Table of Contents
John Maunder
The extract below on “Climate Refugees” is from pages 293-298 of my book. The idea for the book came about when I was visiting my family in Adelaide in January 2020 during a heatwave. One day when the forecast was for 45°C my daughter Denise suggested I should stay inside, shelter from the heat and write another book. I asked what did she have in mind and she simply said Climate the Truth. My son Philip who has lived in Adelaide for about 30 years thought it was a good idea but after a few days thought I settled on “Fifteen shades of climate”.
Climate Refugees
Climate refugees according to Wikipedia are people who are forced to leave their home region due to sudden or long-term changes to their local environment. These are changes that compromise their secure livelihood. Such changes may include increased droughts, desertification, sea-level rise, and disruption of seasonal weather patterns (i.e. monsoons). Climate refugees may choose to flee to or migrate to another country, or they may migrate internally within their own country.
Despite problems in formulating a uniform and clear-cut definition of environmental migration, such a concept has increased as an issue of concern in the 2000s as policy-makers, environmental and social scientists attempt to conceptualize the potential societal effects of climate change and general environmental degradation. “Unless it is assumed” otherwise, in order to consider a person a climate refugee, nature or the environment could be considered the persecutor.
Climate refugees do not really fit into any of the legal definitions of a refugee. Not all climate refugees migrate from their home country, on occasion they are just displaced within their country of origin. Moreover, the refugees aren’t leaving their homes because of fear they will be persecuted, or because of “generalized violence or events seriously disturbing public order.” Even though the definition of who is a refugee has been expanded since the first international and legally binding definition in 1951; people who are forced to flee due to environmental change are still not offered the same legal protection as refugees.
The term “environmental refugee” was first proposed by Lester Brown in 1976. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) proposes the following definition for environmental migrants:
“Environmental migrants are persons or groups of persons who, for compelling reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that adversely affect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their habitual homes, or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad.”
Climate refugees or climate migrants are a subset of environmental migrants who were forced to flee “due to sudden or gradual alterations in the natural environment related to at least one of three impacts of climate change: sea-level rise, extreme weather events, and drought and water scarcity”.
IOM proposes three major types of environmental migrants:
• Environmental emergency migrants: people who flee temporarily due to an environmental disaster or sudden environmental event. (Example: someone forced to leave due to a hurricane, tsunami, earthquake, etc.)
• Environmental forced migrants: people who have to leave due to deteriorating environmental conditions. (Example: someone forced to leave due to a slow deterioration of their environment such as deforestation, coastal deterioration, etc.)
• Environmental motivated migrants also known as environmentally induced economic migrants: people who choose to leave to avoid possible future problems. (Example: someone who leaves due to declining crop productivity caused by desertification). “Those displaced temporarily due to local disruption such as an avalanche or earthquake; those who migrate because environmental degradation has undermined their livelihood or poses unacceptable risks to health; and those who resettle because land degradation has resulted in desertification or because of other permanent and untenable changes in their habitat”.
Other categorisations include:
• Pressured environmental migrants – slow onset. This type of migrant is displaced from their environment when an event is predicted prior to when it would be imperative for the inhabitants to leave. Such events could be desertification or prolonged drought, where the people of the region are no longer able to maintain farming or hunting to provide a hospitable living environment.
• Imperative environmental migrants – gradual onset. These are migrants that have been or will be “permanently displaced” from their homes due to environmental factors beyond their control.
• Temporary environmental migrants – short term, sudden onset. This includes migrants suffering from a single event (e.g. Hurricane Katrina). This does not mean that their status of being temporary is any less severe than other groups, it simply means that they are able to go back to the place they fled from (though it may be undesirable to do so) granted that they are able to rebuild what was broken, and go on to maintain a similar quality of life to the one prior to the natural disaster. This type of migrant is displaced from their home state when their environment rapidly changes. They are displaced when disastrous events occur, such as tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters occur.
In 2017, Wikipedia noted that there was no standard definition of a climate refugee in international law. However, an article in the UN Dispatch noted that “people who have been uprooted because of climate change exist all over the world – even if the international community has been slow to recognize them as such
Environmental migrants
Experts have suggested that due to the difficulty of rewriting the UN’s 1951 Convention on Refugees, it may be preferable to treat these refugees as “environmental migrants.” In January 2020, the UN Human Rights Committee ruled that “refugees fleeing the effects of the climate crisis cannot be forced to return home by their adoptive countries.”
There have been a number of attempts over the decades to enumerate environmental migrants and refugees. Jodi Jacobson (1988) is cited as the first researcher to enumerate the issue, stating that there were already up to 10 million ‘Environmental Refugees’. Drawing on ‘worst-case scenarios’ about sea-level rise, she argued that all forms of ‘Environmental Refugees’ would be six times as numerous as political refugees. By 1989, Mustafa Tolba, Executive Director of UNEP, was claiming that ‘as many as 50 million people could become environmental refugees’ if the world did not act to support sustainable development.
In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 1990: 20) declared that the greatest single consequence of climate change could be migration, ‘with millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding and severe drought’.
In the mid-1990s, British environmentalist, Norman Myers, became the most prominent proponent of this ‘maximalist’ school (Suhrke 1993), noting that “environmental refugees will soon become the largest group of involuntary refugees”. Additionally, he stated that there were 25 million environmental refugees in the mid-1990s, further claiming that this figure could double by 2010, with an upper limit of 200 million by 2050 (Myers 1997). Myers argued that the causes of environmental displacement would include desertification, lack of water, salinization of irrigated lands and the depletion of biodiversity. He also hypothesised that displacement would amount to 30million in China, 30milion in India, 15million in Bangladesh, 14milion in Egypt, 10million in other delta areas and coastal zones, 1million in island states, and with otherwise agriculturally displaced people totalling 50million by 2050. More recently, Myers has suggested that the figure by 2050 might be as high as 250 million.
