‘Kolkata Will Drown’ - an Animated Film Brings Climate Change Home

Mamun Srizon via UNSPLASH

The animated short “Wade”, by homegrown filmmakers Upamanyu Bhattacharyya and Kalp Sanghvi has already won numerous awards but that’s not only why it seems we should take note. The animators made the film upon returning to India to learn of the problem of rising seas and subsequent displacement of people in the Sundarban island chain. With Kolkata being so close to the Sundarbans, learning of worsening climate, displacement and even a 2019 study that warns the mangrove home of the Royal Bengal tiger could vanish, they set about to tell a story. 

'Wade' is a climate change nightmare set in a Kolkata ravaged by sea level rise, where a group of humans and an ambush of tigers face off on the flooded stre...

Their research took them deep into understanding the political and social impacts of climate change, all of which is woven into the narrative. Critics of doomsday studies may find faults with the film, which we have yet to see, but what we applaud is their motive to tell not only an uncommon tale about climate change, but one that sets the record straight: those who contribute the least to climate change are the ones most impacted by its effects. (CondeNast Traveller)

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Climate Woes Growing for Women, Hit Worst By Displacement and Migration

Ninno Jack Jr/UNSPLASH

Unsurprisingly to those closely following the links between climate change and displacement, women and girls are at greater risk to extreme weather, displacement and once displaced, are at greater risk to the perils of displacement like illness, increased farm work and sexual violence in camps. CARE International’s new report documents scientists and expert warnings that climate change exacerbates underlying gender inequalities, something we have also written about previously. 

CARE reports that displacement linked to climate change was already a “harsh reality for millions of people today” but if global warming trends continue, millions more could be forcibly displaced. 

Of those displaced, many are unable to return due to continued climate shocks, while those women and girls already climate displaced, continue to face harsher impacts. Women and girls displaced by Cyclone Idai, which impacted Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi in 2019, continue to face serious health threats due to lack of access to healthcare. The women among the 200,000 displaced last year in Ethiopia by drought and floods face higher levels of sexual violence in shelters and are vulnerable to attacks on longer and more frequent trips to fetch firewood and water. 

In displacement - climate-linked or otherwise - women and girls’ vulnerability to sexual violence is heightened, as noted in our Perspectives Feature: The Gendered Impacts of Climate Displacement, where one of our earliest cases was a young woman in a female-headed household who revealed she was raped and became pregnant, while fetching water outside the displacement camp. 

CARE echoed the same point we raised of how climate change indirectly impacts women and girls with the additional burden of having to earn money and tend to their families when men are forced to seek income elsewhere. This is particularly acute in remote, rural areas where women are the primary persons to fetch water, firewood and tend to subsistence farming.

We noted that following Cyclone Aila in the Indian Sundarbans, when the men left in search of income after the cyclone destroyed livelihoods, some women were forced into brothels, where a 20-25% uptick in migratory sex workers was noted, following the cyclone. 

As has been pointed out repeatedly, government and aid agencies need to fund and gather more data on how women and girls are affected by climate-linked displacement and migration so as to better inform policy and programming, but even more importantly, women need to be at the forefront of the decision-making that responds to climate threats, especially where it impacts their own communities. (Reuters)

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Head to PERSPECTIVES, featuring stories from the field to learn more about how women and girls are impacted by climate-linked displacement.

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Climate Change and Race — Connections are Being Drawn

Vlad Tchompalov/UNSPLASH

In the wake of the current global uprising on racism, connections are being drawn between climate change and race. As is well-understood by some working in this space, climate change is an everyday reality for many developing countries, marginalized and disenfranchised people, many of whom are people of color. However, that link between climate change and race is now amplified to emphasize how little that is part of the story. 

For example, this writer points out that Australia’s wildfires that began last June and continued well into March this year, while generating tons of global outrage, contained very little media coverage of its impacts on Indigenous Australians, some of whom lost their homes and all possessions in the fires, which also put their cultural and sacred sites at risk. 

The fact that the US, UK and Australia dump their waste on developing countries like Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia, paying scant attention to the hazards they create in the process for the populations that live there. 

Similarly, she rightly calls out extractive industries killing of Indigenous leaders in the Amazon under Brazil’s Bolsonaro Administration. While the US and Canada authorize more extractive industries to build oil pipelines, such as Dakota and Keystone XL, through indigenous lands, while posing threats to the health and food sovereignty of Indigenous communities. 

