NPR - Tim McDonnell
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In Kiribati, an island republic in the Central Pacific,
large parts of the village Eita (above) have succumbed to flooding from
the sea. Jonas Gratzer/LightRocket via Getty Images
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This month, diplomats from around the world met in New York and
Geneva to hash out a pair of new global agreements that aim to lay out
new guidelines for how countries should deal with
an unprecedented surge in the number of displaced people, which has now reached 65.6 million worldwide.
But
there's one emerging category that seems to be getting short shrift in
the conversation: so-called "climate refugees," who currently lack any
formal definition, recognition or protection under international law
even as the scope of their predicament becomes more clear.
Since 2008, an average of
24 million people
have been displaced by catastrophic weather disasters each year. As
climate change worsens storms and droughts, climate scientists and
migration experts expect that number to rise.
Meanwhile,
climate impacts that unravel over time, like desert expansion and sea
level rise, are also forcing people from their homes: A
World Bank report
in March projects that within three of the most vulnerable regions —
sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America — 143 million people
could be displaced by these impacts by 2050.
In
Bangladesh,
hundreds of thousands of people are routinely uprooted by coastal
flooding, many making a treacherous journey to the slums of the capital,
Dhaka. In West Africa, the almost total disappearance of Lake Chad
because of desertification has empowered terrorists and forced
more than four million people into camps.
It's a problem in the United States as well. An
estimated 2,300 Puerto Rican families
displaced by Hurricane Maria are still looking for permanent housing,
while government officials have spent years working to preemptively
relocate more than a dozen small coastal communities in
Alaska and
Louisiana that are disappearing into the rising sea.
A December study by Columbia University climate researchers in the peer-reviewed journal
Science projected
that if global temperatures continue their upward march, applications
for asylum to the European Union could increase 28 percent to nearly
450,000 per year by 2100.
But so far, there's no international
agreement on who should qualify as a climate refugee — much less a plan
to manage the growing crisis.
"These people fall through the cracks," says
Erol Yayboke, a development expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who helped author a May
report on forced migration. "It's hard for countries to come to a consensus on something like this."
That difficulty took shape during the second and third weeks of June in the latest round of negotiations on the
Global Compact for Migration and the
Global Compact on Refugees, which are due to be adopted at the U.N. General Assembly this fall.
When
the compacts were first proposed in 2016, there was some hope among
migration researchers and advocates that they could provide a platform
for new international policies on climate refugees, which had gained
prominence since the 2015 Paris climate talks. But that hope was quashed
in March, when Louise Arbour, the U.N. official leading the migration
compact — which, of the two agreements, was considered the more likely
venue for strong climate language —
told the European Union that the document would not grant "specific legal international protection to climate-induced migrants."
Both compacts do make some reference to the climate. The
latest draft of the migration compact
calls on U.N. members to "better map, understand, predict and address
migration movements, including those resulting from sudden- and
slow-onset natural disasters, environmental degradation, the adverse
effects of climate change" and "cooperate to identify, develop and
strengthen solutions, including planned relocation and visa options" for
climate migrants.
The
refugee compact stops much shorter, only mentioning climate as one of many factors that "may interact with the drivers of refugee movements."
Ideally,
the compacts should encourage countries to create new legal processes
to document and manage climate migrants "so people can move before the
water is literally lapping at their feet," says
Nina Hall, a migration expert at Johns Hopkins University. As an example, she cited a plan in New Zealand to
offer up to 100 special climate visas to Pacific Islanders — although that process is still in development and isn't likely to open for several years, she said.
But the language in the compacts is too vague to spur much
progress, she says, and in any case neither compact will be legally
binding.
"We have to be up front that the global compacts are not going to transform the landscape for climate migrants," Hall says.
Climate
refugees pose a number of unique challenges for international
policymakers compared to those displaced by persecution, the traditional
driver recognized by the
1951 UN Refugee Convention.
While some people, like the Puerto Ricans displaced by Maria, are
affected by a specific disaster, many others are forced to move because
of slow-onset changes like sea level rise and desertification, which can
make it hard to identify them as climate refugees. Researchers are
still working to understand how climate change interacts with the
panoply of other factors, including national security and local economic
trends, that might prompt a family to move.
At the same time,
the majority of today's climate refugees are displaced within the
borders of their own country, whereas the new compacts focus exclusively
on cross-border movement. And for Pacific island nations that face a
truly existential threat from sea level rise, there's no legal precedent
to guide how they might relocate to new territory in another country —
if they
even want to move. Even a comparatively simpler effort —
to relocate a community of fewer than 100 people in Louisiana
whose island home, Isle de Jean Charles, has lost 98 percent of its
land to sea level rise since the 1950s, to a new town 40 miles inland —
has taken several years and cost $50 million and still faces setbacks,
including complaints from the predominantly Native American residents
that the state government didn't adequately involve them in the planning
process.
"The reality is there are tens of millions of these people, and we don't agree on what we can do about them," Yayboke says.
Meanwhile,
the wave of nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment that has swept
across Europe and the U.S. in recent years has made it a challenge for
the U.N. to even get governments to follow existing refugee protocol,
let alone expand it to cover an entirely new class of refugee, Hall
says.
"To get any progressive international policy, much less
hard law, is almost impossible in today's climate," she says. "We're not
going to get any kind of binding convention on displaced people due to
climate change."
The U.S. pulled out of the migration compact in December,
citing concerns
that it could impede the Trump administration's immigration agenda.
While that means the final agreement will be missing any commitment from
the
world's number-one migrant destination, it does remove a potential roadblock to including climate-specific language, given Trump's disbelief in climate change.
In
any case, the global compacts aren't the end of the issue. A different
U.N. task force that was established in the Paris climate agreement is
set to deliver a new set of recommendations on climate refugees around
the same time the compacts are adopted. They will likely focus on
measures individual countries can take to prevent climate refugees from
being displaced in the first place, says
Mariam Traore Chazalnoel, a climate expert at the U.N.'s International Organization for Migration.
"Most people don't actually want to migrate," she says. "They would rather stay where they are. But they need the
means to stay where they are."
That
could include programs to train and equip farmers for drought
tolerance, she says, raise homes out of flood plains, and other measures
aimed at increasing communities' resilience to climate shocks. Yayboke
believes that development agencies need to step up funding for climate
adaptation programs, which can help prevent displacement and reduce
government spending on recovery from predictable natural disasters later
on.
"We are spending so much money on this stuff, but we're
being totally reactive," he says. "There are proactive things we can do
that we're just not doing."
Few places are more illustrative of
that problem than Bangladesh. According to the CSIS report, up to 70
percent of the five million people living in Dhaka's slums were
displaced from their original home by environmental disasters.
"The
situation and scope of this problem is entirely new, and of biblical
proportions," says Steve Trent, executive director of the Environmental
Justice Foundation, which released its own
report
on Bangladesh in 2017. "It demands an entirely new legal convention.
The global compacts are a start, but it's clear that they're not
enough."
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