We are witnessing a paradigm change.
António Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees
Until now mankind has weathered environmental crises over the millennia. The question, however, is whether human behavior in the present may be adequate for survival in the future. For 2.7 million years, humans lived within the framework of alternating ice ages and warming periods. But until the industrial age, the rate of global climate change was slow. In the past, mobility was the key to surviving climate change. That strategy is severely restricted today as the pace of climate change is breaking all records. The problem is serious, and there is no established method of dealing with such challenging phenomena.
Refugee literature often distinguishes between “temporary” or “permanent” migrations, but these distinctions provide little help in the aftermath of environmental disaster. International support is required in all disaster situations whether the displaced climate exiles are permanent or not. As Biermann and Boas note, the main institution dealing with refugees is the United Nations, acting through the 1951 Geneva Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.1 The UN is restricted to helping individual political refugees who flee their countries because of state-led persecution, and this does not cover climate refugees. At best, the UN refers to climate refugees as “internally displaced persons” and offers some programs for them under the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. But it is more of a Band-Aid program than a major corrective. The current international regime embodied in the United Nations provides only marginal protection, with no specific mandate, to climate refugees. This is a problem that strikes at the core of Western development policy toward poorer nations, especially the very poorest. Nothing positive can happen with United Nations leadership until an independent regime for the protection and resettlement of climate refugees is established.
World War II created the largest population displacement in modern history. At the end of World War II, notes Christian Aid, some sixty-six million people were displaced across Europe, with millions similarly displaced in China. The victorious nations were optimistic that the “displaced person” problem could be solved.2 When the United Nations wrapped up its initial European refugee efforts after 1950, however, large numbers of people remained uprooted. To a large extent, global history since World War II has been the history of international migration. In sheer size, the waves of people displaced by environmental and political calamities have been greater than the world has ever seen. Admittedly, war has been the prime mover in the refugee world, creating precedents and circumstances that would affect millions in an era of climate change.
In the 1930s and 1940s millions of people became uprooted, homeless, and often stateless. Europe has a refugee history that it seldom wishes to acknowledge. Here are some figures that show the incredible European migratory stream of the World War II era:
MIGRATION IN WAR-TORN EUROPE, 1944–1947
1940–1945 |
5 million Jews from Germany to extermination camps in Poland and elsewhere |
|
4 million Reich Germans from Soviet Zone to US and British zones |
|
2.7 million ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia |
51 million ethnic Germans from old Poland to Germany |
|
1946–1947 |
6 million Reich Germans from New Poland to Germany3 |
In the case of Jews and Germans alone, we see a tremendous demographic upheaval. Add to it the millions of homeless on the European continent. Some of these fled from war zones; others were removed at the behest of government. The Holocaust of World War II created a problematic world of refugees, displaced persons, and embittered national populations. Until 1944, for example, President Roosevelt was disinclined to do much about saving Jewish refugees in Europe, who were perishing by the millions. It was only through the determined intercession of Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau that the president was forced to confront the reality of the Holocaust. Morgenthau’s report marked the transformation of American policy on refugees. Roosevelt created the War Refugee Board, and its operatives were credited with rescuing two hundred thousand Jews from the Holocaust. This was an impressive feat but comprised only a tiny fraction of people compared to the millions who perished. Neither the term “refugee” nor “migrant” were at all popular then or now, as both seemed to confer a stigma on the persons involved.
Refugees sometimes wandered for years, largely because governments could not account for their nationality—a technical question of often bewildering complexity. Since that time the world has lurched from one crisis to another: the partition of India, the creation of Israel, the Hungarian uprising, the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and the current ongoing conflict in the Middle East, as well as severe droughts in Africa. Census takers have been hard pressed to enumerate the exact number of the hordes of men and women wandering across national frontiers.
Since the 1950s the global refugee problem has accelerated far beyond anyone’s expectations and, increasingly, older refugee definitions do not apply well to current realities. In 1951 there were 1.5 million refugees worldwide. On January 1, 2000, the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) considered 22.3 million people to be “of concern.” Add to that the 13–18 million internally displaced persons as a result of war and environmental disaster, and you have a total of over 50 million. According to the UN’s Women’s Commission for Refugees, Women, and Children, the overall total of refugees by 1994, whether officially recognized or not, was some 57 million.4 Although this number amounts to a best-judgment assessment, it is a number well worth pondering.
