Refugees forgotten in Paris
A huge effect of environmental change is mass migration, but amid the thrust to cut emissions, it was overlooked in climate talks
While the United Nations climate change talks in Paris struggled to elicit credible commitments, notably missing from the debate was “environmental displacement” — people fleeing their homes on account of natural disasters. As temperatures and sea levels rise, and land-use patterns change, there will be significant consequences for human mobility within and across borders.
However, public and media debate scarcely discussed the issue and the only references in the Paris summit’s negotiated outcome document are vague to the point of meaninglessness. This absence is especially striking in a year in which refugees and migration have otherwise been so high on the political agenda.
This political dissonance is of a piece with the compartmentalised way in which we approach many global issues. During a frenzied summer, media coverage and political attention focused almost exclusively on refugees. Now, with saturation point reached, the circus has moved on.
Climate change has, instead, become the de rigueur (required by etiquette or current fashion) liberal issue of the day. Remarkably, the global focus on refugees was insufficient to influence the debate in Paris. When we shift our attention so dramatically, we risk missing important analytical connections and, with them, opportunities for meaningful solutions.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, governments created the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. It ensures that states have a reciprocal obligation towards people fleeing a wellfounded fear of persecution. This framework was well adapted to the refugee movements of the 20th century. It continues to be relevant, but it leaves gaps.
Climate change is one cause that falls outside the existing refugee framework. Sinking islands, desertification and flooding, for instance, can all require people to leave their homes. However, the relationship between environmental change and displacement is complex and multi-causal; shaped by other factors, most notably governance.
As Hurricane Katrina illustrated, in countries with strong governance such as the US, a natural disaster is unlikely to require people to cross borders. It is in countries with weaker governance and limited coping capacity that crossborder movements may take place.
Little progress
So far, the institutional response remains limited, though there are two embryonic frameworks. First, in December 2010, an earlier round of the United Nations climate negotiations created the first international legal recognition of the relationship between climate change and migration. However, the framework did not specify how to address the problem of people moving on account of climate change and has not been built upon in subsequent rounds of negotiations.
Second, in October 2015, came a government-led informal process called the Nansen Initiative. This launched a protection agenda, endorsed by 110 countries, though offered no governance framework support international action.
In Paris, there was little progress. The issue has not been a priority for governments. A draft text proposed “a climate change displacement coordination facility”. But this was watered down in the negotiations, leaving only a vague statement about a “task force” to “develop recommendations for integrated approaches to avert, minimise and address displacement related to the adverse impacts of climate change”.
Standing back from these institutional discussions, it’s debatable whether the climate change negotiations are an adequate venue for addressing the underlying issue. The huge challenge is how we should respond to the movements of vulnerable people who do not fit the institutional boxes. With the exception of sinking islands, what drives much supposedly environmental displacement is its interaction with a range of other social, economic and political factors. What’s more, if what we care about is ensuring
to protection for the most vulnerable people, then what matters is not to privilege a particular cause of displacement but to identify a threshold of fundamental rights. When these are unavailable in the country of origin, border crossing has to be guaranteed as a last resort.
This wider challenge of how we think about new drivers of displacement can be found in the European refugee crisis. Nearly all Syrians would meet the 1951 standard of “persecution”. However, for many other nationalities, the picture is more complex. Most are from refugee-producing countries, but not all would qualify for asylum. Yet, this does not mean the residual category can be neatly subsumed under a label of “voluntary, economic migrants”.
Rather, a significant proportion of those fleeing countries such as Afghanistan or Iraq are fleeing a chronically fragile state, within which they are unable to secure the minimum conditions of human dignity. It is these types of movement for which the international community lacks an adequate conceptual or institutional response.
From the climate negotiations to the sustainable development goals to next year’s World Humanitarian Summit, human displacement should be an integral and ongoing part of the agenda. Responses to the needs of millions of vulnerable people should not depend upon box-ticking. Instead, across international processes and branches of government, we need to see the connections and opportunities.
Alexander Betts is director of the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement.
gulfnews.com