No country can seal itself off from the rest of the world. In no country or city can the rich fortify themselves for long against the poor. No frontier is impermeable.
Crispin Tickell, former British ambassador to the United Nations
Once it becomes clear that one of the defining characteristics of our time is the swelling flow of environmental refugees across the planet, further questions arise. What kind of world do refugees find themselves in once they are displaced by destructive storms, expanding deserts, water shortages, and dangerously high levels of toxic pollutants in the local environment? And what are the nations of the world prepared to do about it?1
How can we gauge what has happened recently to our planet in the past few decades, and where do we stand today? According to scientific estimates, the number of those likely to relocate due to climatic reasons—sea level rise, increased water scarcity, desertification, and so on—ranges between 50 and 350 million by 2050.2 Admittedly these are difficult numbers to absorb. But reality plods on, often defying scientific prognostication. Other estimates offer a clear-cut assessment. We know, for example, that there are already 135 million people, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, threatened with severe desertification. In Africa and elsewhere, writes Norman Myers, we see “the phenomenon of marginal people driven into marginal environments.”3 These people in search of livelihood are moving into lands that are too dry or too steep. Others are rapidly cutting down forests with slash-and-burn techniques in order to wrest a living from soil that quickly loses its fertility.
We should recognize that the crisis of climate refugees has occurred in the context of meager spending by affluent nations, especially the United States. For example, in the fiscal year 2014–2015, about 1 percent of the American national budget was appropriated for foreign assistance. The lion’s share of this aid went to Israel, Egypt, and Afghanistan.4 The deplorable circumstances that we have described in various parts of the world are not just the result of economic and technological forces over which we have no control. They are also the result of conscious decisions made by nations preoccupied with their own self-interest. In her book Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid, Samantha Nutt, a Canadian public health specialist, deplores the growing militarization of foreign aid and what she terms naive “tourist” humanitarian actions like sending inappropriate Western food and supplies to distressed areas. Education, she claims, particularly the education of women in distressed areas of the developing world, alleviates poverty far better than sending shiploads of shoes, used T-shirts, and Enfamil that can’t be used with dirty water.5 As foreign aid approaches the 1 percent mark of national budgets, European and other Western nations worry about whether aid will force them to raise taxes in their respective countries, always a hotbutton political issue.
If we appreciate the variability of our global climate system, it is worth remembering how easily communities and nations can be destroyed. One approach might be to have an international agency accord with a graduating scale of refugee protection based on the immediacy of environmental threats. One can hope that people who are displaced by environmental events can return to their homeland after storms and floods subside, for example, while sea level rise will be a permanent fixture. Furthermore, the notion of environmentally displaced persons is unlikely to ever be incorporated within the existing framework of the Refugee Convention, concludes New Zealand environmental lawyer Angela Williams.6 As of now, the plight of climate refugees continues largely unrecognized and mostly devoid of support by the international community.7 Since the Kyoto accords were signed, refugee organizations are demanding new programs of regional cooperation with respect to refugee adaptation activities. It is safe to say that the phenomenon of climate change has now created a new and independent category of refugee that needs to be recognized by the international legal system.8 Currently the United States, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and other nations are adopting a piecemeal approach to the problem of climate refugees. In lacking a well-articulated and programmatically defined approach to the problem, these nations are in effect absolving themselves of any responsibility to deal with the problems of climate refugees.9
At present there is only a limited knowledge base about the number of people displaced by sudden-onset disasters. Government tracking systems are inadequate, and questions remain about how many times people are displaced by environmental calamity, where they go, or if they eventually return home.10 At what juncture does an environmental hazard become a tipping point that creates climate refugees? For example, we need to identify how and when a drought in Somalia triggered a famine in that country, which was already plagued by persistent political instability. In order to identify vulnerable populations, scientists argue for better forecasting instruments that can help to identify vulnerable populations in areas both of origin and destination, notes Susan Martin, a professor of international migration at Georgetown University.11 Also, as Maria Waldinger and Sam Fankhauser have pointed out in their recent valuable study on climate change, “One of the most important drivers of migration patterns across the world are differences in income levels.” Climate change is highly influential in increasing “income differentials,” and this means that the poorest and most at-risk populations—who are already at risk—will be further harmed by climate change.12
Historically, efforts to aid refugees have been laced with skepticism and not a little irritation in the West. The evolving definition of the term “refugee” promulgated by governments and international agencies has been driven by political and ideological concerns very much removed from circumstances on the ground. Benjamin Glahn of the Salzburg Global Seminar notes the unfortunate consequences: “Without an official definition of what constitutes a ‘climate refugee,’ and lacking some form of official recognition under international law, persons forced to migrate across international borders as a result of climate change may continue to be, as the International Bar Association has said, ‘almost invisible in the international system . . . unable to prove political persecution in their country of origin they fall through the cracks of asylum law.’”13
The European Union’s thirty-year-old Schengen Agreement is at the very heart of Europe’s refugee crisis. The agreement allows a person to travel in the EU’s vast area, stretching from Sweden in the north to Italy in the south, without ever having to show a passport. Prosperous countries like Sweden, the Netherlands, and France have no control over migrants through Schengen-area territories and thus no control over who enters or exits their countries. For decades, Schengen has held a kind of tranquil sway as long as movement across developed Europe consisted mostly of either European or middle-class migrants. Since 1985, travel document checks within the region have been abolished. And in 2007 travel and internal border controls were also abolished in nine—mostly eastern—EU nations.