Figure 2.1: Number of refugees since the 1960s. Source: UNHCR Statistical Online Population Database.
The increased demand for asylum and resettlement occurs at a time of unprecedented globalization of the world economy. As a driver of climate migration, economic change is often ignored largely because people in today’s crisis-stricken Europe forget how much richer Western Europe is than most of Asia and just about all of Africa. Using new immigrant surveys, Yale economist Marc Rosenzweig noted that “the poorest 1 percent of the population of Denmark has an income higher than 95 percent of the population living in Mali, Madagascar or Tanzania.”5. Ten African countries comprising some 150 million people have lower per capita gross national product (GNP) than they did at the time of independence. Add climate change or natural disasters to the equation, and people will readily head toward areas like Europe where living conditions are better.6 The computer has revolutionized communications, and better parts of the world are now more knowable to asylum seekers. Furthermore, migration scholar Michael Head has noted, “The ever widening gulf between the capital-rich, technologically advanced and militarily powerful states and the rest of the world has fueled the demand for the right to escape poverty.”7
The number of climate refugees appears to be expanding more rapidly than others as environments of all types around the globe have been declining. Their number will increase greatly, say experts at the National Academy of Sciences, as global warming accelerates, sea levels rise, and flooding and drought disrupt agricultural systems in developing nations.8 And we are now seeing that people who migrate often do so because of the environmental degradation of their home region. Environmental factors as much as any other factors make them economically impoverished.
There is considerable uncertainty as to where these streams of global environmental refugees will flow. But it is a safe bet that they will lap up on the shores of prosperous developed Western nations, which are already becoming increasingly xenophobic. The UNHCR, with a lean staff of 7600 workers, is already stressed by refugee crises of some 37 million in Africa and the Middle East. Add millions of people displaced by climate change, and you have a crisis of governance and management that will sorely tax the wisest solons at the UN and other governmental agencies.
Already Western nations are feeling the pain of including refugee populations in their midst. Australian immigration minister Philip Ruddock urged the fiftieth-anniversary meeting of the UNHCR to curtail the rights of those seeking asylum because of either political or environmental causes.9 Ruddock and others have pointed out the enormous increase in the flight of people from the states of their birth in the final decades of the twentieth century and are fearful that this mass movement is likely to grow exponentially in the twenty-first century. Increasingly migrants “are resorting to unauthorized methods of entry, often at great risk to their lives.”10
Climate refugees are a problem of development policy beyond the scope of a single country or agency. The problems are fraught with emotion, human agency, and political controversy. How will people be relocated and settled? Is it possible to offer environmental refugees temporary asylum? Will these refugees have any collective rights in the new areas they inhabit? And, lastly, as currently vast areas of the world are being rendered unfit for human habitation, who will pay the costs of all the affected countries during the process of resettlement?
The need for planning for climate refugees comes at a time when many countries are devoting little thought to this emerging issue. Indeed some critics point out that nations have yet to challenge the concept of economic growth itself. The problems of climate refugees cannot be addressed without confronting the socially acceptable definitions of growth and the largely unquestioned faith in its benefits. Limits to growth are actually emerging, notes Richard Heinberg, an expert with the Post Carbon Institute and author of The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality.11 Fossil fuels like oil are nonrenewable, and they are finite; as the world’s primary sources of oil and gas run out, fossil fuel companies are turning to increasingly risky and expensive methods of extraction. Wind and solar power can help generate electricity, especially in rural communities, but they are not good options for dealing with issues like urban crowding, the transportation of populations, and expanding food supplies. Preserving and protecting green areas of countries coupled with stabilizing urban growth may be one key to preparing for future problems. Even before countries can deal with the onslaught of climate refugees, they will have to power down the ways they pollute and use up the landscapes and open places. Adds Peter Victor, an economist at Ontario’s York University, the idea of progress once had many measures but now relates only to the economy.12 If we are to deal with large-scale exchanges of population around the planet, we have to recognize that economics does not dominate the larger ecosystem. The limits of the natural world come into play. Ideas such as these need to be kept in perspective as nations debate what to do with climate refugees.
