The issue of environmental refugees is fast becoming prominent in the global arena. Indeed it promises to rank as one of the foremost human crises of our times.
Norman Myers, “Environmental Exodus”
On August 6, 2015, a misty gray day, an illegal migrant was arrested in Britain after he had walked the entire thirty-one-mile length of the English Channel Tunnel. His name was Abdul Tahman Haroun, a forty-year-old Sudanese illegal immigrant who walked the tunnel to Britain from Calais, France. He was charged with malicious obstruction to a railroad carriageway. The fact that he succeeded in walking under the channel to Folkstone, England, underscores the desperation of people like him fleeing the impoverished dry lands of Sudan. On that same date there were at least five hundred other attempts to reach Britain from Calais through the tunnel. The net effect of this development has been that Britain has posted one hundred more guards in the Eurotunnel terminal and announced new measures to deter asylum seekers, with possible prison sentences of up to five years.1
The tunnel is part of a larger issue of the number of people illegally trying to get into Europe from the Middle East and North Africa. Because of war and worsening environmental conditions, a constant flow of humanity is coming across into Europe, and there is no sign that it will be slowing down. Whether attempted by tunnel entry or in boats, which frequently capsize in the Mediterranean, this migration is part of humanity’s distress call.
Climate change is with us and we need to think about the next big, disturbing idea—the potentially disastrous consequences of massive numbers of environmental refugees at large on the planet. As early as 1990 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that “the greatest single impact of climate change could be on human migration with millions of people displaced by shoreline erosion, coastal flooding, and agricultural disruption,” writes the United Nations Development Program in its 2015 Human Development Report.2 These people will be left to seek new homes in an era where “asylum” has increasingly become an unwelcome term. In a recent book entitled Constant Battles, Steven LeBlanc of the Peabody Museum of Archeology argues that environmental changes such as population growth, droughts, and crop failures in the ancient Middle East resulted in higher levels of warfare. Anthropologist Jared Diamond describes similar developments among the ancient Mayans of Mexico and the Anasazi culture of New Mexico in Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.3 In addition, as Michael Klare observes, “Many experts believe that the fighting in Darfur and other war-ravaged areas of North Africa has been driven, at least in part, by competition among desert tribes for scarce water supplies, exacerbated in some cases by rising population levels.”4
University of Hawaii biogeographer Camilo Mora and colleagues have recently published a disturbing analysis of what lies in the global future.5 They call it the era of “climate departure,” a point at which, as Diane Toomey of Yale’s Environment 360 puts it, “the earth’s climate begins to cease resembling what has come before and moves into a new state, one where heat records are routinely shattered and what was once considered extreme will become the norm.”6 Mora and his coauthors examined millions of data points from various regions to determine what climate departure will mean for our planet. Interviewed by Toomey, Mora pegs the date of climate departure as 2047: “At the broadest scale, we calculate that year, under a business as usual scenario, is going to be 2047. Basically, by the year 2047 the climate is going to move beyond something we’ve never seen in the last 150 years.”7 The scientific models cover 200-year periods from sixty thousand locations around the world. The biggest climate changes, Mora’s team predicts, will actually occur sooner in the tropics, where species have long adapted to a stable climate and will suffer dramatically if the average temperature increases by just one or two degrees Celsius. This is already happening in some places in the world’s oceans, with massive bleaching of coral reefs.8
What scares Mora as a scientist and as an earth dweller is that changes are already happening around the world and that “people can’t appreciate the magnitude of these changes until it is too late,” but “when we start damaging physical systems and the carrying capacity of physical systems to produce food, people will react to this in a terrible way.”9 Climate departure will take place in a world of limited food. People need about two hectares each to provide the food to sustain them. Since there are some seven billion people on earth at present, and Mora’s team has estimated that the planet has only eleven billion hectares that can be sustainably harvested, “every year we consume three billion hectares.” The only remedy for the future, Mora notes, is to alert the public consciousness and embark on a concerted effort at reducing population growth.10