These claims have gained significant currency, with the most common projection being that the world will have 150–200 million climate change refugees by 2050. Variations of this claim have been made in influential reports on climate change by the IPCC (Brown 2008: 11) and the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (Stern et al. 2006: 3), as well as by NGOs such as Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace Germany (Jakobeit and Methmann 2007) and Christian Aid; and inter-governmental organisations such as the Council of Europe, UNESCO, IOM and UNHCR.
Norman Myers is the most cited researcher in this field, who found that 25 million environmental migrants existed in 1995 in his work (Myers & Kent 1995), which drew upon over 1000 sources. However, Vikram Kolmannskog has stated that Myers’ work can be ‘criticized for being inconsistent, impossible to check and failing to take proper account of ‘opportunities to adapt’ (2008: 9). Furthermore, Myers himself has acknowledged that his figures are based upon ‘heroic extrapolation’ (Brown 2008: 12). More generally, Brown has argued that there is ‘surprisingly little scientific evidence’ that indicates that the world is ‘filling-up with environmental refugees’ (1998: 23). Indeed, Francois Gemenne has stated that: ‘When it comes to predictions, figures are usually based on the number of people living in regions at risk, and not on the number of people actually expected to migrate. Estimates do not account for adaptation strategies (or) different levels of vulnerability’ (Gemenne 2009: 159).
In the first half of the year 2019, Wikipedia said that 7 million people were internally (e.g. in their country) displaced by events of extreme weather, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre. This was a record at that time and the number is twice the number displaced by violence and conflicts.
In Asia and the Pacific, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre noted that more than 42 million people were displaced in Asia and the Pacific during 2010 and 2011. This figure includes those displaced by storms, floods, and heat and cold waves. Still others were displaced by drought and sea-level rise. Most of those compelled to leave their homes eventually returned when conditions improved, but an undetermined number became migrants, usually within their country, but also across national borders.
Climate-induced migration
Climate-induced migration is a highly complex issue that needs to be understood as part of global migration dynamics. Migration typically has multiple causes, and environmental factors are intertwined with other social and economic factors, which themselves can be influenced by environmental changes. Environmental migration should not be treated solely as a discrete category, set apart from other migration flows. A 2012 Asian Development Bank study argues that climate-induced migration should be addressed as part of a country’s development agenda, given the major implications of migration on economic and social development.
The report recommends interventions both to address the situation of those who have migrated, as well as those who remain in areas subject to environmental risk. It says: “To reduce migration compelled by worsening environmental conditions, and to strengthen the resilience of at-risk communities, governments should adopt policies and commit financing to social protection, livelihoods development, basic urban infrastructure development, and disaster risk management.”
Additionally, it is maintained that it is the poor who populate areas that are most at risk for environmental destruction and climate change, including coastlines, flood-lines, and steep slopes. As a result, climate change threatens areas already suffering from extreme poverty. “The issue of equity is crucial. Climate affects us all but does not affect us all equally,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told delegates at a climate conference in Indonesia. Africa is also one of the world regions where environmental displacement is critical largely due to droughts and other climate-related eventualities.
Due to rising sea levels, as many as 70,000 people will be displaced in the Sundarbans as early as 2020 according to an estimate by the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University. One expert calls for restoring the Sundarbans’ original mangrove habitats to both mitigate the impacts of rising seas and storm surges, and to serve as a carbon sink for greenhouse gas emissions.
Climate change refugee
In what turned out to be a test case, a Kiribati man, Loane Teitiota, in 2013, sought to claim that he was a “climate change refugee” under the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (1951). This was determined by the High Court of New Zealand to be untenable. In commenting on the case, Wikipedia said that The Refugee Convention did not apply as there is no persecution or serious harm related to any of the five stipulated convention grounds.
The Court rejected the argument that the international community itself (or countries that can be said to have been historically high emitters of CO2 or other greenhouse gases) were the “persecutor” for the purposes of the Refugee Convention. This analysis of the need for the person to identify persecution of the type described in the Refugee Convention does not exclude the possibility that people in countries experiencing severe impacts of climate change can come to the Refugee Convention. However, it is not the climate change event itself, rather the social and political response to climate change, which is likely to create the pathway for a successful claim.
The New Zealand Immigration and Protection Tribunal and the High Court of New Zealand, said that there is a complex inter-relationship between natural disasters, environmental degradation and human vulnerability.
Sometimes a tenable pathway to international protection under the Refugee Convention can result. Environmental issues sometimes lead to armed conflict. There may be ensuing violence towards or direct repression of an entire section of a population. Humanitarian relief can become politicised, particularly in situations where some group inside a disadvantaged country is the target of direct discrimination.
The New Zealand Court of Appeal also rejected the claim in a 2014 decision. On further appeal, the New Zealand Supreme Court confirmed the earlier adverse rulings against the application for refugee status, with the Supreme Court also rejecting the proposition “that environmental degradation resulting from climate change or other natural disasters could never create a pathway into the Refugee Convention or protected person jurisdiction”.
Teitiota appealed to the UN. In January 2020, the UN Human Rights Committee “ruled against Teitiota on the basis that his life was not at imminent risk,” but also said that it was a human rights violation to force refugees to return “to countries where climate change poses an immediate threat..
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