Hopefully, the current attitudes of northern developed countries will change from self-interest to financial support of climate change adaptation programs in the poorer nations in the south.13 We are now seeing the decoupling of economic growth and greenhouse emissions. Nearly two dozen countries increased their GDP since 2000 while their emissions have stayed flat or gone down, including developed and developing countries alike, the World Resources Institute reported in 2016.14 This is the result of larger consumption of alternatives to high carbon energy like coal and oil. Articles abound in economic journals about the success of wind and solar power in this regard.
Such optimism may be premature, however. Bill McKibben, journalist and cofounder of the climate advocacy organization 350.0rg, notes that while one greenhouse gas decreased in the United States, another, far more nefarious one may have increased. Methane, the by-product of natural gas, is a much more potent greenhouse gas—it captures more of the sun’s rays. And the boom of hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking”) for natural gas in the States and around the world has led to concerns that methane emissions may be the new culprit of climate change.15
Regardless, the global economy has largely been running business as usual—as of April 2016, countries around the globe were still planning to build hundreds of new coal-fired power plants.16 Without more aggressive action to reduce fossil fuel usage, including preventing new sources of fossil fuel emissions, the reductions we have seen thus far will not be enough to prevent catastrophic climate changes. And the decoupling process will require much more effort in poor countries with large populations living in energy poverty. Under “business as usual,” coal companies are trying to build new coal plants in a misguided effort to lift developing nations out of poverty. Yet often the coal plants require massive, and expensive, new distribution infrastructure and pollute the communities they intended to help. The idea that petroleum and coal is “cheap” in these communities is not only a farce, but it also ignores the larger problems that emissions bring.17
The 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees remains the main plank of legal protection of refugees today. According to the UNHRC, refugee status entitles a person to safe asylum in another country or, barring this possibility, aid and assistance such as financial grants, food, shelter, tools, clinics, and shelters. Neither the Geneva Convention nor the UNHRC protocol of 1967 regard environmental displacement as a determinant of refugee status. A refugee is considered by the United Nations to be a person who is fleeing persecution due to his or her race, religion, nationality, politics, or sectarian origins.18 In the legal proceedings of the UNHRC, there is no mention of environment as a reason to flee. Nevertheless, environmental migrants are refugees, many of whom have abandoned their homelands on a semipermanent or permanent basis, with little anticipation of return.
Refugee movements within the purview of the United Nations have been generally regarded as unruly and unpredictable, and refugee flows are beyond the control of individual states. Since the 1967 protocol, the United Nations makes the status of the refugee “exceptional” so as to preclude dealing with overwhelming numbers. It also focuses on individuals rather than groups. Unlike traditional refugees, environmental refugees do not have the same legal standing in the international community.
Given the stresses in the international community from war and other worldwide tensions, it will be difficult for nations to add “climate refugee” to the approved asylum list. Some officials in the United Nations fear that by including environmentally displaced persons in the recognized refugee status, the current protection for refugees recognized by the Geneva Convention would be seriously devalued. For the UNHCR the phrase “climate refugee” is a misnomer. According to a recent article in the Guardian “there are a number of reasons why ‘climate refugee’ status does not make sense for people who might have to move.”19 The term is legally contentious and culturally insulting to many migrants.
“Across the world refugees encounter racism and discrimination. Host governments often do little to challenge this [poor treatment].” Thus “the prospect of becoming a refugee comes with a lot of baggage. . . . It explains why many people do not like the term ‘climate refugee’ and why they do not see the creation of climate-refugee status as a good solution.” Media stories of fetid refugee camps and photos of people huddled in small boats condition all too often popular conceptions of refugees.20 For the UN, people affected by environmental disruptions are matters of “concern.” But funding of refugees and politics rests at the heart of the problem. The UNHCR is fearful that it will be overwhelmed by a tsunami of refugees.
In a 2001 article written by sociologist Richard Black of the University of Sussex and funded by the UNHCR, the problem was explored in a manner calculated to reframe the problem as a nonissue. According to Black, “The strength of the academic case [regarding the existence of climate refugees] is often depressingly weak.” Hard evidence, argued Black, is a necessary component of an increase in migration at times or in places of more severe environmental degradation that would turn people into international migrants or permanent refugees in their own country. “Moreover,” Black concluded, “there remains a danger that academic and policy writing on ‘environmental refugees’ has more to do with bureaucratic agendas of international organizations and academics than with any real theoretical or empirical insight.”21 Finally, critics of the term “climate refugee” or “environmental refugee” wonder if protection is morally necessary—more a matter of home governments to deal with. As they are quick to point out, a refugee is someone who flees political, ethnic, or religious persecution. So-called environmental or climate refugees do not fill the bill in this regard.
