Environment and Migration Alliance (CCEMA): understanding impacts and finding solutions
International Organization for Migration (IOM)
Wednesday, December 8 – 15:00—16:30
IOM, UNU and other CCEMA partners highlight key questions and challenges for migration and displacement. Delegates and experts discuss proactive approaches for policy and practice in the context of climate change and adaptation, with relevant case studies.

“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.

Government delegates had in front of them the current version of the draft negotiating text under the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA). There is one entry that deals with climate change and mobility found on paragraph 4(f) on page 17 of the text and it reads:

4. Invites all Parties to enhance adaptation action under the Copenhagen Adaptation Framework [for Implementation] taking into account their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, and specific national and regional development priorities, objectives and circumstances, [and whereby developing country Parties shall be supported by developed country Parties and in accordance with paragraph 6 below], to undertake, inter alia:
[...]
(f) Measures to enhance understanding, coordination and cooperation related to national, regional and international climate change induced displacement, migration and planned relocation, where appropriate;

The language used here has been streamlined even more from the previous version of the text presented in Copenhagen. Click here for a great summary of the entire meeting from Climate-L.org. The next meeting is set for August 2 in Bonn.

According to Betts, three broad categories of people stand out as “distress migrants” with unfulfilled protection needs: 1) People who may be considered as “neither/nor” groups, who flee desperate economic and social distress, resulting, for example, from state collapse; 2) People who flee sudden natural disasters such as tsunamis, earthquakes, and flooding; and 3) People who are displaced by slow-onset causes related to environmental degradation or the consequences of climate change. In short, those migrants this blog advocates for.

Although he admits there are gaps in current protection law, he believes that there is no need for the creation of new, binding norms to address them since broad norms already exist.  The international community just needs to a) find an authoritative consensus on the application of current instruments to the situation of vulnerable migrants and b) create a clear division of responsibility between international organizations for the operational implementation of such guidelines.

He suggests that we use a soft law framework like that created for internally displaced persons towards a possible “Guiding Principles on the Protection of Vulnerable Irregular Migrants.” The non-binding nature of soft law is particularly attractive, he argues, because so few powerful states are predisposed to the negotiation of binding, multilateral norms through the UN framework, especially in the touchy area of migration (as seen in the limited number of signatories of the UN Treaty on the Rights of Migrant Workers).

While Betts believes that “UNHCR would not take on institutional responsibility for the protection of vulnerable migrants, which would be outside of its normative and operational mandate”, it could, however, play a facilitative role by designing and overseeing the soft law framework process. This would fit nicely with the idea of a “collaborative approach” of dividing responsibility among international organizations like the International Federation of the Red Cross, OHCHR, IOM, and a range of NGOs.

*Recently republished in the International Journal of Refugee Law, Vol. 22, No. 2, July 2010 p. 209-236.

Post by Kayly Ober