Most potential climate change consequences are described are in terms of weather extremes such as heat waves, floods, and severe storms. If we can extrapolate Mora’s data well into the future, we can anticipate greater and more damaging tropical storms and extreme heat waves that will transform moderate climate zones in the hemispheres into tropical environments or deserts. According to a data analysis published by the US Climate Change Science Program, there have been three distinct periods in the twentieth century in which the average number of tropical storms increased and then continued at “elevated levels.” The level of tropical storms globewide remained relatively stable until the close of the century, but in the ten-year period from 1995 to 2005, the number of extreme cyclones and hurricanes increased from an average of ten to fifteen: eight hurricanes and seven tropical storms.11 And as the Climate Institute notes, “It is important to consider that two of the driving forces behind hurricane formation (sea surface temperature and humidity levels) have been influenced by climate change.”12 Heat waves are another extreme weather event that will increase in number as greenhouse gas emissions continue, driving global temperatures caused by climate change increasingly higher. India and a number of other countries have seen their summer temperatures increase to over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. The summer of 2003 saw one of the highest weather-related death tolls in European history as fifty-two thousand people died as a result of heat extremes.13
With increased temperatures comes increased capacity of the atmosphere to hold moisture, resulting in heavier rainstorms. An increase in the intensity of floods in low-lying areas would be catastrophic around the world. In Bangladesh, for example, over seventeen million people live in elevations of less than three feet above sea level, and millions inhabit the flood plains and flat banks in the subcontinent along the Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers.14
Environmental factors are almost invariably linked with economic factors in the push and pull of everyday existence. In developing countries it is the impoverished who often bear the brunt of the most environmental damage, which in turn sets off migration events. Because people often become climate refugees as the result of multi-causal factors, it is not easy to quantify their displacement as a social science problem. But it should also be recognized that sometimes environmental decline has nothing to do with political economy. As Norman Myers has pointed out, “Not all factors can be quantified in comprehensive detail, nor can all analyses be supported with across-the-board documentation.”15 As we have seen, however, the links between climate and human migration are not new. The droughts of the 1930s in the plains of the American Dust Bowl forced hundreds of thousands of migrants toward California, and those that struck the Sahel region of Africa between 1969 and 1974 displaced millions of farmers and nomads toward the cities.16 If future changes in the climate continue to force mass levels of migration, it raises the question of when these victims will be granted rights to a form of protection.
The world has seen massive influxes of refugees before. The term “refugee” was first applied to Protestant Huguenots of France who were forced to leave the country by edict of King Louis XIV in 1685. (Revocation of the Edict of Nantes allowing religious toleration.) It was adopted from the French word “refugie,” originally meaning someone seeking religious asylum. Today, the term applies to those who flee to safety in a foreign country away from political upheaval.17 Neither the term “refugee” nor “migrant” seemed at all popular then or now, as it seems to confer a stigma on the persons involved. There is an intriguing body of literature on past refugee problems from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. In the past, refugees were often by-products of statebuilding processes. Nation-states excluded unwanted minorities much as the newly unified German state after 1864 excluded Poles. Turks excluded Armenians, and Balkan countries excluded Muslims. Relocation of refugees was seen as a preemptive measure to deal with problems of overcrowding and resource scarcity.