The field of refugee studies has grown dramatically since the latter part of the twentieth century.22 Yet trying to put a starting date on a term of academic inquiry that has no specific organizational history is difficult. However, it is safe to say that the terms “environment” and “refugee” have been linked since 1948, when the term was first used to discuss various aspects of the Palestinian refugee problem. The term “ecological refugee” in official terminology was first used by Lester Brown of Worldwatch Institute in 1976.23
Since then, other terms such as “environmentally displaced persons” and “environmental migrants” have also come into popular usage. The term “environmental refugee” has been around for a long time, but it has been sufficiently emotionally and politically charged to sink into the public consciousness. Recently, however, “climate refugee” has gained traction because of increased media attention and the proliferation of documentary films like Sun Come Up (2010), the story of Carteret Islanders in the South Pacific who are forced by climate change to leave their ancestral land to migrate to politically unstable Bougainville in New Guinea’s Solomon Islands.24
Figure 2.2: Proportion of IDPs increased in past decade. Source: UNHCR.
The term “environmental refugee” came into usage in the United Nations in 1985 as a report title for the United Nations Environment Programme.25 This growing concern of the international community about the consequences of migration resulting from environmental deterioration was reinforced in 1990 by the publication of the first UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which stated that the “gravest effects of climate change may be those on human migration as millions will be displaced.”26
At this writing the UNHCR has moved toward the term “environmentally displaced persons” to keep out of the “refugee” legal thicket. “Refugee,” as we have seen, refers to persecuted people whose human rights have been violated. Earthquakes, floods, droughts, and so on may be harmful, but they do not constitute “persecution” as it is currently defined. The term “refugee,” in its technical definition, implies persons who have already crossed an international border.
For the purpose of this book we define “environmental” and “climate refugees” as persons who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their traditional homelands because of events like sea level rise, extreme weather events, and drought and water scarcity that jeopardize their existence or seriously affect their quality of life. Further, after defining what an environmental refugee is, we need to apply categories as to whether their flight is forced or anticipatory. Is the environmental degradation the primary cause of their migration or merely an additional cause of refugeedom? Or is the term merely a politically correct one for “undocumented immigrant”? These terms shed little light on how climate change creates refugees within national borders. Yet the number of “internally displaced persons,” or IDPs, has been increasing exponentially in recent years (see fig. 2.2). Therefore, our position is that we reject the narrow term of “refugee” currently used by the UN in favor of a more inclusive one that takes environmental factors into consideration.
In a changing world we may have to alter our traditional understanding of the term “refugee” in order to accommodate our awareness of new situations and circumstances that may arise. As late as 2003, researchers at Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt dismissed a future migration flood of political and environmental refugees into Europe as a “fairy tale.” In its report the bank argued that concerns in European industrial countries about a major increase in migration were unfounded.27 Thus as the twentieth century waned, Deutsche Bank reflected the opinions of many Western leaders. Few were prepared for the storm that was to come. While political or religious refugees are protected by international law, it is unclear what conventions and policies protect people displaced by extreme weather events.
Though people in Western developed countries are less likely to become climate refugees, sudden climatic events like Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans can catapult a large population into a realm of environmental refugeedom. In fact, the plight of Hurricane Katrina survivors provoked an interesting discussion in the media over whether it was appropriate to deem them “refugees.” The term was criticized by Rev. Jesse Jackson, who said it was “racist” to “call American citizens refugees.” Multiple news organizations banned the word in response to this criticism, including the Washington Post and the Boston Globe, but others argued that the alternative terms—”evacuees” or “displaced people”—were not good enough, not dramatic enough to convey the situation. New York Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis said, “Webster’s defines a refugee as a person fleeing ‘home or country’ in search of refuge, and it certainly does justice to the suffering legions driven from their homes by Katrina.”28 New York Times Magazine “On Language” columnist, William Safire, said he believes the word “refugee” is “neither racist nor ethnic nor in any way demeaning.” The bigger issue, Safire thinks, is that it implies people who have crossed borders because “they do not have the protection of their own country,” citing Brookings Institution senior fellow Roberta Cohen. He preferred the terms “Katrina survivors” and “flood victims.”29
However, it is primarily people in poor, developing countries that have high population density, marginal food stores, health problems, and political instability who will become environmental refugees. As the future unfolds, these climate refugees will be on the move in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. Today the greatest numbers of environmental refugees are living in sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent, China, Mexico, and Central America. Of the 150 million facing food deficits or famine, 135 million have been affected by severe desertification, with untold millions of farmers in this region who have abandoned traditional farmlands for tropical forest areas.
