On the 12th of January 2010 a 7.0Mw earthquake sent catastrophic seismic shock waves through the Caribbean island of Haiti. The tremendous earthquake devastated the capital city of Port-de-Prince destroying large parts of the country’s infrastructure. According to UNDP a total of 188,383 buildings collapsed of which 105,000 were completely destroyed claiming the lives of 230,000 people and forcing 2.3 million to leave their home. The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) stated that at the peak of the disaster 1.5 million people were living in 1,354 spontaneous settlements, with 31,656 transitional shelters being constructed to provide for 158,000 families with safer living conditions.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-12135851
A year on and many of the leading world’s newspapers are - much as they where during the Caribbean disaster - gripped by the unfolding of another natural disaster. During the months of December and January Queensland, Australia was immersed in floods the size of Germany and France; floods described by the State Treasurer, Andrew Fraser, as events “of biblical proportions”. Official figures have declared that up to 200,000 people have been effected with 70 towns cut off and an estimated AU $1billion reconstruction bill.
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The 2009 Copenhagen Climate Change Convention underlined the links between human activity, climate change and an increase in these unstable natural patterns. Ecological scientific evidence is now widely accepted as demonstrating that our drastic changes in how we interact, cultivate and develop our land have had great climate changing effects on the planet. Leading academic scholars such as Richard Black (2001) affirm that before 2002 global emissions grew by about 1% a year, with a 3% growth in the following years.
Signing nations of the 2009 Copenhagen Accord (http://unfccc.int/resource/docs/2009/cop15/eng/l07.pdf ) declared “climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time”. However, while the Accord states that global temperature should not increase by more than two degrees Celsius, there is no specific provisions set forth for how that will be achieved. Instead, the Accord offers a relatively vague specification that “we should cooperate in achieving the peaking of global and national emissions as soon as possible recognizing that the time frame for peaking will be longer in developing countries”.
The lack of determination to establish concrete international policies in tackling many of the inter-linking issues relating to environmental degradation are of grave alarm. If not for anything history has taught that effective foresight in policy-orientated research and policy-making are essential in minimising predictable negative impacts to vulnerable populations.
As with the effects of the Haitian disaster and the Australia floods, global migration due to climate change and environmental degradation has greatly been highlighted to potentially displace millions of people over the next few decades. The slow on-set events including the rise in sea levels and deforestation are noted have already affected 24 million people today. Norman Myers (2002) has suggested that by 2050 up to 200 million people could be forced to migrate, a figure the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) regards to vary by a factor of 40 (between 25 million and one billion depending on which scenarios unfold).
Although organisations such as the IOM, UNU-EHS and UNEP have produced formidable research into the potential populations at risk, the international political will to implement concrete legislation still remains vague. In fact, as the German Advisory Council on Global Change stated in 2007 “environmentally induced migration has so far received little attention” (Research Workshop on Migration and the Environment: Developing a global research agenda, 2008).
Political interest in migration over the past decade has principally focused on identifying irregular migrants. The perseverance of many Northern countries to control immigration flows has led countries such as Italy, for example to establish off-shore identification centers (Centri di Permanenza Temporanea e Assistenza, CPTA – Centers of Temporal Permanence and Assistance) in north African countries such as Libya (not a signatory of the 1951 and 1967 Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees and with an abysmal human rights record). There is now growing evidence in pursuing of these draconian policies northern countries are ignoring the abuse of human rights taking place on their doorstep.
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In recognising that migration is a complex global phenomenon resulting from a wide range of economic, political and geographical motives both for migrants and for receiving countries it further demonstrates the necessity for the international community to recognise and address the concerns related to climate-induced migration. For it has been since as early as the 1990s that the IPCC has expressed serious concerns about the drastic effects climate change would have on human migration. With in 1992, Sadako Ogata, the then UN High Commissioner for Refugees stating that environmental degradation was increasingly becoming a cause a symptom of massive population movement.
According to a recent report by Piguet et al (2010) three main environmental factors are highlighted to grow in significance due to climate change. 1. The increase in strength and frequency of tropical cyclones, heavy rains and floods; 2. drought and desertification and 3. sea-level rise.
Proposed future policy in tackling the negative, gradual or drastic effects of environmental degradation have been to implement incentives for cross-border temporary labour migration. The IOM (2007) has recognised circular labour migration as a powerful tool in generating supplementary incomes (remittances), allowing migrants to ‘skill-up’ return, educate and build protective infrastructures. The potential held by labour mobility also extends to a positive impact on environmental restoration efforts, alleviating demographics pressure on the scarce natural resources. Such approaches are of pivotal importance when, as noted by Guchteneire & Pecoud (2006) up to 60 million individuals maybe at risk of desertification induced migration by 2020 in Sub-Saharan Africa – an area currently suffering considerable brain-drain.
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However, it is important to note that a crucial problem in implementing these issues lies within the complexities of the wide debate of the lack of consensus on the concept of ‘environmental refugees’. The UNHCR has stressed that the term bears no legal grounding covered by the 1951 Geneva Convention. There is a consensus among concerned agencies that the use of the term is to be avoided for it is misleading and could potentially undermine the international legal regime for the protection of refugees. In an effort to capture the complexities and extent of the phenomenon the IOM has advanced the following working definition.
‘Environmental migrants are persons or groups of persons who, predominantly for reasons of sudden pr progressive changes in the environment that adversely effect their lives or living conditions, are obliged to leave their homes or choose to do so, either temporarily or permanently, and who move either within their country or abroad’ (IOM policy brief 2009).
With no legal international protection labour migrants who decide to move and potentially establishing traditions of circular migration, sending remittances and brain gain benefits may been severely impeded. On the other hand environmental migrants may find themselves in irregular or undocumented situations, vulnerable to the exploitation of human traffickers and human smugglers, brain drain, potential imprisonment, prostitution and death (Guchteneire & Pecoud 2006).
In spite of this, the will to internationally adopt this definition still remains weak. The necessity to adopt a holistic, human security-orientated approach to climate-induced migration remains essential to address all forms of movement comprehensively.
The necessity for climate change to become a overarching priority for a wide range of international actors is imperative. Perhaps the very essence of the importance for international cooperation on climate-induced migration was never so well put as by the former U.S President Bill Clinton:
“If you’re worried about 400 people, you just let the world keep warming up like this for the next 50 years and your grandchildren will be worried about 400,000 people”.
AQM.
