Hosted by Climate Refugees

The World Bank's latest report on internal migration states: "a more complete picture of patterns of mobility must now include those moving due to climate change." The UN Refugee Agency notes "climate change is also driving displacement and increasing the vulnerability of those already forced to flee." At the same time, climate shocks on human mobility need not be inevitable with immediate, coordinated and effective global action. Protecting today's migrants must mean the right to migrate, but also the right to not migrate. For migration should be an option, but not the only option to survive. With the climate talks in Glasgow less than a month away, these leaders weigh in on the protections and policies we need to safeguard the most vulnerable against climate-induced migration and displacement.

Panelists:

US Congressman Joaquin Castro represents the Texas 20th Congressional District in the US House of Representatives. He was elected as representative in 2012. Congressman Castro serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and is Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Development, International Organizations & Global Corporate Social Impact. Full bio in link.

Ambassador Melanne Verveer is the Executive Director of the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security. Ambassador Verveer previously served as the first U.S. Ambassador for Global Women’s Issues, a position to which she was nominated by President Obama in 2009. She coordinated foreign policy issues and activities relating to the political, economic and social advancement of women, traveling to nearly sixty countries. She worked to ensure that women’s participation and rights are fully integrated into U.S. foreign policy, and she played a leadership role in the Administration’s development of the U.S. National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security. President Obama also appointed her to serve as the U.S. Representative to the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Full bio in link.

Professor Saleemul Huq is the Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) and Professor at the Independent University Bangladesh (IUB) as well as Senior Associate of the International Institute on Environment and Development (IIED) in the United Kingdom. In addition he is the Chair of the Expert Advisory Group for the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) and also Senior Adviser on Locally Led Adaptation with Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA) headquartered in the Netherlands.

He is an expert in adaptation to climate change in the most vulnerable developing countries and has been a lead author of the third, fourth and fifth assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and he also advises the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In addition he is affiliated with the UN Food System Summit for 2021 as co-chair of the Action Track 5 on Building Resilience to Vulnerabilities, Shocks & Stress. Full bio in link.

Moderator:
Amali Tower is the Founder & Executive Director of Climate Refugees. Amali has extensive global experience in refugee protection, refugee resettlement and forced migration and displacement contexts, having worked for numerous NGOs, the UN Refugee Agency and the US Refugee Admissions Program. She has conducted country and regional visits, case studies and research in climate-induced displacement contexts, including in urban and camp settings. Her research on climate, conflict and displacement in the Lake Chad Basin in the African Sahel has been selected as evidence of loss and damage to be presented at COP 26 in Glasgow. She is a a member of the World Economic Forum Expert Network in Migration, Human Rights and Humanitarian Response. Full bio in link.

This event has now ended but you can watch a recording of the great discussion below.

Date: April 22

Event time: 1:00 PM ET / 17:00 GMT

Migrant arrivals at the US-Mexico border in recent weeks has led to usual outcries by some of a “border crisis.” Many of these individuals arriving are asylum-seekers from Central America seeking international protection, where compounding pressures and the failure to address conditions displacing individuals, including climate risks, are among the reasons driving forced movements to US borders.

In February, President Biden issued an executive order on Rebuilding and Enhancing Programs to Resettle Refugees and Planning for the Impact of Climate Change on Migration. It offers the possibility of US commitment to address climate change and forced migration through increased support to climate resilience, protection and resettlement pathways for individuals displaced by climate-related impacts, and opportunities for international cooperation. In response to the executive order, Climate Refugees released the report Climate Change, Forced Displacement, Peace & Security: Biden Administration Actions That Ensure Rights.

Now Climate Refugees with co-host the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University are hosting a virtual panel discussion on Central American migration at US borders through the lens of actors and activists working on the frontlines. We will bring together experts in asylum, climate policy, and environmental justice, working at individual, community and regional levels to discuss their respective work and solutions, and an overarching view on what can be done at the global level, ahead of the climate negotiations at COP26 in Glasgow.

Register for Zoom link.

Special Opening Remarks

Congressman Joaquin Castro, US House of Representatives, Texas.

Panelists

Erika Andiola is the Chief Advocacy Officer for RAICES and former Press Secretary for Latino Outreach for Bernie 2016. She started her community organizing experience when she co-founded the Arizona Dream Act Coalition. She then served in the National Coordinating Committee and the Board of Directors for the United We Dream Network. Her personal struggle as an undocumented woman herself, with an undocumented family, has given her the drive and the passion to keep fighting for immigrant and human rights.

Alma Maquitico is the co-director of the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, where she leads NNIRR’s strategic human rights work to uphold human rights standards on the US-Mexico border, build intersectional solidarity and frameworks and political action to guarantee human rights and dignity. Alma's work has centered on developing initiatives to address rural development, climate change, and human rights. Over the past twenty years, she has provided technical assistance to various grassroots organizations addressing food, agriculture, and ecological sustainability, particularly with migrant and refugee communities on the US-Mexico borderlands. In addition, Maquitico has helped build grassroots networks to monitor and document human rights violations resulting from immigration enforcement in communities along the US-Mexico border. She is the author and co-author of various articles and publications at NNIRR and beyond. Her most recent publication is forthcoming, Food as Territory: Reclaiming the Food Territories of Migrants and Refugees. For more information about NNIRR's work please visit www.nnirr.org.

Jasmine Sanders is a climate scientist, strategist, advocate and Executive Director of Our Climate, a climate change advocacy organization energized by its youth grassroots movement. Prior to her appointment as Executive Director of Our Climate, she managed the strategic initiatives and special projects for the international refugee rights protection agency HIAS. Her passion for environmental issues and keen academic aptitude in the sciences and mathematics won her the coveted internship with the U.S. House of Representatives Science, Space and Technology Committee and a policy fellowship with Terpstra Associates, a DC lobbying firm where she advocated on Capitol Hill for agricultural and environmental issues. She holds a graduate degree from the University of Essex with a MSc in Tropical Marine Biology. Specializing in climate change,Ms. Sanders is a graduate from the University of South Alabama with a BS in Biology and a minor in Spanish. She currently resides in Washington, DC.

