An Urgent Need To Begin Addressing Climate Change Displacement

While there isn't a single, isolated link between climate change and human displacement, it is clear that they are related.

There have long been discussions about the effects of climate change on displacement and human migration, and terms like "environmental refugees" and "climate refugees" are being used in both the media and in academia with increasing frequency. Yet the first large-scale conference on climate change and displacement wasn't held until 2011, which was the Nansen Conference: Climate Change and Displacement in the 21st Century.

Given the escalating nature of the climate crisis and the extremely high likelihood that we will see mass migrations occur as a result, it is critically important to treat the issue of climate-caused displacement with the urgency it deserves and to treat it as a full-blown crisis unto itself. In order to do this, however, it would first be necessary to clarify the legal definition of climate refugees and to specify how the issue of climate refugees will be addressed from the standpoint of international law.

Defining What a Climate Refugee Is

Part of the problem lies with the 1951 Refugee Convention as it currently exists, which doesn't define or make accommodations for climate refugees. Whereas the principle of non-refoulement contained in the Convention prohibits forcing conventional refugees to return to their place of origin, this does not currently cover climate refugees.

As of present, neither the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons nor the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness provides protection for climate refugees. The issue, fundamentally, is that the definition of a climate refugee hasn't been clarified in international law.

Researchers and scholars in the fields of international law, human rights and environmental policy have suggested a number of possible definitions which could be consolidated into something like the following:

Climate refugees are people forced to leave their homes and temporarily or permanently relocate due to sudden or gradual environmental disruptions caused by climate change.

Sociologist Diane C. Bates has also suggested further classifying two different types of itinerants within this context: environmental migrants, whose native environments are being affected by climate change but whose movements could still be said to be at least somewhat voluntary, and environmental refugees, who truly have no choice but to move due to uncontrollable external forces.

Of course, determining what constitutes "voluntary" and "involuntary" and how to universally assess when an instance of displacement is one or the other is also something that would need to be figured out. As you might imagine, the line is a very blurry one.

The Urgency of the Present and Future Situations

Beyond the scientific study of climate change itself — what causes it and how it occurs — there's a strong moral argument to be made for the urgent need to study the precise ways that climate change causes displacement as well as ways to mitigate the human suffering caused by such displacement.

Already, displacement caused by climate change is a far bigger and more urgent crisis than many, especially those in developed nations, may realize. As of December 2020, over 80 million people worldwide have been forced to flee their homes and over 26 million have left everything behind, including their native countries, in the hope of finding safety and security.

Furthermore, there are 25 people newly displaced every minute — that's over 35,000 displacements each day. Looking ahead, the World Bank projects that 216 million people in six regions could become climate change refugees by 2050. The problems and challenges of creating and coordinating effective multilateral humanitarian response programs will therefore only continue to grow.

For those living in the U.S., this isn't a far-removed problem either. Numerous regions are already impacted by climate change and the situation is becoming more urgent. 8 million people in Florida, for example, are at risk of rising sea levels, unclean water, and intensifying natural disasters, all a result of climate change, with the escalation of these problems certain to cause widespread displacement.

The need for effective multilateral responses to the refugee crisis is particularly urgent in the context of refugee camps, which house roughly a quarter of all refugees. Specifically, concerns about the national and international security challenges emerging from refugee camps are increasing, including threats to the safety of humanitarian workers, refugee radicalization and recruitment into terrorist and rebel movements, the proliferation of small arms, the spillover of civil conflict into neighboring counties and the persistence of failed states, among others.

In these and many other ways, refugee camps can be dangerous sources of regional instability and deserve as much attention by governments, donors and regional and security organizations as more conventional security threats.

Yet, despite all this, and despite the growing severity of the problem, the world "barely pays attention" to the plight of climate refugees, as NPR once put it, and a primary cause of this is due to the lack of international agreement on what a climate refugee is, precisely.

The Moral Dimension of Climate-Caused Displacement

The moral imperative of addressing climate-caused displacement is amplified by the anthropogenic origin of climate change. Not only is it human-caused, the brunt of the responsibility lies with wealthy nations which make up just 12% of the global population but create 50% of the greenhouse gasses through the consumption of fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, the effects of climate change disproportionately impact poor and developing nations, even threatening to undo the developmental gains they have achieved. This adds further urgency to the argument that addressing climate-caused displacement is a moral and ethical responsibility.

In an attempt to address this, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has established "recommendations for integrated approaches to avert, minimize and address displacement." But, as of yet, there still isn't a legal designation through which we can address the issue of people displaced by environmental forces.

Beyond such recommendations, there hasn't been much progress, to the point that many critics and commentators have suggested that the failure of states to take decisive action to address climate-caused displacement reflects their reluctance to acknowledge their failure to mitigate climate change as a whole.

Because of the way that climate change threatens the ability of people everywhere to enjoy what the international community has agreed are inalienable human rights — such as access to food, water, housing, medical care and basic security — there is increasing consensus that climate change is a human rights issue in addition to being an ecological one.

And if climate change itself violates basic human rights, then climate displacement also violates those rights. To remediate climate migration and provide climate justice would therefore be responding to violated human rights and should be treated as such.

It is in the context of all this information that advocates urge the need to create a protected status for climate migrants. There are those who argue that climate refugees could be protected within existing frameworks or by expanding existing frameworks without forming a new type of protection. Others contend that a unique categorization of displacement must be created to be able to identify the unique needs that climate refugees have, where new rights might be generated specifically for them.

But whichever approach is taken, one thing is clear: Action simply must be taken now lest we soon find ourselves with a moral, human rights and geopolitical catastrophe on our hands.

(Khaldoun AbouAssi, Ph.D., is The Provost Associate Professor at the American University's Department of Public Administration and Policy - School of Public Affairs)