The massive influx of migrants into Europe has put the future of the Schengen Agreement at stake. Many EU ministers have agreed to press ahead with plans to suspend the Schengen passport-free travel zone for two years and introduce new border checks at national frontiers.14 Johanna Miki-Leitner, then Austrian interior minister, claimed that “Schengen is on the brink of collapse.”15 In a backlash against immigrants, Sweden has proposed the closing of its bridge to Denmark, and Denmark itself has recently passed a law making the transport of refugees to the Swedish border a crime of human smuggling.16 Officials have discussed the possibility of “in effect, suspending Greece from Schengen, in a move that would force Greek citizens to go through passport control when flying to other parts of the area,” according to the Financial Times.17
For the European Union’s future, Schengen will have to be profoundly modified or scrapped. The current refugee crisis has made what was once unimaginable now become imaginable. The Schengen Agreement is no match for the driving forces of desperate needy people who have access to modern communication. At the moment, everything depends on the protection of the Greek-Turkish border. If current plans by the EU to pay for the warehousing of refugees in Turkey fail, EU ministers may urge the closure of national borders for two years.
Map 10.1: Schengen Agreement Countries
Current immigration policies are not even remotely capable of dealing with the numbers involved.18 Meanwhile, as the free flow of goods and services and money is protected by international agreements, it seems perverse to deny the same rights to people.19 At present, however, the indications are not promising. State protection of climate refugees has its limits. To claim that they can be accommodated within their own countries ignores three facts. First, the governments in those countries have initiated dam projects involving the forced removal of thousands, uprooting countless villages and towns. The Three Gorges Dam in China, for example, displaced 1.4 million people with the government’s blessing. Second, entire countries—or large parts of them—may become uninhabitable or disappear completely. Third, governments may simply lack the resources to cope. The current anarchic situation in Libya and civil war in Syria are case studies in this regard.
Molly Conisbee and Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation have summed up the matter succinctly: “Globalisation does not just mean rapid capital transfers and unlimited cheap travel. Nor does it mean treating the world as a playground, a museum, or a supermarket. It means that ignoring our neighbours is no longer an option.”20
The one “refugee success story” that we know of is the case of Chandigarh, India. In the 1950s the Indian government commissioned the noted French architect Le Corbusier to design a city for sixty thousand refugees from Pakistan.21 This well-planned city is a delight to both walk in and drive in—a refreshing antidote to India’s traffic-plagued cities. Le Corbusier’s heavy concrete structures today, however, serve less as testimony to the refugee than to the French architect’s ego. The refugees have been long settled, and Chandigarh is now known mostly as an Indian army staging area for possible conflicts in the Punjab. Little is mentioned of the six thousand peasant families who were expelled from their ancestral lands to make way for Chandigarh.
First and foremost, developed nations that have huge intakes of climate refugees and others will have to develop standards, internationally agreed to, for the categorization and processing of migrants. Agencies working with climate refugees will have to determine whether an individual is a refugee or an opportunity migrant and examine the severity of the environmental process in the old homeland to determine if it is possible to return to the place of origin. Currently many agencies are considering a multifaceted policy approach to address the relationship between environmental degradation and forced migration.22 The components of this policy are as follows: there needs to be long-term funded scientific research on the cause-effect mechanism between environmental degradation and forced migrations.23
As refugee populations go on the move, one of the moral questions is how organized nations can deal with human trafficking. Regional free-movement protocols among nations outside of Africa do not exist to protect mobile peoples. Borderless and people-centered regions championed by refugee advocates are a long way from being implemented. In fact, the current assault on “borderless” Western Europe by millions of refugees may make resettlement of displaced peoples more difficult than ever. As most displaced migrants live at or near the poverty level, they are disproportionately affected by changes in climate. In agrarian regions, as drought makes it harder for populations to sustain themselves, food insecurity climbs and it becomes difficult to remain. In subsistence communities the key is not to pressure people to move but to develop strategies that will allow them to remain with their culture and communities intact. Improved water installations, for example, can go a long way in keeping communities from becoming disaster zones. Other strategies such as attempts to combat soil erosion and developing centers whereby people can learn new skills to sustain themselves in their environment have recently been popularized.
The development of temporary refuges for displaced populations fleeing desertification or flooding has a strong tradition in many African countries. When a massive volcano eruption occurred on Mt. Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2002, those fleeing the volcano were allowed to stay in Uganda until it was safe to return despite not being granted refugee status. According to the UNHCR, temporary protection is a pragmatic tool for offering sanctuary to those fleeing humanitarian crises.24
As many climate refugees will ultimately settle in urban areas, much of the urban infrastructure will be unable to cope with the influx and breakdown. Thus major attention needs to be paid to our world-class cities, which require having infrastructure repair programs in place. In terms of housing, sanitation, and public safety, international aid to new huddled masses in large cities in both developed and developing countries won’t be worth much if climate refugees are forced to cluster in Bantu-style segregated urban slums.
A case in point is Rome. Take a trolley from the center of the city near the Coliseum and ride for a while. Fancy apartments and condominiums give way to dilapidated settlements—first come the Asian neighborhoods, then finally the stark, depressed buildings that are the homes of people from the sub-Sahara. The migrants in cities—poorly educated, bereft of friends, unfamiliar with the language and the culture—spread their meager blankets, baskets, and trinkets on urban sidewalks to sell to tourists and passers-by. Meanwhile, no fewer than nine developed countries, almost one in three, are taking steps to restrict the flow of climate refugees from developing countries. What follows are some suggested policy responses that we believe will have impact on the climate refugee problem. As Sir Nicholas Stern and others have argued, strong deliberate policy action is required.
An examination of current literature on the subject shows possible remedies for climate refugees. First it is important to update the Geneva Convention, which has not been revised since the 1960s. The Geneva Convention needs to be updated to compensate for ecological debts that could be agreed to in terms of sustainable per capita level of fossil fuel consumption. Emissions can be cut through increased efficiency, and demand for carbon-based power can be changed by the adoption of cleaner technologies. Coal, for example, can be better regulated and controlled through pricing and taxation. This would help to clarify the overconsumption of coal by some nations that increases pollution in parts of the developing world and contributes to the refugee burden. Any policy that prevents environmental degradation, such as reforestation projects, should receive immediate action. As the Stern Review noted, “The loss of natural forests around the world contributes more to global emissions each year than the transport sector.”25
In her study on climate change refugees and international law, Angela Williams, formerly of Sussex University Law School in England and now an international environmental lawyer in New Zealand, argues that there is a way nations can deal with this problem, pointing out that there are already international agreements among nations, such as the United Nations Law of the Sea Convention, which involves 140 nations and 13 regional programs. The primary purpose of the convention is to protect their shared marine environment through treaties and action plans. Williams argues that it ought to be possible for nations to work out similar approaches to the problem of climate refugees.26
In his highly regarded report Environmental Refugees, Norman Myers forcefully lays out an intelligent approach to the problem of climate exiles/refugees: “We cannot continue to ignore environmental refugees simply because there is no institutionalized mode of dealing with the problem.”27 First and foremost Myers believes that we have to look at the root causes of the problem and address them with what he calls “silver bullet options.” Foreign aid should be specifically targeted to improve the underlying economic and political situations that generate environmental refugees. Today, he notes, there are ten developing countries with well over two-thirds of the world’s “poorest of the poor” that receive only one-third of foreign aid.28 The World Bank and other financial institutions need to stop treating these nations as just another credit account when it comes to foreign debt. Too much money is extracted from developing countries in the form of debt service when what is needed is debt relief. Myers suggests some form of debt relief for poor nations through “debt-for-environment swaps.”29
Other forms of relief might be in rooting out political corruption and lowering military expenditure to 1970 levels. Simple policy initiatives like tree planting in environmentally endangered poor countries would supply timber and firewood as well as yield additional benefits by preventing soil erosion, offering windbreaks for crops, and restoring watersheds. Myers concludes by saying, “For all countries, whether developing or developed, the overriding objective must be to reduce the motivation for environmentally destitute people to migrate by supplying them with acceptable lifestyles.”30
Writing in the journal Global Environmental Politics, Frank Biermann and Ingrid Boas lay out a dynamic schema for governing the climate refugee crisis.31 While the singular events of environmental disaster cannot be predicted, the governance of climate refugees can be better organized and planned. Too much emphasis has been placed on programs of disaster response and disaster relief when it comes to climate refugees. Biermann and Boas argue for programs not of relief but of “planned and voluntary resettlement over longer periods of time.”32 In the long term, they note, most climate refugees will not be able to return to their homes. Thus an institutional framework is needed to conceive of most climate refugees as “permanent immigrants to the countries that accept them.”33
Also, as others have already pointed out, this regime will have to focus on protecting people within their own territory. Developed countries will have to bear more of the cost of maintaining people displaced by environmental or climatic events in their own country. The only danger in establishing this new regime is that it will become just another bureaucracy that is heavy-weighted with nationalism and economic argument. However, this regime can be successful if the UN finally embraces an adaptation protocol for “climate refugees” that includes a combination of adaptation and voluntary resettlement programs. As Biermann and Boas point out, “Dealing with the resettlement of millions of climate refugees over the course of the century will require not only a new legal regime, but also one of several international agencies to deal with this task.”34
One of the boldest prescriptions for the legal and human rights protection of climate refugees is contained in an essay by Bonnie Docherty and Tyler Giannini in the Harvard Environmental Law Review.35 Because climate change is global, they contend, the international community should accept responsibility not only for mitigating climate problems but also for helping the tempest-tossed climate refugee. Docherty and Giannini argue for “an innovative, international, and interdisciplinary approach that can be implemented before the situation reaches a crisis state.”36 The existing international legal framework does not address the crisis of millions of people on the move. The best solution to this problem, they believe, is the creation of an independent and parallel convention to the UNHCR.37 This new convention would have a commission much like the UNHCR, with both the political and fiscal power to approach climate refugee problems and search for solutions.38 The problem is so new and substantial that climate refugees, by their very nature of being without UNHCR protection, need a new regime to handle their problems. There is an urgency to this matter, as many small island regimes, such as the Maldives and delta regions like Bangladesh, will soon disappear under rising tides.
The bottom line for these scholars is that neither current climate change law nor refugee law precisely and definitively addresses the issue of climate change refugees. In their words, “Climate change is a de facto problem currently lacking a de jure solution.”39 Currently the United Nations offers little institutional protection of climate refugees. Significantly, the UNHCR does not try to broker cross-border climate refugee problems that can lead to armed conflict and increase population flows. Docherty and Giannini argue for a new approach that covers relocation of these people that is both temporary and permanent. A new convention for climate refugees would involve a nexus between environmental disruption and human action.
