Climate Change Will Trigger The World's Greatest Refugee Crisis

Fairfax - Lisa Singh*

Millions of people will be driven from their homes by climate change over the next few decades. How can we help?

Rising sea levels are a significant threat to low-lying countries such as Kiribati. Photo: Justin McManus

Comment: Vehicle emissions and fuel efficiency under scrutiny

We've recently been witnessing the worst refugee crisis since World War II, with several million Syrians having fled their country.
It has rightly gripped Australians' attention and moved us deeply. But it coincides with a more obscure event that's potentially just as ominous.

Ioane Teitiota, of Kiribati, failed in a bid to use climate change as grounds for refugee status in New Zealand. Photo: Getty Images

In New Zealand, a man named Ioane Teitiota​ recently applied, and failed, to be accepted as the world's first climate-change refugee.
The 38-year-old arrived in New Zealand from Kiribati in 2007. When his visa expired, he sought refugee status to avoid deportation. He argued his family would be unsafe in Kiribati, which is threatened by rising seas and storm surges.
Unfortunately for Teitiota, the world's courts do not yet formally recognise climate-change refugees.
The 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention only applies to people who fear "being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality or political opinion". The threat of inundation does not yet apply.
Whatever the legal realities, Teitiota's case is a timely symbol of two looming, and interconnected, global crises.
One is the ecological crisis of climate change, which threatens human existence as we know it.
The second is the human crisis of refugees fleeing trauma and violence to reach peaceful nations that represent paradise by comparison.
These two great challenges are gradually merging into one great crisis of cause and effect, because climate change will ultimately create a further refugee crisis.
Traditionally, the main reasons for human displacement have been war, persecution, disease and poverty. Sadly, those problems are not going away. But in coming decades, they will be eclipsed by a wave of climate-change refugees.
Climate change will displace coastal communities with rising sea levels. It will cause drought and famine. And it will force residents out of rural areas that suffer greater risk of wildfire.
On current trends, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts sea levels will rise by up to 60 centimetres by 2100, putting vast areas under water.
Scientific predictions about climate-change migration are somewhat varied, but universally disastrous. Consider the following prominent estimates and projections:
Climate change will displace up to 200 million people by 2050 (first predicted by Professor Norman Myers, and cited by the Stern Review and the UN). Almost 10 per cent of the world's population is at risk of displacement by 2100 (including 250 million in the Asia-Pacific alone). 250,000 Australian properties will be inundated by 2100.
We must start preparing now, with strong and ethical leadership. And we must harness the determination and compassion inspired by the Syrian crisis. Closed hearts and borders will not yield a solution.
Few places symbolise the looming crisis better than the Maldives, which rises just 2.4 metres above sea level.
The country's former president, Mohamed Nasheed, infamously confronted Western polluters with the following options: "You can drastically reduce your greenhouse gas emissions so that the seas do not rise so much ... Or, when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can let us in ... Or, when we show up on your shores in our boats, you can shoot us. You pick."
We may be only a decade or two from such a confronting scenario.
Australia is one of the world's highest per-capita emitters, with a conservative government whose climate-change denial and inaction has become a global embarrassment. Refugee policy also remains in a dark place.
But amid such huge challenges, there is also real hope and inspiration.
The response of most Australians to the Syrian refugee crisis shows that compassion, sacrifice and mutual responsibility are alive and well in our community, and offers hope for a less toxic debate about refugees.
Attitudes to climate change are also changing.
Recent polling showed 70 per cent of Australians now believe climate change is happening (up from 64 per cent in 2012), with 89 per cent of those accepting humans are at least partly the cause. So the deniers are now fewer than a third.
So, what to do about the looming challenge of climate change refugees? The answers are obviously complex, but, fundamentally, we will need a more co-operative and generous approach between nations – with far more shared responsibility and genuine resettlement options than now exist.
We will need less emphasis on borders of separation, and more emphasis on the equal value and equal rights of every living person, regardless of race, religion or wealth.
And we will need to defeat the toxic demonising of vulnerable people trying to cross borders in search of survival and security.
When the number of climate refugees starts to swell, it will take courage and compassion to cope.
There's a fight under way to inspire those values in our communities. And there's an ongoing fight to limit the damage of climate change and prepare for its consequences.
I believe we are up for it, if we open our hearts and minds.

*Lisa Singh is a Labor Senator for Tasmania and shadow parliamentary secretary for environment, climate change and water.