World War I created the first refugee crisis. The victorious nations at the Paris Peace Conference created the League of Nations, part of whose task was to deal with the repatriation and resettlement of 9.5 million refugees. The League of Nations was scarcely prepared to deal with the situation. The victors as well as the vanquished were in dire financial straits. The League of Nations’ High Commission for Refugees (1921) did meritorious work in repatriating prisoners of war, and under Commissioner Fridjhof Nansen the league was able to initiate identification papers for homeless or stateless refugees. But as historian Michael Marrus has pointed out, dealing with the refugee problem in the 1920s and 1930s was like “using bedroom sheets to block a hurricane.”18
Like the previous world war, World War II produced a tsunami of refugees. Allied military officials in 1945 quickly divided the vast hordes of people, over nine million, who had been either prisoners of war or enslaved by Nazi Germany, into two groups: refugees, who could be repatriated to their home countries, and “displaced persons,” who had no homeland. As Marrus describes it: “Millions of refugees moved through the wreckage of Eastern Europe: Germans expelled by the Russians and various governments, thousands of forced laborers released by the Nazi collapse, some 2.5 million Poles and Czechs returning from the Soviet Union . . . cast out of their homes by the conflagration of war.” Late in the war the International Refugee Organization was started by the United Nations to deal with the twin issues of refugee repatriation and resettlement. Across Germany and Eastern Europe “displaced persons camps” were organized to safeguard the mass of refugees from starvation and neglect. By 1949 the refugee horde had been reduced to what the High Commission on Refugees called “the final million.”19 There was no home for these people in Europe, and the bulk were taken by ship to the United States, Australia, and Canada. England and France took in fewer than one hundred thousand each. When future refugee crises erupted after the turn of the twenty-first century, these gates of resettlement and rehabilitation would be closed.
The United States, meanwhile, had been pursuing its own migration strategies. As Jane McAdam explains, during World War II President Franklin Roosevelt “created a covert research initiative known as the ‘M Project’ (M for ‘migration’), appointing a small team of experts to study possible resettlement sites across the world” for upward of ten to twenty million refugees in the postwar period. At its conclusion in 1945, the M Project had compiled more than six hundred land studies.20 This secret study, led by geographer Henry Field,21 was considered political dynamite during the war. According to McAdam, “Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Australia’s Northern Territories, Canada and Manchuria were identified as possible areas for refugee resettlement.”22 Strangely the vast unpopulated landscape of Alaska was not mentioned.
The Holocaust of World War II had created a problematic world of refugees, displaced persons, and embittered national populations but until 1944, 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 Henry Morgenthau Jr., the secretary of the treasury and sole Jew in Roosevelt’s cabinet, that the president was forced to confront the reality of the Holocaust. The report of the secretary of the treasury marked the transformation of American policy toward 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 amounted to only a tiny fraction of the millions of innocent people who ultimately perished.
At this writing, Europe is under siege by Syrian war refugees who represent one of the largest war-induced migrations in history. The war has dragged on for over four years now, taking more than two hundred thousand lives and causing untold destruction to the Syrian environment. Well over a million refugees have entered Europe, adding a complex religious and cultural mix to the already complicated issue of climate refugees. These streams of migrants may literally change the face of the continent in a generation. Optimists hope that through resettlement and education the issues can be resolved. Others believe that this might be the time when things begin to fall apart in our global system. At present, while a dangerous situation unfolds, many world leaders have chosen paralysis and mutual recrimination. At this juncture members of the EU nations of Europe are discussing ways to keep further immigration limited to “documented” refugees.
In 2009 only 30 percent of Americans believed that the world climate was changing. By 2012, surveys revealed that 70 percent of the American people had come to believe that greenhouse gases had altered the planet. A new age of environmental change—and subsequently refugees—had dawned.23
Environmental refugees in an age of sectarian violence, civil war, and economic recession are not a flashy public policy project. Most policy makers wish the subject would go away. But in an age when the world is being forced to bear witness to the fact that millions are fleeing their homes owing to sea rise, desertification, drought, unprecedented hurricanes, tsunamis, and war, the topic is stubbornly resistant to the kinds of public amnesia so often in effect in the world theater of nations.
