CLIMATE DISPLACEMENT IN THE NEWS
Climate change begins when fossil fuels are taken from the ground and commodified, a process run by some of the most profitable corporations in the world. While we often focus on the effects of climate change on populations worldwide, the extractive practices that cause climate change often wreak unimaginable damage on nations of the Global South that already suffer the worst impacts of intensifying natural disasters and weather extremes.
n March, the British home secretary, Priti Patel, revealed new immigration rules that those seeking refugee status protection in the UK must do so using a ‘legal resettlement’ path - such as the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement scheme - in order to gain indefinite leave to remain in the UK. Meanwhile, those that pay smugglers to enter the UK can only attain temporary permission to remain and will be regularly assessed for deportation from the UK.
A key issue with the proposed plan is that the UK is party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, which prohibits countries from penalizing persons who seek asylum in a country through unofficial points of entry.
A recent story in The Nation recounts the experiences of two climate migrants seeking refuge in the US with one defining difference between the two: legal status. The ease with which one migrant fleeing climate disaster is able to immigrate to the US mainland is juxtaposed to the difficulty of the other, highlighting the time sensitive need for the US to create legal infrastructure for climate migration.
Last month, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and World Food Programme (WFP) issued a report, warning that the pandemic, climate crisis and conflict were combining to create alarming levels of global hunger.
Currently, 34 million people globally face emergency levels of acute food insecurity, classified as Phase 4 on the 5-Phase IPC (Integrated food security Phase Classification). An additional 174 million people are classified as IPC Phase 3, indicating a “crisis” level of food insecurity requiring immediate action, a 29% increase from 2019, when 135 million people were suffering from this degree of food insecurity.
For people already in poverty, climate change will prove devastating, as detailed in the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights’ 2019 report, Climate Change and Poverty. For many Bangladeshis displaced by floods and cyclones over the past thirty years, this is a daily fear. Morzina Begum, has been displaced six times, and has lost approximately $30,000 USD equivalent throughout the process — she now lives on a roadside.
Last month, a report by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), revealed a shocking new statistic: 10.3 million people had been displaced due to climate change-induced events in just the last six months. A further 2.3 million more were displaced by conflict, indicating the vast majority of internal displacement is now triggered by climate change. Over 60% of those displaced were from countries in Asia that produced less than one percent of the total global CO2 emissions in 2019, further supporting climate justice calls that the countries least responsible for the climate crisis are amongst the most vulnerable to its consequences.