Their de jure approach would involve six elements being met in order for a refugee to be considered a victim of climate change: (1) forced migration, (2) temporary or permanent relocation, (3) movement across national borders, (4) disrupted lives consistent with climate change, (5) sudden or gradual environmental disruption, and (6) a “more likely than not” standard for human contribution to the disruption.40
With a new international administration in place to elaborate and resolve issues in a fast and efficient manner in place, Docherty and Giannini argue, climate refugees could be helped and relocated in new and vital ways. This new convention would guarantee legal identity and assistance to climate refugees and force all nations to share in the fiscal responsibility of helping these people with “binding upfront contributions.” Most assuredly, this idea of both a new international convention and a rival bureaucracy would not sit well with the UNHCR, which tends to look at climate refugees merely as displaced persons. Nevertheless this kind of scholarly inquiry shows the variety and creativity of current humane legal thought on the subject of climate refugees.
As Biermann and Boas have stated, the protection and resettlement of possibly over two hundred million climate refugees over the course of this century will require substantial funds, which will have to come largely from the developed West (which bears much of the blame for causing global warming).41 These will be the donor countries, and the question is whether or not these countries will be ready for programs that may seriously tap into national wealth. Only by creating new legal responsibilities toward climate refugees will the international community, especially the industrialized nations, accept their obligations42. The people liable to be displaced by environmental change, crisis, and degradation are among the world’s poorest and have the least political muscle.43
Because there are currently no frameworks or guidelines to help climate refugees, they risk falling through the cracks of international refugee and immigration policy.44 Since it takes time to implement slow-onset “frameworks” and “conventions,” Roger Zetter, an Oxford scholar on refugee issues, recommends stop-gap emergency procedures, or what he calls a “protection gap,” in terms of specifying and protecting migrant rights before displacement, especially in the area of resettlement and rights related to return.45 This can only be done if there is a mutually used knowledge base for intergovernmental agencies providing advocacy, capacity strengthening, and improved communication between civil society organizations. The place to begin is working with those migrants who have been internally displaced in their own countries in order to allow them to stay in their homeland. Lastly, there has to be an internationally agreed-upon apparatus for the protection of climate refugees from violence during their movements.46
The Nansen Initiative was launched in 2012 by the governments of Norway and Switzerland in recognition of the dire fact that under existing law there was no assurance that people forced by environmental disasters to flee across borders would be admitted and receive assistance, let alone find durable solutions to their displacement.47 As scholar Walter Kälin has commented on the subject, “Such displacement creates not only legal protection problems but also operational, institutional, and funding challenges.”48
While the purpose of the Nansen Initiative is to build consultative arrangements among Western countries impacted by climate and political migration on an illegal and large-scale basis, it has a strong focus on disasters, especially the adverse impacts of climate change. Disaster displacement across international borders is now an unpleasant fact of life for those countries involved. And those participating in Nansen consultations have tried to develop strategies to prevent displacement when possible “and when it cannot be avoided, to protect displaced peoples and to construct durable solutions for their displacement.”49 The Nansen Initiative has also pointed out that laws and policies do not sufficiently address the problem of cross-border displacement.50
The one major positive development of Nansen is that it has given countries a forum for regional and subregional discussion of the problem rather than discreetly sweeping cross-border displacement under the rug. Nansen has conducted valuable studies on infrastructure and land reform in immigrant-exporting countries. It has also worked in the area of disaster-related human displacement. Thus far the work of the Nansen Initiative has taken place outside the United Nations system.51 Advocates of the Nansen Initiative hope to put climate change and disasters squarely back on the UN agenda. What Nansen faces is the situation that all the affected nations—rich and poor—need: to develop a set of common understandings and practices for handling the problem of climate refugees. The authors of the Nansen Initiative recognized that action must be taken now. As climate change inflicts itself on the planet in the coming years, altruism and generosity among nations are likely to be blunted.
What follows are two scenarios, one of them pessimistic and the other somewhat optimistic. By no means are these scenarios predictive. They merely sketch out the possibilities for the future that we see here and now.
Most nations have chosen to collectively ignore the problem until now, when the demographic tsunami is flooding Europe with migrants from conflict-ridden Middle Eastern countries. Until the Syrian refugee crisis, there were no legal conventions or norms to provide help and succor to climate refugees in search of sanctuary. Currently the pressure of international events is helping to change public attitudes toward climate refugees. But these attitudes could easily swing from positive to negative depending on political and cultural pressures. The easiest way to deal with this problem is to abandon many of the official terminologies used for refugees. The main challenge then becomes how to develop credentials for safe passage as well as norms of treatment and settlement for these displaced persons. Further, climate refugees have “human rights” as identified in the United Nations Charter.
For everyday purposes, these rights need to be spelled out in ways that can facilitate the process of adequate care for climate refugees. As José Riera of the UNHCR has noted, “A major question is whether there is an appetite at the international level to embark on a new process to come up with new norms and protections. . . . My suspicion is that there is zero appetite for this.”52 Regardless of how nations and their governments feel about rights and protocols, the fact remains that refugees will keep migrating to developed nations as long as conditions in their old homelands remain intolerable. Certain areas of the planet are in the so-called climate hotspots—low-lying islands, coastal regions, and large river deltas that remain in danger of catastrophic environmental change.53
Thus far we have been talking about legal and normative frameworks or the lack thereof. But how do we develop a capacity for them? Roger Zetter notes that protecting climate refugees poses three distinctive challenges: “determining whether displacement is voluntary or forced: (2) whether it is temporary or permanent, and how protection needs differ between internal or international displacement.”54
Under this challenging sociopolitical umbrella is the even more important question of process. How do we process climate refugees for a new and hopefully more stable and productive life in countries where the language, politics, and culture is not theirs? Context shapes sensitivity toward displacement, and countries like Bangladesh, India, and Kenya have had to deal with a series of economic, political, and environmental traumas since their independence. In these countries only the state provides a protection apparatus, and it is one that has a large element of violence to it. Countries like Sudan and Libya may be so fragile economically that they cannot commit to developing effective economic and legal protection for their refugees. What needs to happen first in the receiving countries is the development of a national plan for dealing with climate change. Unfortunately, one term now describe how most nations deal with the problem: ad hoc.
