Disaster demands we be ready
Climate change will displace millions in coming decades. Nations should prepare now to help them
Wildfires tearing across Southern California have forced thousands of residents to evacuate their homes. Even more people fled the hurricanes that slammed into Texas and Florida earlier this year, jamming highways and filling hotels. A viral social media post showed a flight-radar picture of people trying to escape Florida and posed a provocative question: What if the adjoining states were countries and didn’t grant escaping migrants refuge?
Experts estimate that by the middle of this century, climate change will displace between 150 million and 300 million people. If this group formed a country, it would be the world’s fourth-largest, nearly as many people as in the United States.
Yet neither individual countries nor the global community are completely prepared to support a whole new class of “climate migrants”.
Millions displaced yearly
Climate migration is already happening. Every year desertification in Mexico’s drylands forces 700,000 people to relocate. Cyclones have displaced thousands from Tuvalu in the South Pacific and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean. Experts agree that prolonged drought may have catalysed Syria’s civil war.
Between 2008 and 2015, an average of 26.4 million people per year were displaced by climate- or weather-related disasters, according to the United Nations. And the science of climate change indicates these trends are likely to get worse. Sea levels may rise up to 1m by the year 2100, submerging coastal areas and islands.
The Pacific Islands are extremely vulnerable, as are more than 410 cities including Amsterdam, Hamburg, Lisbon and Mumbai. Parts of west Asia may become inhospitable to human life.
Climate change will affect most everyone to some degree, but poor people in developing nations will be affected most severely. Undernourished people who have few resources and inadequate housing are especially at risk.
Recognise and plan
The global community has not uni- versally acknowledged the existence of climate migrants, much less agreed how to define them. According to international refugee law, climate migrants are not considered refugees, so they have none of the protections accorded to refugees, who are defined as people fleeing persecution. No global agreements exist to help the millions of people displaced by natural disasters every year.
Governments and organisations such as the United Nations should provide legal status to environmental refugees and establish protections and rights for them. Reforms could factor in the concept of “climate justice”, after all, richer countries have contributed the most to cause warming, while poor countries will bear the worst consequences.
Some have suggested countries that bear major responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions should take in more refugees. Alternatively, the largest carbon polluters could contribute to a fund that would pay for refugee care and resettlement.
The Paris climate agreement does not mention climate refugees. However, there have been some initiatives by various organisations and governments. They include efforts to create a climate change displacement coordination facility and a UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Climate Change.
As history has shown, destination countries respond to waves of migration in various ways, ranging from welcoming immigrants to placing them in detention camps. Some countries may be selective in whom they allow in, favouring the young and productive while leaving children, the elderly and infirm behind. A guiding global policy could outline minimum standards.
Short-term actions
Negotiating international agreements could take many years. For now, major G20 powers should consider intermediate steps. The US could offer temporary protected status to climate migrants already on its soil. Government aid programmes and nongovernment organisations should ramp up support to relief organisations and ensure aid reaches refugees from climate disasters.
In addition, all countries that have not signed the United Nations refugee conventions could consider doing so. This includes many developing countries in South Asia and the Middle East that are highly vulnerable to climate change and already have large refugee populations.
The scale of this challenge is unlike anything humanity has faced. By midcentury, climate change is likely to uproot far more people than WWII, which displaced some 60 million across Europe. The migration crisis that has gripped Europe since 2015 has involved something over 1 million people. It is daunting to envision much larger flows of people, but that is why the global community should start doing so now.