As the International Organization for Migration has noted, migration, especially a mass influx of migrants, can affect the environment in places of destination as well. Camps and temporary shelters in urban areas can produce strains on public health and water supply and generally degrade local ecosystems.30 Also, these migrants with their different culture and languages may become a permanent part of urban centers—mostly marginalized groups of the old and the poor and women and children. Not all migrants will be able to cope with new and stressful environments. As information chains become available among affected peoples, many will elect not to migrate at all and will remain internally displaced climate refugees.
As the Huffington Post put it, “Xenophobes warn that Europe’s cultural identity is at risk, and yet the founding treaty of the EU calls for societies characterized by pluralism, nondiscrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity, and equality between women and men. That means welcoming refugees and taking steps to integrate them in a way that respects these values and their identity.”31 In 2004, filmmaker Roland Emmerich dramatized the potentially ironic consequences of xenophobia in a scene from The Day after Tomorrow: American citizens flee en masse from lightning and a terrible climatic disturbance from the north only to find themselves running up against the very fences they had constructed to keep Mexican migrants out.32 In Europe a tsunami of displaced Muslims is already producing public outrage over governments’ inability to deal with the invasion of local cultures and landscapes. This is coming about largely because people generally have difficulty dealing with sudden unpredictable crises. The net result may be significant increases in violence toward migrants and minority groups.
The climate refugee issue is fraught with questions about national security. Along with changing climate come internal and cross-border tensions stemming from large-scale migrations. Radical changes in the environment result in resource scarcity and this intensifies social conflict. Weak and failing states in Africa, for example, may suffer from numerous public health problems caused by toxic water supplies.
All of this points to the simple fact that climate debate is rooted in a monstrous problem of national and international inequities spawned by the reluctance or resistance of developed nations to assist developing countries to manage the challenges of climate change. This could result in a rift in north-south relations. Further, climate change could have deep implications for the effectiveness and viability in even stronger existing governments. China, experts argue, will have to play a critical role in all climate change discussions. According to the World Bank, sixteen of the world’s twenty most-polluted cities are in China—the air is so polluted that it leads to 400,000 premature deaths every year.33
The UN General Assembly is beginning to pay more attention to population displacement and involuntary migration in relation to environmental change. However, the UN is currently more preoccupied with the international security aspects of climate change in terms of loss of physical territory, statelessness, and cultural survival rather than the everyday human impact of environmental changes. Developing policies that will allow the United Nations to adapt its work to the problems of climate change and vulnerable affected populations proceeds at a snail’s pace. Meanwhile, climate or environmental refugees could become one of the foremost human crises of our times.
Thus, despite debate over terminology, displaced peoples are on the move. They live in countries wracked by conflict and environmental disasters. They have no special laws to protect them, and their plight until recently has garnered little public attention. They appear in the jargon as IDPs (internally displaced persons), but IDPs hardly make their way into the mainstream news. They are at the mercy of their own governments, which are often either unable to help, actively hostile, or reluctant to admit outsiders who might interfere.
The more complex society becomes, the more vulnerable it is to changes inside and out. Issues like how to handle an influx of climate refugees are not easily resolved. In addition, in the arena of international politics, large amounts of spending are for weapons that can provide military solutions to problems that might be addressed otherwise. Looking out at the world from the safe, prosperous confines of the United States, it is evident that America, just by itself, is neglecting many international environmental problems.
The struggle for access to natural resources will accelerate. Conflict over valuable resources—and the power and wealth they confer—has become part of the matrix of climate migration. This conflict intersects with ethnic, religious, and tribal antagonisms. The struggle over access to oil and other natural resources on the planet is well known. But as Michael Klare has noted in his work Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict, “Struggles over access to energy sources are likely to break out in other parts of the globe as well.” Water and access to it will most likely provoke the most intense conflicts in the future, and these conflicts will force many people to seek sanctuary elsewhere.34
In a worst-case scenario some nations that are already failing, like Libya and the Sudan, may collapse, leaving them open to terrorist rule. Outmigration of populations may involve millions. The arrival of migrants in host countries from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds may be the source of great social and class conflict on the continent. As World Bank economist Nicholas Stern and others have forcefully argued, the potential for conflict is greater if the host country is either underdeveloped or experiencing economic problems.35 Greece, Pakistan, Lebanon, and India are good examples.
