The Third Rail of Climate Change: Climate Refugees

The World Bank’s World Development Report 2010 finds that climate change at its current rates will lead to “a vastly different world from today, with more extreme weather events, most ecosystems stressed and changing, many species doomed to extinction, and whole island nations threatened by inundation.”

The report is dire: 2 degree Celsius warming, now guaranteed by climate scientists, will result in 100 million to 400 million people at risk from hunger and disease due to increased droughts and flooding, 1 billion to 2 billion will experience water shortages, and per capita incomes will decline 4-5% throughout the developing world as the agriculture and tourism people depend on for their livelihoods declines.

By mid-century, between 25 million and 1 billion people will likely be displaced due to climate change, an analysis by the International Organization for Migration suggests.

Some of these climate refugees will cross international borders; others will move within their borders. But people who are displaced by climate change have only temporary rights to shelter rather than permanent rights to resettlement under current international laws. Several countries, including the United States and the UK, have occasionally issued temporary visas for people displaced by natural disasters, but they have no long-term relocation policies for people whose homelands become unlivable due to climate change.

There were rumblings in 2001 of a precedent-setting agreement between the low-lying Pacific island nation of Tuvalu and New Zealand to accept Tuvalu's entire population of 11,000 should climate-related evacuation become necessary. The existence of such an agreement is a common myth.

New Zealand only accepts refugees under the United Nation's 1951 and 1967 Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. The government’s immigration policy only extends to Pacific island countries via family and economic ties under the Pacific Island Access Category for which it has yearly quotas, currently 75 annually from Tuvalu and Kiribati, 250 from Tonga, 1,100 from Samoa.

“New Zealand’s immediate climate change focus is on effective and comprehensive global mitigation to reduce emissions, and adaptation action, so as to avoid such migration scenarios in the first place,” say officials from New Zealand’s Foreign Affairs and Trade Department. New Zealand supports “disaster prevention and mitigation activities with partner governments, regional agencies and civil society to ensure that communities are better prepared to endure and recover from crisis situations.”

The EU has studied the impact of climate change on migration through its EACH-FOR program. The multi-regional, two-year studies found that migration is a complex decision and “longer term or permanent migration, in contrast to seasonal or temporary migration, is becoming more common, particularly among younger generations.”

But the EU does little more than acknowledge that certain countries are on the front line of climate change and that the EU will face increasing “migration pressure” from the developing world which will bear the brunt of climatic impacts.

The EU’s proposed responses, says Edward Ricketts at the EU’s Chamber of Commerce in London, are limited to “greater EU disaster response and conflict prevention capabilities” as well as “more 'carbon diplomacy,” establishing joint agreements for technology transfer to help countries reduce their emissions.

Franck Duevell, a senior researcher at the Oxford University-based Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, explains that the lack of policy response by governments has to do with the unreliability of the numbers of people expected to move: