Ashraful Haque Akash via UNSPLASH
We have long known that refugees have been forced to flee their homes for a multitude of drivers, including drought, livelihood loss and poverty rooted in climate-related impacts.
We know that refugees, whatever the reasons for their eventual flight, don’t always flee on the first instance of trouble. In fact, they usually do everything they can to stay.
We know it is not uncommon for some refugees to be first displaced internally, even several times internally, before eventually fleeing across borders.
We can extrapolate from experience and the testimonies of refugees that when protection needs go unmet, people will be forced to migrate, including across borders.
In the context of refugees, when we hear multiple drivers of that forced migration, including drivers that are unprotected, such as climate change impacts, it does not present a problem because we know they are also fleeing well-documented conflict or persecution.
We even have a term now for this very situation - “nexus-dynamics.”
Yet discussions of climate change as a driver of forced migration across borders often stall and climate as a driver is even negated if there are other drivers for that migration.
The best climate migration modeling we have is the World Bank report Groundswell, which tells us to anticipate internal displacement in the millions - 143 million to be exact - which, for some, shifts the conversation of cross-border climate migration being largely a non-issue of concern to the international community.
“Is that not some indirect connection to very direct injustice that we, as activists, should count among our populations of concern at risk to this growing threat?”
Yet we know internal climate migrants will have the same protection needs as anyone currently displaced. We are living in a time when one percent of the global population is currently displaced. That is nearly 80 million people. And whether they are displaced internally or across borders or whether displaced for reasons of conflict or persecution or impacts of climate change, they all have the same humanitarian and protection needs, and it’s a global struggle to meet those needs.
The scale of the World Bank numbers are so immense that it should come as no shock that should those hypothetical displacement numbers actualize, those sovereign States will be unable, even with international assistance, to meet the humanitarian and protection needs of its citizens, and absent that, people will be forced to migrate across borders.
When that happens, the stalled conversations of legal frameworks, terminology and definitions, would have overlooked the most important aspect of this conversation that we are not having:
The need to address this as a justice issue that disproportionately impacts the most impoverished, marginalized and disenfranchised people in our world who played very little role in creating the problem in the first place.
So much focus on whether climate change will or will not propel movement of people across borders, and if and when it does, questions about what should we do, is a wholly reasonable discussion, but it runs the risk of obfuscating the dangerous truth that people are already moving for reasons of climate change, and they are telling us so, if we would only listen.
Micronesians in Portland, Oregon were recently in the media discussing climate change amongst the very concerns that prompted their decision to migrate.
Niue’s Coral Pasisi, a Pacific representative of the Climate Security Expert Network, just briefed the UN Security Council last week that Pacific Islanders had already moved across borders, creating land tensions in the process.
These are examples absent a climate-conflict nexus. Sure, economic strains may have been felt that forced that migration, but surely in these island-states, they are linked, if not even directly linked to the impacts of climate change.
So more complicated examples like Central America, where migrants are fleeing violence, gang violence, state repression, and extreme weather linked to climate change and climate variability, seen in the Dry Corridor, and noted in documented food insecurity, or Lake Chad Basin examples, where refugees and IDPs told us they had been impacted by the ongoing conflict with Boko Haram and the drying of Lake Chad, upon which they were dependent for livelihood, aren’t our only complicated examples of examining climate migration.
We have examples that tell us climate migration is happening now and it’s happening to people who had very little to do with climate change in the first place, telling us they will pay heavier and disproportionate prices that challenge their human rights.
And what about those who may not be forced to migrate or ever be displaced but are just as adversely impacted by climate change in ways we are yet to properly examine?
What about the victims of what Harvard University calls ‘climate gentrification?’
Should we not be concerned with the injustice of Miami’s über rich, at risk to rising sea-levels, moving inland in order to protect their wealth, and in the process, potentially pricing out the low-income immigrant and refugee communities of Little Haiti, Little Havana and Liberty City in the process?
Shouldn’t we be additionally concerned that Little Haiti comprises also of Haitian refugees, once resettled by the United States, who now could potentially face a new kind of forced displacement that has no roots in conflict, persecution or direct climate connection?
Is that not some indirect connection to very direct injustice that we, as activists, should count among our populations of concern at risk to this growing threat?
The point is there is a responsibility here for the polluters, the developed countries and the complicit that made those gains at the expense of the planet, the poor, the marginalized, the Indigenous, the oppressed, the colonized, the forgotten and everyone and everything in between to also view this as a justice issue, and it’s our job to help keep that point and the disproportionately marginalized communities impacted as our focus.