The institutional frameworks for addressing migration, displacement, and relocation in the context of climate change at regional and global levels do not exist outside of the usual refugee cant. No right to admission to a foreign state in the case of displacement due to environmental hazards or disasters is enshrined in international law. In West Africa, for example, a region with more than its share of environmental woes, there is currently no consensus internationally or in the West African region on procedures to admit or protect peoples crossing borders in disaster contexts. Rural renewal, through advanced agricultural practices and introduction of better strains of seeds, faces a major challenge because populations in West Africa often opt for migration rather than farming as environmental degradation continues apace.
Global governance of international migration of climate and political refugees has been much more controversial than has been the case regarding most transnational issues. For example, notes Susan Martin of Georgetown University, there is not a single country today that is not affected by the movement of some 232 million international migrants with a world of personal agendas and ambitions.36 Management of climate refugees, specifically, cannot be handled by unilateral action.
In a world of work and settlement, placing climate refugees involves working not only with nations but also with unions, humanitarian organizations, multinational corporations, and labor recruitment agencies. Most states are unclear as to what they want to achieve through their immigration/refugee policies. And many people have difficulty seeing either the short-term or long-term benefit of having large numbers of migrants in their midst. As Martin notes, “Public opinion also is often ambivalent, at best, about immigration.” Martin is more realistic than some scholars on the subject of climate refugees, other refugees, and international governance. According to scholar Susan Martin, “the immigration policies of most destination countries are not conducive to receiving large numbers of environmental migrants unless they enter through already existing admission catgories.”37
While we are aware that large numbers of refugees suffer in the world because of ethnic conflicts, war, and totalitarian regimes, that does not detract from the fact that we see refugees as victims of undisputed climate change impacts. Similarly, because of these very significant environmental disruptions on the planet, we do not see much value in speculations about whether or not climate refugees are a temporary or permanent phenomenon. Climate refugees are with us because our climate is undergoing major transformations. The response of the international community to these transformations is not adequate and is still at its early stages. One of the significant consequences of the end of the Cold War is the diffusion of power. The United States remains a dominant player on the world stage but has neither the moral influence nor the political clout that it enjoyed in earlier years. The ability of the United States to address these issues is further complicated by climate skeptics in the media and Congress who reject the overwhelming consensus of the global scientific community. Meanwhile, terrorism is a horrible counterfoil to the actions of all responsible nations. Currently there is no body of government and no international authority mandated with responsibility for climate-induced displacement. Therein lies the problem. Yet, too many elected officials appear determined to either ignore or refute the facts about climate change—even where global warming is already hurting their communities and their constituents.
Until now, although population displacement by war and nationalism has been a common development in the modern era, refugees have been on the margins of our historical thinking. Opportunities for resettlement were often so limited that the modern era saw the rise of the refugee camp. In recent years the largest groups of global refugees have been internally displaced by either sectarian violence or environmental change. They have not been forced out of the nation in which they claimed citizenship. Thus in the modern era we see the emergence of international climate migrants and the internally displaced by natural disasters—a new kind of “refugeedom.”
UNHCR, “Worldwide Displacement Hits All-Time High as War and Persecution Increase,” http://www.unhcr.org/news/latest/2015/6/558193896/worldwide-displacement-hits-all-time-high-war-persecution-increase.html.
1. Frank Biermann and Ingrid Boas, “Climate Change and Human Migration: Towards a Global Governance System to Protect Climate Refugees,” http://www.globalgovernancewatch.org/library/doclib/20160205_ClimateChangeandHumanMigration.pdf.
2. “Human tide: the real migration crisis,” Christian Aid, May 2007, https://www.christianaid.org.uk/Images/human-tide.pdf.
3. Michael Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees from the First World War through the Cold War (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001), 299.
4. Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, New York: United Nations, January 1, 1995.
5. Branko Milanovic, “The Economic Causes of Migration,” The Globalist, October 22, 2013.
6. Guillermina Jasso, Douglas S. Massey, Mark R. Rosenzweig, and James P. Smith, “The New Immigrant Survey in the US: The Experience over Time,” Migration Policy Institute, January 2003.
