Following an official visit to Honduras, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change, Ian Fry, is sounding the alarm about how climate change impacts are pushing many people to leave the Central American country.
Fry found that communities are facing prolonged droughts, severe flooding events, and coastal erosion and inundation due to climate change. These impacts are “forcing people to leave their homes and seek more sustainable livelihoods” elsewhere in order to avoid starvation and a lack of safe drinking water. Industries that provided stable livelihoods just a few years ago are now being swallowed by rising seas, creating “‘ghost communities with only old people left’”. In one Dry Corridor community the Special Rapporteur visited, drought has forced 80% of residents to leave Honduras, given how limited livelihood options are elsewhere in the country.
Recognizing that Honduras is still dealing with the impacts of twin hurricanes - Eta and Iota - that pummeled the region in late 2020, Fry called upon both the Honduran government and the international community to significantly step up efforts to both protect impacted communities and address the climate crisis.
Over the past few years, Climate Refugees reporting has highlighted the particularly acute needs amongst marginalized groups, such as minority, Indigenous, and Garifuna communities who have long contended with land grabbing, environmental injustice, and violence, issues our Executive Director raised in an article for the Council on Strategic Risks in 2021, and which Fry noted in the case of the Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people in Honduras. According to Fry, some 150 Garifuna have been killed since 2018.
Echoing his report on displacement across international borders from earlier this year - for which Climate Refugees provided inputs - Fry highlighted the importance of protecting those who are forced to flee Honduras due to climate change. Among other strategies, he calls for the Honduran government to work with its neighbors on protection, such as expanding the Cartagena Declaration to include such displaced persons, and to consider supporting a new protocol to the 1951 Refugee Convention that would explicitly protect those displaced internationally by climate change.
““We must ensure that people displaced across international borders due to climate change are ensured the same rights as those afforded to refugees””
Fry’s visit to Honduras coincided with Honduran President Xiomara Castro De Zelaya’s visit to the US southern border, where she met with Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and other officials. During her visit, which was primarily about the issues faced by Honduran detainees, Castro De Zelaya also took the opportunity to request that the US government extend Temporary Protective Status (TPS) to include Hondurans affected by Eta and Iota.
The TPS designation, established by Congress in 1990, allows migrants from countries considered unsafe to live and work in the US temporarily. Honduras has been on the TPS list since 1998, when Hurricane Mitch devastated the region, but only Hondurans residing in the US at the time of designation are currently eligible. President Castro De Zelaya’s request would allow a greater number of Hondurans to seek protective status in the US. It remains to be seen whether the US government will agree to such an expansion, though it did recently expand TPS protection for Venezuelans and Afghans.
While TPS is a valuable tool to protect those fleeing unsafe conditions, particularly because country designations (and extensions) do not require Congressional approval, it does not provide permanent status or a pathway to citizenship.
And so while the US should absolutely use TPS wherever such protection needs exist, it cannot be a substitute for long-term, permanent, and transformative change, including in how the US deals with Central American migration overall. As we and our partners outlined in a 2020 policy report, addressing the root causes of migration from the region is key, but the dominant US strategy has long been one of unhelpful and ineffective deterrence and responsibility-shifting.
If we are to truly protect those displaced by climate change, we will need to utilize all tools in the toolbox. Strategies like TPS are a good short-term solution, but countries of origin, transit, and destination must all be part of a comprehensive and cooperative effort to ensure that every displaced person has access to protection. Such a shift cannot wait, with the climate crisis pushing more households and even entire communities to the brink.