Until now, the Western developed nations have deliberately remained ignorant of demographic realities like that of West Africa, where economic, politics, violence, and environmental degradation are so intertwined that it is difficult to tell where one trend starts and another begins. Indeed the whole of West Africa is in the middle of large-scale border upheaval that may set millions of Africans on the march. France, long one of the stabilizing forces for economy and security in West Africa, has pulled out. And oil-rich Nigeria, always a bellwether of national development, is seeing massive urbanization of rural peoples, especially in the city of Lagos, whose crime, pollution, and dysfunction make it a cliché in the developing world.55 Sixty-six percent of the population of Lagos lives in slums, with little or no access to roads, clean water, electricity, or waste disposal. In 1970 the population of Lagos was 1.4 million; today, according to the World Population Review, it is the largest city in Africa, with a population of twenty-five million.56 Population experts estimate that at its current rate of growth, in twenty-five years Nigeria will have three hundred million people, the same as the present-day United States, living in an area the size of Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada.57 Meanwhile, the country is rapidly depleting its resources. People can only endure so long the streets with floating garbage, mosquitoes and malaria, the random violence, and the generally debilitating quality of environmental decline before they decide to strike out for something better.
Owing to environmental decline and poverty, countries in the developing world like Sierra Leone and the Ivory Coast are becoming chaos-ridden regions where lawless private armies provide a bare minimum of stability to the region. Thus environment in developing countries becomes an important refugee issue. It also becomes a major issue of national security. Water, for example, will be in dangerously short supply in many areas of the world. War could erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia over Nile water. Even in Europe tensions have arisen between Hungary and Slovakia over the damming of the Danube—a classic case of how ethnic tensions are inflamed by environmental disputes.58
Thomas Homer-Dixon, a professor studying conflict and environment at the University of Toronto, believes that the planet is currently on the threshold of acute conflict because of environmental change. What Homer-Dixon calls “hard regime” countries—autocratic governments with very strong armies—will survive in the future. The survival of “softer,” democratic nation-states is far less certain, he says. While a minority of the world’s population will live very well in shiny, affluent, high-tech metro regions of the West where most ethnic and religious problems have been quelled by bourgeois prosperity, he writes, “An increasingly large number of people will be stuck in history, living in shantytowns where attempts to rise above poverty, cultural dysfunction, and ethnic strife will be doomed by a lack of water to drink, soil to till, and space to survive in.”59
China, in Homer-Dixon’s view, is the quintessential example of environmental degradation. China’s current success masks its environmental problems, but not for long. Diminishing water supplies in China’s interior will unleash large-scale population migrations to urban areas that are already under considerable environmental stress. The whole of China may become fractured by its water problems, and in the future China may look profoundly different on the geopolitical map. Looking at other cities like Delhi and Calcutta, we will see worsening air and water quality. Like Beijing, the stage is being set for a drama of surging populations, environmental degradation, and ethnic conflict. Homer-Dixon speculates that as the situation worsens in Africa, whatever the laws and barriers, refugees will find a way to crash official borders and bring their religions and passions with them. Even the United States and Europe will be weakened by the cultural disputes that arise from the tidal surge of climate refugees.
As large refugee populations begin to swarm and move north and west, the state as a governing ideal may founder as arbitrary impositions on a world map that has very little in common with the new demographic realities. In the future the map of the world with its 190 or so countries may be relegated to the status of another quaint document on the historical shelf. There is little compelling evidence that outside of a few Western industrialized countries, the nation-state as a governing ideal can be transported in our time and made to work.60 Already Lebanon, Syria, El Salvador, Peru, and Colombia have few working parts in their nation-state schema. Suffice it to say that these “quasi nations” are plagued by violence, and local governments in these places have great difficulty protecting their citizens.
None of this even takes into consideration what climate change in this century will do to erode the capacity of existing nations to cope. Places today that call themselves countries may degenerate into a collection of cultures with highly marginalized populations. Such dismal prognostications strike at the heart of all of us who hope for rationality and peace in the global context of massive demographic shifts. The most difficult problem in the future will be public acceptance of climate as a rationale for massive population displacements. Specifically, new forms of disease such as Ebola will influence public decisions about refugees in general. With these problems in mind, we should also examine new methods of immigration and refugee absorption that spread aliens throughout new environments to prevent the development of refugee camps, slums, and ethnic ghettos of people of color in primarily Caucasian landscapes.
Many industrialized countries of North America, Europe, and Australasia are seeking to protect themselves as wealthy enclaves from what they perceive to be the singular pressure of increasing international migration movements.61 Today the United Nations estimates that there are some forty-three million refugees at risk in various parts of the planet. Of those, some twenty-five million have been displaced by natural and human-caused disasters. Of these, eleven million are Africans, mostly from the Sudan. While many will stay behind, adrift and displaced in their own landscapes, others will take the migration route from poorer to richer countries. Some writers like Anthony H. Richmond are using the forceful analogy of apartheid to describe the strategy being developed by many Western developed nations to restrict and control these migrants. He points out that while the political structure of apartheid in South Africa has been dismantled, when it comes to movements of climate refugees, developed countries and others seem bent on constructing instruments that bear striking resemblance to those developed in South Africa in the 1950s.62 Richmond points to the following strategies being put into place in Western nations: (1) defense of existing cultural and social institutions, (2) state security, (3) maintenance of law and order, (4) the need to protect ethnic identity, and (5) the preservation of economic privilege.63 Thus the main response to stemming the flow of migrants has been to label them illegal or undesirable people.64
Resistance to the “onslaught of the refugee” takes the form of armed frontier patrols, computer data banks, fingerprinting, and various forms of travel documents.65 The problem of the flow of climate refugees toward these wealthy enclaves is accelerated by technology and globalization, which has bred a greater number of highways of economic interdependence than ever before. Of course the glaring contradiction of globalization is that money, goods, and information flow relatively freely across borders, whereas people do not.66
Meanwhile, we are witnessing an era of change fraught with cultural contradictions67—millions of people are on the move and no effective global institutions exist to deal with the problem. All that have emerged thus far are short-term solutions of “containment” born of political nativism and hysteria whipped up by the media. Richmond and others see that it will be difficult to maintain state sovereignty in the future against the vast mix of migrants. As Richmond notes, “All boundaries are permeable and borders can no longer be defended with walls, iron curtains, armed guards or surveillance systems.”68
In his 2015 encyclical, Laudato Si,69 Pope Francis framed the question of our common future on earth perhaps better than any scientist or philosopher: how can anyone claim to be building a better world without thinking of the environmental crisis and the suffering of the excluded?70 New dialogue is needed about the future of the planet, the pope argued. With the earth “beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,”71 the throwaway culture of the West has to be constrained. By “throwaways” the pope noted that treating people and environments as if they were expendable items of mass consumerism brought about by a “numbing of conscience” negatively affects the entire planet.72 “A true ecological approach always becomes a social approach, it must integrate questions of justice in debts on the environment so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.”73
The pope writes that he is especially concerned that there has been a “tragic rise in the number of migrants seeking to flee from the growing poverty caused by environmental deterioration.”74 These migrants, he continues, “are not recognized by international conventions as refugees; they bear the loss of the lives they left behind, while enjoying no legal protection whatsoever.”75 Sadly, Pope Francis notes, there is widespread indifference to such suffering. He pointed out the problem of a massive world water shortage in the coming decades: “It is also conceivable that the control of water by large multinational businesses may become a major source of conflict in this century.”76 He noted that a true “ecological debt” exists between the global north and south. It is connected to the commercial imbalances with decisions of government and by disproportionate use of natural resources by certain countries over long periods of time. “The Earth is being despoiled with a cheerful recklessness,” the pope lamented.77
Laudato Si is the Vatican’s powerful pronouncement in favor of a new social and environmental paradigm for the planet that through the moral suasion of religion seeks to transcend the traditional market culture of profit and loss into the realm of community. The question remains, however, whether Western developed nations will be willing to reduce their lifestyles and current patterns of consumption to achieve the pope’s vision of community. It is fitting that a spokesman for the world’s largest church should confront a question of human survival that is so biblical in nature.
With Laudato Si in mind, we need to clarify and redefine the United Nations’ legal framework that applies to people crossing borders in the wake of environmental disasters. Also, the bureaucracy of the UN is severely bloated with “empires within empires” and is in dire need of reorganization. Multilateral treaties similar to regional initiatives need to be put in place to set standards for the treatment of environmental refugees. Further, we need an asylum policy for environmental refugees that goes farther than the current UN strategy. Some countries can be subsidized by international agencies to offer temporary protective regimes for people who are uprooted by environmental change.
The way we live now on the planet is an affront to environmental morality. We pollute and poison the earth while the overwhelming bulk of its human population is treated as a mass of insignificant economic widgets to be used at will at the lowest possible cost. Add to this the glaring fact that countries that were once in the forefront of being civilized, democratic nations are now succumbing to authoritarian and xenophobic solutions to the problem of dealing with climate and other types of refugees.
In the United States politicians have a breathtaking ignorance of the real world and concentrate almost exclusively on overtly partisan issues. Environmental problems and the plight of climate refugees are tragically far down on the congressional action list. The belief that human-caused climate change is nothing but a scientific hoax is alive and well in our state and national legislatures.
The United States seems to be slipping its transatlantic bonds, and the nations of Europe have let a few Islamic fugitive gangsters frighten them out of their wits. The United States has not experienced the tramp of hostile invading armies on its soil since the Civil War; thus a long domestic peace has conditioned its outlook on the world. Few of us are alive today who experienced the shock of seeing displaced persons in our midst after World War II with concentration camp numbers tattooed on their arms. To understand the appalling reality of being a refugee in America we must resort to fiction like Cormac McCarthy’s dystopian novel, The Road.
Meanwhile, as millions on the planet plan their desperate departures from drying, drowning, and decaying landscapes, what is to be done? Who will provide the leadership during a period of one of the most dramatic demographic shifts in history? As we move forward through troubled times, we owe it to our children and grandchildren to make an effort to deal creatively with issues spawned by global migration. Many of the countries that we have discussed in this book are failing or dysfunctional. If something is to be done, that “something” has to come from the developed nations. What follows are comments that can help point the way for survival in an unsettled and increasingly mobile world.