7. Michael Head, “Refugees, Global Inequality, and a New Concept of Citizenship,” Australian International Law Journal (2002): 59.
8. Colin P. Kelly, Shahrzad Mohtadi, Mark A. Cane, Richard Seager, and Yochanan Kushnir, “Climate Change in the Fertile Crescent and Implications of the Recent Syrian Drought,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 11 (2015).
9. See Paul Daley, “How Ruddock Urged Europe to Get Tougher,” http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2002/07/20/1026898930680.html.
10. Bruno Rego, “Environmental Citizenship as Anthropology of Hope: A Tale of a Realistic Utopia,” Transaction Papers, 13th Annual Conference, Environmental Justice and Citizenship, Mansfield College, Oxford, July 2014.
11. Richard Heinberg, The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality (New York: New Society Publications, 2011).
12. Peter Victor, “Questioning Economic Growth,” Nature 468 (November 18, 2010): 370.
13. Heinberg, End of Growth; Eben Fodor, Better Not Bigger (New York: New Society Publishers, 2007); Peter Victor, Managing without Growth, Slow by Design (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishers, 2008).
14. Nate Aden, “The Roads to Decoupling: 21 Countries Are Reducing Carbon Emissions While Growing GDP,” World Resources Institute, April 5, 2016.
15. Bill McKibben, “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Chemistry,” The Nation, March 23, 2016.
16. Brad Plumer, “Hundreds of Coal Plants Are Still Being Planned Worldwide— Enough to Cook the Planet,” Vox, updated April 5, 2016.
17. Denise Robbins, “Experts Debunk the Coal Industry’s ‘Energy Poverty’ Argument against the Pope’s Climate Action,” Media Matters, July 6, 2015.
18. UNHCR, Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees (1952), chapter I, article 1, section A, subsection (2).
19. Alex Randall, “Don’t Call Them ‘Refugees’: Why Climate-Change Victims Need a Different Label,” Guardian, September 18, 2014
20. Alex Randall, “Don’t Call Them ‘Refugees’; Michael Werz and Laura Conley, “Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict: Addressing Complex Crisis Scenarios in the 21st Century,” Center for American Progress, January 2012.
21. Richard Black, “Environmental Refugees: Myth or Reality,” New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper No. 34, UNHCR, March 2001.
22. Richard Black, “Fifty Years of Refugee Studies,” International Migration Review 35, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 57.
23. Lester R. Brown, Patricia L. McGrath, and Bruce Stokes, Twenty-Two Dimensions of the Population Problem, Worldwatch Paper 5 (Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute, March 1976).
24. http://redantelopefilms.com/project/sun-come-up/
25. Essam El-Hinnawi, Environmental Refugees (Nairobi: United Nations Environment Programme, 1985)
26. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Policymakers’ Summary of the Potential Impacts of Climate Change, 1990, (Geneva: IPCC Secretariat, 1990), 20.
27. Deutsche Bank Research, “International Migration: Who, Where, and Why?,” Current Issues, August 1, 2003, 4.
28. “Calling Katrina Survivors ‘Refugees’ Stirs Debate,” Associated Press, September 7, 2005.
29. William Safire, “Katrina Words,” New York Times, September 18, 2005
30. international Organization for Migration, “Migration, Climate Change, and the Environment,” https://www.iom.int/sites/default/files/our_work/ICP/IDM/iom_policybrief_may09_en.pdf.
31. Judith Sunderland, “Fear and Loathing of Refugees in Europe,” Huffington Post, February 9, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/judith-sunderland/fear-and-loathing-of-refu_b_9188204.html.
32. Etienne Piguet, “Climate Change and Forced Migration,” New Issues in Refugee research, Research Paper No. 153 (UNHCR, 2008).
33. Christine Lagorio, “The Most Polluted Places on Earth,” CBS Evening News, June 6, 2007
34. Michael T. Klare, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (New York: Henry Holt, 2001), xi.
35. Nicholas Stern, The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, (London: London School of Economics, 2006).
36. Susan Martin, International Migration: Evolving Trends from the Early Twentieth Century to the Present (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014).
37. Susan Martin, “Climate Change and International Migration,” Institute for the Study of International Migration, June, 2010, p.3.