She highlights the EPA report in March, which revealed Black communities in the US are three times more likely to die from exposure to pollution than white communities, something supported again this week, by another writer who makes the link between the EPA report and the heightened pregnancy risks for Black women, which makes climate change especially worrisome then for women of color. 

As both writers correctly posit, there are elements of race that cannot continue to be overlooked in the climate change discussion. Chief among them that the continued reliance on fossil fuels not only accelerates climate change and worsens air quality, but we now also know, adversely and disproportionately impacts communities of color. (Vogue & Reuters)

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The UN Is Sounding the Alarm on 'Climate Refugees' - We Weigh In

Markus Spiske/UNSPLASH

When UNHCR released its Global Trends report last week, not only did it contain alarming statistics like nearly 80 million people forcibly displaced in 2019, amounting to 1% of the world’s population or one out of every 97 people in the population, but it also contained climate change as one of the causes of that forced displacement. This was unprecedented for the UN Refugee Agency, which notes the risks that both extreme weather and long-term environmental changes pose to displacement with the “interplay between climate, conflict, hunger, poverty, and persecution creates increasingly complex emergencies.” UNHCR says it is particularly concerned about the “risk of climate-related displacement of people”... because “the reality is that climate change is forcing people around the world to leave their homes and even their countries. We’ve been working on displacement issues linked to climate change and disasters for many years, and we have long seen firsthand the devastating impact on people uprooted from their homes.” (Gizmodo Earther)

Analysis

It’s hugely significant that UNHCR made these connections between climate change and displacement and, even more, it is really welcome. Especially since a few of us have been making these connections for a while now. Much of the discourse around building policy on cross-border climate displacement has stalled under the premise that climate displacement will be largely internal. Even if that were true, we’ve always found that rather problematic since it tends to presume countries will be equipped to deal with the level of expected displacement and  overlooks the very real protection needs that even internal climate displaced people have. Furthermore, our experience has told us, people usually leave their homes as a last resort, and after repeated struggles. It’s also not unheard of to be repeatedly displaced either - sometimes internal displacement, then cross-border, if needs go unmet. 

Central American asylum-seekers at the US border are prime examples of nexus dynamics - that is those fleeing situations of violence or persecution, recognized under refugee law, that are interconnected to situations linked to climate change, where Dry Corridor residents in these countries have been affected by a near 6-year drought that has made over 2.5 million people severely food insecure. 

This recognition by UNHCR can go a long way in both urging and helping countries recognize that climate change is contributing to conditions that more and more people are fleeing each year, and for the thousands of people already dealing with this reality, this shift is very welcome indeed. 

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COVID-19 Adds to Adversity of Climate Refugees

Tam Wai/UNSPLASH

Already outside a legal framework, now facing closed borders, restrictions in rights and mobility, two experts - Sumudu Attaputu, Executive Director of the Madison Human Rights Program at the University of Wisconsin and Abdullah Resul Demir, head of the Istanbul-based International Refugee Rights Association - weigh in. Attaputu says the recent UN Human Rights Committee’s decision in Ionae Teitota v. New Zealand in January 2020 was a positive step forward in legal solutions for cross-border climate displacement but people will move whether there is a legal framework or not if they feel it is unsafe to stay in their homelands. 

Demir highlighted refugee realities that are only heightened by the Coronavirus pandemic. For instance, many recognized refugees and those who lack legal status are equally likely to have minimal right and access to education, technology, communications, economic participation, healthcare access and more. Similarly, migrants and refugees work with no insurance, so unlike impacted businesses and economies, refugees don’t even have the  insurance indemnities to buttress losses. He added that environmental migration is a result of " unequal income distribution and (a ) system of exploitation,” and so long as these economic irregularities continue unchecked, people will be forced to migrate. (AA)

Analysis

As we shared in our World Refugee Day Feature, surveillance, curfews and lack of status, rights and more are just some of the impediments impacting refugee access to COVID-19 medical treatment, and it’s in these conditions, that refugees are stepping up in their own communities to respond to the needs of fellow refugees and migrants.

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SPECIAL ADVOCACY FEATURE: Seeking Refuge is Not a Crime

Mitchell Lensink/UNSPLASH

Seeking Refuge - Regardless of Cause or Crisis - is Not a Crime

Seeking asylum is not a crime. 

I used to say that all the time to naysayers, even to supporters, if only to believe it was still so. 

Now I found myself saying it to an actual asylum-seeker. 

I had met her at a local bakery in Manhattan. She said she was a migrant from Honduras in search of a job, needing help with navigating just about everything, 

Waiting in line to order, I learned of her plight and reached out to help. 

In the process I learned she had actually fled her country with her two sons after becoming the target of gang violence. I learned she had survived horrors at home, only to be held in a detention cell at the US border, simply for exercising her right to seek asylum. Now she feared she had made the wrong decision, and worse yet, a mistake because she had no basis for asylum. 

Horrified and ashamed, I helped her navigate her job application and then told her how to access a free asylum clinic, explaining the US refugee system and the NY subway system, but utterly unable to explain the US political system that created her present plight. 

As she left the cafe, I had a rush to yell out to the other cafe patrons blithely going about their day: say it with me, SEEKING REFUGE IS NOT A CRIME! 

PANDEMIC BORDER But Long Before COVID

The Trump administration has been doing its level best to subvert international obligations towards refugees and asylum-seekers since taking office in 2017, including through the use of increased detention. Asylum-seekers who previously awaited court hearings on their claims outside, now do so in makeshift prisons. Now with one fell swoop, the COVID-19 pandemic has ushered in a pathway to obfuscate the right to seek asylum entirely and with it, threaten the health of those at the borders and beyond. 

Under a new deportation policy, dressed up as a public health policy, US Customs and Border Control Agents are now empowered to turn away any asylum-seeker without hearing claims whatsoever. The move comes through the use of an arcane public health policy that gives the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) the power to ban entry of people who may spread infectious disease in the US. Regardless of its presentation, the policy presents a total violation of the right to seek asylum under US and international law. 

The pandemic border response is illustrative of ongoing US attempts to erode asylum space.   And now this week, the administration has proposed new rules that would effectively end any semblance of asylum left in the United States, even if the Coronavirus restrictions are lifted. The Justice Department unveiled the changes Wednesday, and if enacted after a public comment period, a host of sweeping changes would allow most asylum cases to be thrown out even before a court hearing.

“Dressed up as a public health policy, US Customs and Border Control Agents are now empowered to turn away any asylum-seeker without hearing claims whatsoever. ”

In the weeks following the new Coronavirus deportation order, 20,000 asylum seekers were expelled without Coronavirus testing within an average of just 96 minutes of arriving at the border, effectively denying their rights to due process under the US Constitution and violating the most sacred cornerstone of international protection - the principle of non-refoulement - the prohibition against forcibly returning refugees or asylum-seekers to a country where they will face harm. 

The government claims these emergency protocols are on the basis of public health - ours and the migrants - since the Coronavirus spreads so easily and thus it's imperative to reduce the number of migrants in detention cells. Of course, I can’t help but wonder if the government considered closing the detention cells all together in the name of public health, like some countries did, and if not that humane gesture, then perhaps ensuring the utmost public safety of the migrants in detention? 

When Asylum is a Choice Between Life and Death

The 38,000 already detained in the US are denied just as many rights: the right to be free from detention, punishment for seeking asylum, the right to health and in the first case of a Salvadoran man who died from COVID-19 while in detention, the right to life. A second man, a Guatemalan detainee, died in May

A distress signal written in soap on a detention window simply read “HELP US.” Disputes linger over what spurred violence to erupt on May 1 at the center in Massachusetts, but there’s no denying it was over Coronavirus testing. 

Conditions in detention centers are clearly conducive to the spread of disease. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainee transfers between states has led to COVID-19 outbreaks in at least 5 states. In Florida, increased cases inside three south Florida detention centers led one Miami federal judge to order ICE to disclose data on whether the government’s practice of frequent detainee transfers between facilities led to the spike. 

An ICE detention center in California has been accused of using a harsh COVID-19 disinfectant over 50 times a day, causing several detainees to fall sick. ICE detainees have been forced to go on hunger strikes for soap, sanitary supplies and lack of protection against COVID-19. 

Detainees have been denied adequate masks, sanitation and gloves, threatened with pepper spray for demanding their right to personal protective equipment and even reprisals for going public. A lawsuit filed on behalf of asylum-seekers in Phoenix alleges shocking unsanitary conditions and treatment with detainees in inadequate personal protective equipment forced to clean a COVID-infected facility. More than two dozen lawsuits have now been filed in federal court, demanding the release of detainees at heightened risk to COVID-19. 

COVID Deportations

More than 1,300 detainees in 54 facilities in ICE custody are now COVID-19 positive. That’s half of the 2,600 detainees tested as of May 28. However ICE’s own accounts admit that infected detainees may not still be in its custody, which makes sense since the United States continues to deport migrants and asylum-seekers from its borders. 

On May 11, a deportation flight from Texas to Haiti departed with 50 passengers who were sent to hotels for quarantine upon arrival in Port-au-Prince at the Haitian government’s expense, although the country has only four medical centers and 200 beds to treat COVID-19. However, ICE did not deport five Haitians who tested positive for COVID-19 on that flight only after media reports revealed US government plans to initially deport them as well. 

Deporting individuals who are known to be infected with the virus violates US and international public health guidelines to prevent the spread of the virus. The sheer cruelty and irresponsibility of these actions prompted 27 members of the US Congress and 164 human rights organizations to urge the Trump administration to halt the Haitian deportations. Since April deportations, three Haitians have tested positive for COVID-19 upon arrival in Haiti. 

In Guatemala, over 15% of its caseload comprise US deportees, where at least 119 deportees from the US have now tested positive. On a May 13 flight, 16 Guatemalan deportees tested positive for COVID-19. Guatemala first suspended deportations from the US but then allowed them to resume after the US promised stringent testing. However after that, a deportee who tested negative was confirmed COVID-19 positive upon arrival in Guatemala. 

Swift Air, one of ICE’s major subcontractor airlines has made numerous flights between the US and Latin America, including Brazil and Ecuador, where there are major COVID case spikes, and to Mexico and a majority to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and researchers tracking these deportations conclude that ICE has deported many infected persons to countries unprepared for a pandemic. 

“In essence, the US government has been forcing asylum-seekers into untenable situations for a long while in order to deter border asylum. Now with one global pandemic, they have upped the ante, forcing asylum-seekers into an even worse dilemma: to choose between the right to seek asylum and the right to health. ”

The Right to Health

Even accounting for the most minimal level of health protections - the right to health is protected in international law. One of three treaties generally regarded as the International Bill of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) is the strongest on this legal application, including obligations to respect the right to health for prisoners, detainees, migrants and asylum-seekers. 

The International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers stipulates the right to emergency medical care. Although the US is not party to this convention nor the ICESCR, surely its obligations are morally sacrosanct, and one could argue the latter as customary international law. 

“More than 1,300 detainees in 54 facilities in ICE custody are now COVID-19 positive. That’s half of the 2,600 detainees tested as of May 28. ”

At any rate, the principle is upheld legally in many other international human rights legal instruments, including the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination, which the US is party to, and the Committee on this treaty is clear about affording non-citizens an adequate standard of healthcare. As well, the Special Rapporteur on Health has stressed the extreme vulnerability of undocumented populations and sick asylum-seekers, who should never be denied their rights to health. 

Human rights actors and UN agencies on health, human rights, migration and refugees have all called for the immediate release of detainees held in cramped and unsanitary conditions within  detention facilities. And while some countries like Spain and Switzerland closed its detention facilities, others drastically reduced its detainee numbers, while the US continued its policies as usual. 

Proving perhaps that cruelty really is the point, ICE continues to detain 4,449 asylum-seekers who have established a credible fear of persecution. Quite clearly these are bonafide asylum-seekers that should not be detained, under any circumstance, even under the current draconian US policy. ICE has also continued to detain persons approved for release, and a further 11,000 non-violent persons. 

In essence, the US government has been forcing asylum-seekers into untenable situations for a long while in order to deter border asylum. Now with one global pandemic, they have upped the ante, forcing asylum-seekers into an even worse dilemma: to choose between the right to seek asylum and the right to health. A choice that should not be a choice between either at all. Rather a right to both, as enshrined in both US and international law. 

“Central American country diplomats and experts tell us there is no doubt climate change is contributing to the present migration we are seeing at the US border. ”

WHY FLEEING?

The bulk of the border arrivals via Mexico these past years have been asylum-seekers from Mexico and Northern Triangle Countries (NTC): El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. The bulk of recent forced returnees during the Coronavirus pandemic have also been largely from these countries. 

There’s no doubt the NTC asylum-seekers are fleeing violence, but also, climate change. Naysayers may call it poverty and they would not be wrong. It is poverty, but it is poverty fueled by food insecurity, fueled by drought, fueled by climate change and climate variability. 