We do not know how soon reality will trump ideology. At present there are lots of back-and-forth discussions between national and international leaders that have not been very productive. What is certain, however, is that climate change is not just changing the planet; it is changing human lives. In a 2007 essay for the Financial Times, David Cameron points out that “as early as 1971, Richard Falk [a professor of international law at Princeton University,] argued that environmental change was a security issue and outlined what he called his ‘first law of ecological politics’: the faster the rate of change, the less time to adapt, the more dangerous the impact will be.”24 We are now living in an age of resource shocks. Unbridled world consumption of food and water and other resources combined with the advent of climate change may produce a global explosion, writes Michael Klare in his book The Race for What’s Left. Different nations are coming up with different strategies on migration. Ultimately, climate refugees present us with a troublesome issue of human rights in an age of climate change, violence, and technological transformation.25
Extreme weather events in North Africa and elsewhere may become the norm rather than the exception. Certainly desertification has put large populations on the move in search of water, livelihood, and security. A rise in sea level will create serious situations considering that a quarter of the world’s population lives on or near coasts and that the majority of our own megacities are situated in coastal areas. A Pentagon memo notes: “Picture Japan’s coastal cities flooded, with their freshwater supplies contaminated. Envision Pakistan, India, and China—all nuclear powers—skirmishing at their borders over access to shared rivers and arable land with older coastal areas now submerged under rising seas.”26
It is often difficult to differentiate between those refugees driven by environmental factors and those driven by other factors. Economics, politics, culture, and climate intertwine like some sociological double helix. What refugees have in common, however, is that they are suffering, and often they are impoverished by the environmental degradation of their homeland, affected by tsunamis, desertification, water scarcity, and disease.
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 Office of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), with a lean staff of ten thousand seven hundred workers, is already stressed by refugee crises of some twenty-one and one-third million.27 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.
It is not rocket science to conclude that as the century progresses there will be a glaring need for more farms and farmers to feed the planet’s burgeoning population. Meanwhile, major countries like China are buying farmland in whatever country they can find it, and food stocks on Wall Street such as ConAgra and General Mills are soaring. Access to supplies like water and grain will become major concerns to countries with diminished rainfall. By 2020, warns Chatham House in its Resources Futures report, “yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by 50 percent” in some countries. The highest rates of loss are expected to be in Africa, where reliance on rain-fed farming is greatest, but agriculture in China, India, Pakistan, and Central Asia is also likely to be severely affected.28 Heat waves will diminish the flow of rivers, which will mean diminishing supplies of water for irrigation and hydroelectric power. Long range, in addition to setting waves of population migration in motion, a changed environment in the future will transform infrastructures of government out of recognition from their older patterns.
Presently, in the safe, affluent confines of our homes, we watch on our television or read in our newspapers or on the Internet of the relentless march of hundreds of thousands of refugees out of Africa and the Middle East bound for the sanctuary and prosperity of England and Western Europe. They are people who cannot hold on to a livelihood in their forsaken homelands because of drought, soil erosion, desertification, floods, and war. They are desperate people who are willing to risk the violence of nativist Europeans or drowning in a tempest of the Mediterranean Sea. Unlike other refugees of yesteryear, these people have abandoned their homeland with little hope of a foreseeable return.
Environmental 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 or permanent asylum? Will these refugees have any collective rights in the new areas they inhabit? And who will pay the costs of all the affected countries during the process of resettlement?
Developed Western nations like the United States also have begun to feel the shock of environmental stresses and catastrophes. A decade ago Hurricane Katrina put the proud Southern city of New Orleans underwater, and more recently Hurricane Sandy decimated the Middle Atlantic coast and flooded New York City. Today the Southwest languishes in one of the worst droughts in recent memory while environmental historians point out similarities with the Dust Bowl of winds that roared across the drought-ridden plains of Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma in the 1930s and covered distant cities like Washington and Philadelphia in a choking mantle of dust and dirt. California worries about its San Andreas Fault, and seismologists of the Pacific Northwest fear the coming of what they call “The Big One”—sliding tectonic plates of the “Cascadian subduction zone” resulting in a major earthquake followed by tsunamis whose impact will cover some 140,000 square miles, render seven million people homeless, and destroy and flood Seattle, Tacoma, Eugene, and Salem, the capital of Oregon.
