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Environmental refugees – how climate change affects people`s lives
Bild: Guru Thilak/stock.xchng
However, unlike victims of political upheaval, who can obtain financial and medical aid, food and shelter through governments and international organisations, environmental refugees are not yet recognized in the world conventions.
A major problem is that until now, even the United Nations has no official status for those who are environmental refugees. They do not acknowledge that the affected people are refugees seeking asylum. Since those affected are called “environmental migrants”, the legal status of those who should be “refugees” is undermined to the extent that they are not officially obliged to be given asylum.
However, experts from the United Nations University`s Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS) stressed, that there is an urgent need to define a new category of refugees. Prof. Hans van Ginkel, Rector of the UNU, further emphasises, that environment-related refugees must be distinguished from economic migrants, who depart voluntarily to find a better life but may return home.
Whilst the victims of sudden and highly-publicised natural disasters like the 2004 Asian tsunami or the Pakistan floods in 2007 and 2010, benefit from the generosity of the private and public sector, the circumstances which turn citizens into environmental refugees often happen silently and gradually, far away from the attention of the world. One example of those “silent catastrophes” is the Gobi desert in China, which expands every year by more than 10,000 square kilometres, threatening many villages and fertile soils. On the other side of the globe, Louisiana in the US loses around 65 square kilometres per year to the sea, and in Alaska 213 communities are threatened by tides that flow inland by up to three metres a year. The melting of the perma-frost soil will affect the building ground of Siberia and other regions of the world and in the UK, about 10 million people live in flood risk areas.
The inhabitants of the Carteret Atoll recently became climate refugees/Wikipedia
It is difficult to estimate the extent of environmental migration. At this point in time the UNU-EHS experts suggest that 50 million people are escaping from the effects of creeping environmental deterioration. Other estimates suggest that between 20 to 150 million people may be affected. According to Nicholas Stern from the London School of Economics, global warming could create some 200 million climate refugees by 2050 but Christian Aid suggests one billion for the same period of time.
The former Global Humanitarian Forum pointed out, that every year the deaths of over 300,000 people are attributable to climate change and another 325 million are seriously affected. Meanwhile, over 135 million people, as many as the combined populations of France and Germany, are in danger of being driven from their land. This is why the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) considers climate change to be a major challenge in the 21st century.
The developing world pays for the failures of the industrialised nations
Climate refugees in coastal area of Bangladesh, The World Wants a Real Deal/Flickr
Almost two billion people in the world today depend on the fragile ecosystems in arid and semi-arid areas, and ninety per cent of them live in the developing world. So the effects of the global warming, mainly caused by the industrialised nations, hit the poorest nations most. Here, ecological stresses caused by droughts and desertification are threatening livelihoods and food: certain crops and livestock are unlikely to survive in certain locations if conditions become too hot and dry, or too cold and wet. Small-scale farmers are particularly hard hit.
Since this leads to an increasing number of people competing for a decreasing amount of resources, environmental migration also has the potential to create conflicts with other communities. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for instance blames the ethnic and religious violence in Darfur on global warming: "The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change," he states in the Washington Post.
Further causes that lead to environmental migration due to global warming are monsoons, floodings and the disruption of seasonal weather patterns. Calculations have revealed that the rise of the sea level could increase by 12 centimetres in 2030 and by 50 centimetres in 2100. Since an estimated 50 per cent of humanity inhabits coastal zones including low-lying island groups, many more people will become affected.
India must face environmental migration challenges
Whole villages are becoming abandoned because of the large amount of rubbish that is being dumped there from the nearby cities. One example is the Indian village Chellipaddam near Kerala`s business capital Kochi. In 2007, 53 families had to leave their homes because of the decaying city waste which subjected some to illness and fainting.