Our field research on climate change impacts on Central America migration to the US has been delayed by the global pandemic but our research and conversations with experts and Central American country diplomats have been ongoing, all of whom tell us there is no doubt climate change is contributing to the present migration we are seeing at the US border. 

When climate change and violence coalesced to increase border arrivals, the US utilized every tool in its arsenal to deflect responsibility. Now with COVID-19, it’s using the same playbook. 

When the US reversed its own asylum position on a Guatemalan case, announcing in June 2018 that it would no longer be granting asylum to victims of domestic abuse and gang violence on the basis of membership in a social group, the government found yet another way to limit asylum protections. In so doing, it limited asylum claims of anyone who might constitute a social group, such as women and children, as well as anyone seeking protection on the basis of sexual orientation, gender and child abuse.

This was a very deliberate act on the part of the government since it was well-documented by then that women and children were fleeing high rates of domestic abuse, child abuse and gang violence in these Central American countries. 

At every turn, the US is eroding, circumventing and (illegally) redefining the law to suit its anti-immigrant agenda. It adopts new policies, such as the Migrant Protection Protocols, to return asylum-seekers to Mexico, now expanded to Guatemala as well, to await hearings, which has essentially trapped Central American asylum-seekers in 11 border cities along northern Mexico. It lowers its own refugee admissions ceiling and belabors its resettlement processing system, all in a quest to slow refugee arrivals. 

The latest moves to restrict asylum access, if enacted, will no doubt be challenged in court, just as the current pandemic restrictions are by the ACLU. Quite clearly, the US has the capacity to protect public health, even in a pandemic, without violating its legal obligations to uphold the right to seek asylum. And even in its amoral insistence to continue detention, it can choose to provide testing, treatment and quarantine instead of deportation. 

The past three years have been a continuous onslaught on refugees and the right to seek asylum. While conjuring new restrictive policies, they fail to realize though that crises keep mounting, the planet keeps warming and the protection needs of vulnerable and oppressed communities continue, regardless of the political desires of a corrupt few.

“At every turn, the US is eroding, circumventing and (illegally) redefining the law to suit its anti-immigrant agenda.”

Given the largely unchecked US actions thus far, I can’t help but wonder what the US will do when climate displacement overwhelms response and legal capacity?

The COVID-19 crisis has shown us the shrinking space for migrant workers, refugees and asylum-seekers to gain access to countries as borders shut down over virus fears. Similar sentiments were seen in the Syrian refugee crisis. What will happen when the next crisis hits? The climate crisis is projected to impact those who have the least and those already facing complex crises, and will no doubt increase human displacement. 

Whether the displacement is largely internal or across borders, this present COVID crisis and the many others preceding it have shown us governments are nowhere near ready nor so inclined to deal with its effects.

However, COVID-19 has shown us that, as a society, we are capable of making the necessary changes in response to crises, even with compassion and humanity, and that is the test-run we need to do it again with climate change. 

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What You Can Do

Detention: 

• Many of the US detention centers fall under the purview of municipal laws and ICE and local police collaborations take place through 287g agreements that are locally voted upon, so there’s much you can do to lobby your local government to stop the practice and expansion of detention. 

  • Detention Watch Network is a great place to start with their many campaigns

  • RAICES Texas and RAICES Action Fund offer an excellent range of advocacy initiatives you can take from home, behind a laptop, in-person or whatever suits you.

  • United We Dream has a (MoveOn-supported) petition right now to demand ICE stop using hazardous chemicals in response to COVID-19. Sign the Petition NOW to ICE Acting Director Matthew Albence.

  • Support New Sanctuary Coalition in its numerous volunteer opportunities in legal, translation, accompaniment, communications and more in the fight against deportation. 

Legal

• Help the ACLU who are suing the Federal government at every turn for its illegal erosions against the right to seek asylum

Legislation

• Support climate action and the passage of the Green New Deal

• Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts introduced unprecedented “climate refugee” legislation last year to create a new humanitarian program of assistance and resettlement for those displaced by climate change across borders and thus, outside the protection of international law. 

  • Watch this space for updates on the bill and how you can help. 

Climate Displacement

• Be an active agent of shaping future policy by supporting Climate Refugees field mission to Central America.

• Follow Climate Refugees SPOTLIGHT: Climate Displacement in the News and PERSPECTIVES: Climate Displacement in the Field to learn more about these issues and more. Also on social media: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook

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