Comprehending the scale of our looming climate crisis is difficult. And absorbing climate refugees or their war-torn brethren is burdensome and fraught with controversy. It is easy to welcome them at the airport but more complex to provide them with sustenance and jobs. Thus, when we contemplate the subject of refugees and the future, we might do well to look in a mirror and recognize that every one of us is or could be a migrant.
http://climate.org/archive/PDF/Environmental%20Exodus.pdf
1. “Channel Tunnel: Man Accused of Trying to Walk to UK,” BBC News, August 7, 2015.
2. “Human Development Report 2015,” United Nations Development Programme, 2015.
3. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, rev. ed. (New York: Penguin, 2011).
4. Michael T. Klare, “Entering a Resource-Shock World: How Resource Scarcity and Climate Change Could Produce a Global Explosion,” TomDispatch.com, http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175690/
5. Camilo Mora et al., “The Projected Timing of Climate Departure from Recent Variability,” Nature 502 (October 10, 2013): 183–87.
6. Diane Toomey, “Where Will the Earth Head after Its ‘Climate Departure’?,” Yale Environment 360, July 2, 2014, http://e360.yale.edu/feature/interview_camilo_mora_where_will_earth_head_after_its_climate_departure/2783/
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.; Juliet Eilperin, “More Frequent Heat Waves Linked to Global Warming,” Washington Post, August 4, 2006.
9. Toomey, “Where Will the Earth Head?”
10. Ibid.
11. Greg J. Holland and Peter J. Webster. “Heightened Tropical Cyclone Activity in the North Atlantic: Natural Variability or Climate Trend?” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 365 (2007): 2695–2716.
12. Quote and analysis from the Climate Institute, “Topics/Core Issues: Extreme Weather,” accessed October 26, 2016, http://climate.org/archive/topics/extreme-weather/index.html
13. Janet Larson, “Setting the Record Straight: More than 52,000 Died from Heat in Summer 2003,” Plan B Updates, Earth Policy Institute, July 28, 2006.
14. Government of Bangladesh and the European Commission, “Damage, Loss, and Needs Assessment for Disaster Recovery and Reconstruction,” pp. 14–16.
15. Norman Myers, Environmental Exodus: An Emergent Crisis in the Global Arena (Washington, DC: Climate Institute, 1995), 32.
16. UN High Commissioner for Refugees, “Climate Change and Forced Migration,” January 1, 2008, http://reliefweb.int/report/world/climate-change-and-forced-migration
17. Ben Zimmer, The Wall Street Journal, “The Burden Carried by ‘Refugee,’” September 4, 2015
18. Michael R. Marrus, The Unwanted: European Refugees in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 52.
19. Ibid.
20. Jane McAdam, “Lessons from Planned Relocation and Resettlement in the Past,” Forced Migration Review 49 (May 2015), 30–33, http://www.fmreview.org/sites/fmr/files/FMRdownloads/en/climatechange-disasters.pdf
21. Henry Field, M Project for F. D. R.: Studies on Migration and Settlement Literary Licensing, LLC, 2013
22. McAdam, “Lessons,” p. 31.
23. “Polling the American Public on Climate Change,” Environmental and Energy Study Institute, EESI Reports, October 2014.
24. David Cameron, “A Warmer World Is Ripe for Conflict and Danger,” FT.com, January 24, 2007, http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/49bca770-ab4f-11db-b5db-0000779e2340.html?ft_site=falcon&desktop=true#axzz4WGfG9J3i
25. Michael Klare, The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources (New York: Picador, 2012).
26. Dan Brook and Richard H. Schwartz, “The Warming Globe and Us: It’s More than C02,” Dissident Voice, May 1, 2007
27. UNHCR, “Figures at a Glance,” http://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html
28. Bernice Lee, Felix Preston, Jaakko Kooroshy, Rob Bailey, and Glada Lahn, Resources Futures: A Chatham House Report (London: The Royal Institute of International Affairs, December 2012), 76.