Adrián Martinez Blanco, MA is the Director of La Ruta del Clima, a Costa Rican NGO that promotes public participation in climate and environmental decision-making that has been an observer, advocating at the UNFCCC climate summits since 2014. Adrián is the co-author, along with his colleague Helen Gutierrez, of the newly released Movilidad Humana: Derechos Humanos y Justicia Climática (Human Mobility: Human Rights and Climate Justice). His areas of research includes climate impacts, loss and damage, human rights, public participation and international climate law. He is a current PhD candidate at the University of Eastern Finland and holds a Master in Environment, Development and Peace with a specialty in climate public policies.

Moderator

Amali Tower, Founder and Executive Director of Climate Refugees. Author of the recent report, Climate Change, Forced Displacement, Peace & Security: Biden Administration Actions That Ensure Rights

This event has now passed but we invite you to watch a live broadcast of the event below. Thank you.

Online

Climate Refugees with co-hosts Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University brings together experts in environmental racism, Indigenous rights, climate science and racial justice to discuss the two big issues of our time: race and climate change.

The climate crisis disproportionately impacts marginalized populations, many of whom may be displaced or forced to migrate because of years of unequal access to opportunities and gaps in human rights. The COVID-19 pandemic, George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests for racial justice – coming on the heels of one another – equally demonstrate the impacts of two very different crises that have disproportionate impacts on Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) because of systemic unequal access to opportunities, a link Climate Refugees  made in an Op-Ed on race and asylum. Philip Alston, the UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights’ report on Climate Change and Poverty, revealed developing countries will bear 75 percent of the financial costs and losses associated with the climate crisis, despite contributing only 10 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, creating a situation in which those in extreme poverty now also live in extreme weather. The report warned of increasing divisions as well, the risk of a ‘climate apartheid’, where the wealthy escape the negative impacts of climate change, leaving impacts to be borne by disproportionate groups ostracized by divisions, including race. In the U.S., people of color are far more likely to live near pollutants, Black communities face higher risks from air pollution, and Black mothers are most affected by pregnancy risks associated with climate change, linking race, even more than poverty, to environmental pollutants, something long stated by environmental justice and Indigenous rights activists.

Panelists

Professor Philip G. Alston
Dr. Lucky Tran
Dr. Ingrid Waldron
Professor Carlton Waterhouse

Convened & Moderated by Amali Tower, Climate Refugees

Professor Philip Alston is the John Norton Pomeroy Professor of Law at NYU, where he co-chairs the NYU Center for Human Rights and Global Justice. He has a distinguished career in the field of international law and human rights. In human rights he was appointed in 2014 as the UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and has visited and reported on Chile, China, Mauritania, Romania, and Saudi Arabia. He was previously UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions from 2004 to 2010 and undertook fact-finding missions to 14 countries. He was a member of the Group of Experts on Darfur appointed in 2007 by the UN Human Rights Council, and was special adviser to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights on the Millennium Development Goals. He chaired the UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights for eight years until 1998, and at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights he was elected to chair the first meeting of the Presidents and Chairs of all of the international human rights courts and committees. He was UNICEF's legal adviser throughout the period of the drafting of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In 2010-11 he was a member of the Independent International Commission investigating human rights violations in Kyrgzstan.

As a UN official, he has worked for several other UN agencies and NGOs, throughout his career, as well as taught international law at several prestigious universities, including Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and Harvard School of Law. His full biography is linked above.

Dr. Lucky Tran, is a biologist and science communicator based at Columbia University, where he is the Director of Communication and Media Relations at the Irving Medical Center. He holds a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Cambridge. As a steering committee member, he was one of the organizers of the March for Science, the largest day of science advocacy in history, with over one million participants in over 600 cities worldwide. Lucky has also been an organizer with the People’s Climate March, Occupy Wall Street, and was a founding member of artivist collective, the Illuminator. He’s worked as a science journalist and media personality because he enjoys helping people understand science through various mediums, including via award-wining movies that explain complex science in simple ways, featured in the Washington Post, NBC, CBS, Time, National Geographic and more. HIs views have been published in print, radio, tv and online in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, The Atlantic, VICE and many more. Lucky is a refugee who grew up in Australia and now lives in New York. As a scientist and refugee, his two main areas of activism are climate justice and immigrant justice.

Professor Carlton Waterhouse is an international expert on environmental law and environmental justice, as well as reparations and redress for historic injustices. He lectures globally on climate justice and group based inequality. In 2019, he testified before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights of the Organization of American States and in 2018 he completed a Fulbright research fellowship in Brazil examining race and police violence. His views have been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and many other media outlets. His scholarship includes essays, articles, and book chapters focused on the ethical and legal dimensions of environmental justice and reparations. He is currently completing a book on Social Dominance and the Supreme Court that explores the Court’s past and current role in maintaining racial hierarchy in American society. Professor Waterhouse began his career as an attorney with the EPA, where he served in the Office of Regional Counsel in Atlanta, Georgia and the Office of General Counsel in Washington, D.C. He is a Professor of Law at Howard University, where he is building the Howard University Environmental Justice Center at Howard Law School. Drawing from his unique background, Professor Waterhouse examines civil rights, human rights, and environmental issues from a multidisciplinary approach. He actively participates in national, local, and international organizations protecting civil rights and addressing environmental issues like climate justice.