In relation to India, there is a general concern about environmental migrants as well. Dr. Hefin Jones from Cardiff University estimated that the country itself will have around 30 million environmental migrants within 50 years. At the same time, the current illegal influx from Bangladesh, a low-lying delta nation, will rise. According to Jones, in future decades around 15 million affected persons in Bangladesh and around 30 million persons in China will be required to leave their local area because of the rise of the sea level, erosion and scarce soil fertility due to climate change. The average temperature in India, Jones continues, will increase by 3 to 5 degree Celsius by 2100. The warming will be felt mainly in the Northern parts and will lead to a 20 per cent rise in the summer monsoon rainfall.
In addition, the estimated rise in sea level in the Bamgla coastal areas will be one metre in 2050 and two metres in 2100. As a result, it is expected that the sea will submerge most of the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta including the Sunderbans. Being the largest delta region in the world, its 12 southern islands are threatened with erosion and submergence. Prof. Sugata Hazra from the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, estimates that out of the 4.1 million people living in the islands, 70,000 would be rendered homeless by 2020. Currently, most of the displaced people from two already submerged and six shrinking islands have been heading for Pathar Pratima island and Sagar island.
Helping environmental refugees
Until now, Finland and Sweden are the only countries, that include “environmental migrants” as “persons otherwise in need of protection” in their official state immigration and asylum policy. Both recognise “environmental migrants” as a category of individuals who are “unable to return to the country of origin because of an environmental disaster” and offer protection. Although Denmark does not refer to environmental migrants in its official asylum policy, it adopted a pragmatic approach. It grants, on discretionary grounds, asylum to single women and families with young children from areas where living conditions are considered to be very difficult because of famine and drought.
In relation to sudden natural disasters some exceptions do exist. The US, Canada and the European Union (EU) for instance do give temporary asylum to those people that are affected. Regarding the EU, none of their instruments makes mention of environmental refugees or migrants as yet. Nevertheless, the pressure of recognising them is growing.
An American initiative, worthy of note, is the Program to Relocate and Assist Environmental Refugees (PRAER). It seeks to promote awareness about environmental refugees and petitions the UNHCR and the industrialised nations to recognise the legal status of those displaced by climate change by giving them asylum as refugees. Its website also offers an option to sign a petition which is addressed to the President of the United States and to the President of the United Nations. Other initiatives include the Environmental Justice Foundation, Towards Recognition or Forced Migrations.
In October 2009, President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives held a very special cabinet meeting. In a blue-green lagoon, about 5 metres underwater, he drew attention to the threat of global warming to his beautiful, low-lying Indian Ocean state at risk of becoming swamped. Communicating with boards and hand signals, his cabinet signed a document calling for global cuts in carbon emissions. “We are going to die”, he expressed at a later press conference.
Sources & Links
- Climate Change, Migration and Displacement Events at COP16
- Environmental security is a human right
- Forced Migration Online (FMO)
- India TogetherIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
- Program to Relocate and Assist Environmental Refugees
- UNITED NATIONS UNIVERSITY - Institute for Environment and Human Security
- United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
- United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification
Gabriele Mante & Mattias Kolstrup, RESET-Redaktion
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Recognised as “Decade Project” by the UN Decade of Education for Sustainable Development
So-called environmentally induced migration is multi-level problem. According to Essam El-Hinnawi definition form 1985 environmental refugees as those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural or triggered by people) that jeopardised their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life. The fundamental distinction between `environmental migrants` and `environmental refugees` is a standpoint of contemporsry studies in EDPs.
Some reports predict that rising sea levels, desertification, soil erosion and shrinking freshwater supplies – all made worse by climate change – could create up to 50 million environmental refugees within the next 10 years. Yet environmental refugees are currently not recognised under the UN Convention on Refugees or any other international agreements.
According to Bogumil Terminski it seems reasonable to distinguish the general category of environmental migrants from the more specific (subordinate to it) category of environmental refugees.
Environmental migrants, therefore, are persons making a short-lived, cyclical, or longerterm change of residence, of a voluntary or forced character, due to specific environmental factors. Environmental refugees form a specific type of environmental migrant.
Environmental refugees, therefore, are persons compelled to spontaneous, short-lived, cyclical, or longer-term changes of residence due to sudden or gradually worsening changes in environmental factors important to their living, which may be of either a short-term or an irreversible character.
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