We end this book on a somewhat hopeful note. While we realize that hope is not a practical strategy for the future, we nonetheless base this feeling based on historical facts. First, Europe has had a long history of dealing with refugees, and although parts of that history are sordid, Europe has handled its refugee population problems in the past in a manner that approached decency. Second, on the subject of climate refugees, there is only one international organization with the experience and the grit to deal with the massive flows of people driven by the forces of climate change. We refer, specifically, to the United Nations. Yes, the UN has problems. Eric Shawn, in his book The UN Exposed, claims that this body is rife with humbug, professional disillusionment and bureaucratic paralysis, and the UN’s critics have excoriated its leadership as nothing more than a self-serving gang, barely above the rank of hoodlums.78
A good bit of this criticism, perhaps racially based, stems from the fact that many of the leadership positions in the UN are held by representatives from developing nations who have the temerity to criticize the United States and the EU. Yet, despite the criticism, some of it well-deserved, the United Nations has done noble work in its refugee outreach. Who else can be found with the large-scale talent, compassion, and money to deal with the wrenching problems of poverty, migration, disease, and human loss? The United Nations has been proactive in many areas of the world in defending human rights, improving the treatment of minorities, and increasing the medical support of distressed populations. They know what refugee camps are like; they have been in the business of assisting refugees since the end of World War II.
The late historian Tony Judt pointed out the dilemma of the UN’s relationship with the United States: “A petulant United States, expecting the UN to sweep up after it and generally perform international miracles but resolutely opposed to furnishing it with the means to do so and intent upon undermining its credibility at every turn, is an insuperable handicap and a leading source of the very shortcomings American commentators deplore.”79 As Judt argued, the United Nations has made many contributions to maintaining world order through its agencies (World Health Organization, UNESCO, the United Nations Relief Works, and the UNHCR). In the future the United Nations will neither collapse nor go away like the ill-fated League of Nations after World War I. The basic task ahead will be to fine-tune the organization’s mission to include rescue, rehabilitation, and possibly resettlement of climate refugees in an even-handed manner.
One very hopeful development has been the Paris Climate Conference of 2015, where 188 nations signed a global accord setting a cap of two degrees centigrade on anthropogenic or greenhouse emissions. During the deliberations some six hundred thousand people took part in worldwide demonstrations in favor of reducing carbon emissions. Although many participants originally had low expectations about the conference outcome, the end result was surprising. The conference kept alive the hope that the earth’s warming would be held at two degrees. The conference pledged to monitor global emissions and to revisit this international goal every five years beginning in 2023.80
As the dramatic movements of people across the earth take place, we cannot afford to be mere bystanders. Our support for a safer, cleaner, more temperate world must be decisive. The struggle for the future is not so much poor against rich as it is between survival and non-survival of the human species. As Naomi Klein has stated, we need to build something in this age of climate change that is bigger than we ever dared to hope: “Yes there will be things that we will lose, luxuries that some of us will have to give up, whole industries that will disappear.”81 It is too late to stop climate change, but it is not too late to adapt and survive in changing circumstances.
The way forward, if there is to be a way forward, will involve the re-evaluation of approaches and attitudes toward aliens crossing borders in both poorer countries and developed nations as prosperous as the United States. Ironically, the international myopia about climate refugees exists at the same time that a wealth of strategies, procedures, and policies to ameliorate this problem have been developed by scholars and humanitarian agencies.
Environmental refugees exist and suffer and should be helped instead of being allowed to wallow in decrepit camps. People forced to flee through no fault of their own deserve a decent future. If climate refugees are not recognized in terms of what changes in the natural world are doing to them, they will continue to be more than a marginalized economic drag. Out of their camps will come all the evils of tomorrow—from disease to ethnic upheaval and terrorism.
The world’s climate is changing at a rate that far exceeds historical records. And one thing is certain: adaptation to climate change through migration has always been a possible human strategy. Now, however, what population experts call a “new human tsunami” is just one step away.82 A good start in developing new approaches to our current dilemma is by looking first at where we have been in the arc of history. We like to think that “things are different now,” but they really are not. We live in the long shadows of history, and whether or not we can learn from what has gone on before will determine how we deal with the onrushing crush of climate refugees in our present era. There is always hope.
Crispin Tickell, “Risks of Conflict—Resource and Population Pressures,” http://www.crispintickell.org/page13.htm11. Lester R. Brown, “Environmental Refugees: The Rising Tide,” chap. 6 in World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse (Earth Policy Institute, 2011), http://www.earth-policy.org/books/
2. Petra Ďurková, Anna Gromilova, Barbara Kiss, and Megi Plaku, “Climate Refugees in the 21st Century,” Regional Academy of the United Nations, https://fusiondotnet.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/climate-refugees-1.pdf.
3. Norman Myers, Environmental Exodus: An Emergent Crisis in the Global Arena (Washington, DC: Climate Institute, 1995).
4. See Foreign Aid Explorer website, https://explorer.usaid.gov, USAID, July 27, 2015.
5. Samantha Nutt, Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2011).
6. Angela Williams, “Turning the Tide: Recognizing Climate Change refugees in International Law,” Law and Policy 30:4 (October 2008), p. 523.
7. Ibid., p. 502
8. Ibid., p. 514.
9. Ibid., p. 517.
10. Susan Martin, “The State of the Evidence,” Forced Migration Review, May 28, 2015, 82–83.
11. Ibid.
12. Maria Waldinger and Sam Fankhauser, “Climate Change and Migration in Developing Countries: Evidence and Implications for PRISE Countries,” ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, October 2015: 10, http://www.cccep.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Climate-change-and-migration-in-developing-countries_final.pdf.
13. Benjamin Glahn, “‘Climate Refugees?’ Addressing the International Legal Gaps,” International Bar Association, June 11, 2009, http://www.ibanet.org/Article/NewDetail.aspx?ArticleUid=B51C02C1–3C27–4AE3-B4C4–7E350EB0F442.
14. Duncan Robinson and Alex Barker, “EU to Press Ahead with Plans to Suspend Schengen Rules,” Financial Times, December 4, 2015, https://www.ft.com/content/42214a5c-9aa1–11e5-be4f-0abd1978acaa.
15. Ian Traynor and Helena Smith, “EU Border Controls: Schengen Scheme on the Brink after Amsterdam Talks,” Guardian, January 26, 2016.
16. Griff White, “Denmark Turns Hostile on Refugees,” Washington Post, April 12, 2016.
17. Robinson and Barker, “EU to Press Ahead.”
18. Andrew Simms, Memorandum Submitted by the New Economics Foundation, Select Committee on International Development, https://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmintdev/79/79we29.htm.
19. Ibid.
20. Molly Conisbee and Andrew Simms, Environmental Refugees, The Case for Recognition (London: New Economics Foundation, 2003), p. 35, https://ia600703.us.archive.org/14/items/fp_Environmental_Refugees-The_Case_for_Recognition/Environmental_Refugees-The_Case_for_Recognition.pdf.
21. Gatrell, Making of the Modern Refugee, pp. 165–166.
22. Renaud et al., “Environmental Degradation and Migration,” p. 7.
23. Ibid.
24. UNHCR, Guidelines on Temporary Protection or Stay Arrangements, February 2014, available at http://www.refworld.org/docid/52fba2404.html.
25. The Stern Review presented a pioneering comprehensive analysis for understanding the world of the climate refugee. Nicholas Stern, The Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), ix, available at http://mudancasclimaticas.cptec.inpe.br/~rmclima/pdfs/destaques/sternreview_report_complete.pdf.
26. Williams, “Turning the Tide,” p. 518.
27. Norman Myers, “Environmental Refugees,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, p. 612, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692964/pdf/12028796.pdf.
28. Ibid.
29. Debt-for-environment swaps: “Arrangement in which a debtor nation trades a portion of its liabilities to fund local protection efforts. Also called debt for nature swaps.” BusinessDictionary.com.
30. Myers, “Environmental Refugees.”
31. Frank Biermann and Ingrid Boas, “Preparing for a Warmer World: Towards a Global Governance System to Protect Climate Refugees,” Global Environmental Politics 10, no. 1 (2010), p. 60–88, available at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/227627225_Preparing_for_a_Warmer_World_Towards_a_Global_Governance_System_to_Protect_Climate_Refugees.
32. Ibid., p. 75.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., p. 79.
35. Bonnie Docherty and Tyler Giannini, “Confronting a Rising Tide: A Proposal for a Convention on Climate Change Refugees,” Harvard Environmental Law Review 33 (2009): 349–450, http://www.law.harvard.edu/students/orgs/elr/v0133_2/Docherty%20Giannini.pdf.
36. Ibid., pp. 349–350.
37. Ibid., p. 350.
38. Ibid: 349–403.
39. Ibid., p. 357.
40. Ivid., p. 372.
41. Biermann and Boas, “Preparing for a Warmer World,” p. 79.
42. Conisbee and Simms, Environmental Refugees, p. 29.
43. Ibid.
44. Glanh, “Climate Refugees”?
45. Roger Zetter, “Protecting Environmentally Displaced People: Developing the Capacity of Legal and Normative Frameworks,” Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford, Refugee Studies Center Report, February 2011: 58.
46. Walter Kälin, “The Nansen Initiative: Building Consensus on Displacement in Disaster Contexts,” Forced Migration Review 49 (May 2015), p. 5, available at http://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/files/FMRdownloads/en/climatechange-disasters/kaelin.pdf.
47. The Nansen Initiative was named after Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), celebrated polar explorer, scientist, and peace advocate who became high commissioner for refugees for the League of Nations in 1921 and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his humanitarian work in dealing with displaced populations in the aftermath of World War I.
48. Kälin, “The Nansen Initiative,” p. 5.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., p. 7.
52. Glahn, “Climate Refugees”?
53. Ibid.
54. Zetter, “Protecting Environmentally Displaced People,” p. 4.
55. Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” Atlantic (February 1994), https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1994/02/the-coming-anarchy/304670/.
56. “Nigeria,” World Population Review, http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/nigeria-population, September 13, 2015.
57. Elisabeth Rosenthal, “Nigeria Tested by Rapid Rise in Population,” New York Times, April 14, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/15/world/africa/in-nigeria-a-preview-of-an-overcrowded-planet.html?_r=0.
58. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy.”
59. Quoted in Kaplan, ibid.
60. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy.”
61. Kathleen Valtonen, review of Anthony H. Richmond, Global Apartheid: Refugees, Raciosm, and the New World Order, in Refuge 14:6, p. 25.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid.
68. Anthony H. Richmond, Global Apartheid: Refugees, Raciosm, and the New World Order (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 205, quoted in ibid., p. 26.
69. Francis (pope), Laudato Si (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2015), http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html.
70. Ibid., para 13.
71. Ibid., para. 21.
72. Ibid., para. 22.
73. Ibid., para. 49.
74. Ibid., para. 25.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., para. 31.
77. Ibid., para. 59.
78. Eric Shawn, The UN Exposed: How the United Nations Sabotages American Security and Fails the World (New York: Sentinel, 2006).
79. Tony Judt, “Is the UN Doomed?” When the Facts Change: Essays 1995–2010 (New York: Penguin, 2015), p. 263.
80. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Adoption of the Paris Agreement, 30 November to 11 December 2015, Paris; see section 31.
81. Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014), 28.
82. Liberation Forum, September 2008, held a debate on the theme “Climate Refugees: A New Tsunami?”
