Climate refugees
By Bhaskar Anand
The word “refugee” forces us to imagine people who were ill-treated and exploited in their home country. In general, most people might fall prey to xenophobia and use the term as an abuse to specify some generic migrant population. The United Nations defines a refugee as “someone unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.
Refugees also flee their home country based on natural calamities. In such cases, people migrate from their native places due to the impact of climate change, e.g. sea-level rises, salinization of agricultural land, desertification, growing water scarcity, climate events such as flooding, storms and glacial lakes outbursts causing floods. They are generally termed “climate refugees.” Climate migration is a slow and complex process mediated by socio-economic and political factors. These migrations are mainly dependent on the aforementioned climate processes. However, non-climate drivers, such as government policy, population growth and community-level resilience to natural disasters, are also substantial contributors. All these factors contribute to the extent of vulnerability of people and their near-death experiences.
The refugees are well-defined according to the U.N. 1951 Convention and 1967 Protocol. They are protected by international law specified in the 1951 Refugee Convention. However, this definition of refugees/migrants is constrained to political circumstances and natural disasters that may or may not include rapidly deteriorating factors of climate change. In the recent past, a new class of refugees has surged across the world due to the emerging global climate crisis. Contemporary migrations are limited to lower socio-economic communities residing in the global south especially localized in certain countries such as Bangladesh, the Philippines, Guatemala and others. However, it seems that climate migration has already become a global issue with a slow shift towards their relatively richer neighbors and such trends might already be defining the refugee crisis and the geopolitics of the 21st century.
According to the U.N. by the end of 2017, there were 25.4 million men, women and children registered as refugees across the world. Most of them were victims of war, violence, conflict and/or persecution. These political refugees were a quarter of the number of current population of climate migrants (about 100 million). According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), by 2050, it is estimated that at least 200 million people will migrate due to the prevailing adverse conditions that are a direct result of climate change.
Just like any migrant population, these peoples do not migrate voluntarily. They are forced to relocate themselves for survival. Migrants tend to move to another place locally in the vicinity of their livelihood. Inevitably, these climate migrants get a very low level of socio-economic acceptance and as a result are frequently exploited and criminalized. On the basis of humanitarian grounds, it is very much required that local governments should provide protection, shelter, healthcare, emergency relief and assistance in the resettlement of such vulnerable people, who are what we might be witnessing as the first in a long line of victims of the climate crisis.
In the near future, there is likely to be an exponential rise in the cross-border relocation of climate migrants. This might cause more severe concerns of persecution or imprisonment, and may even lead to civil war. In the forthcoming time, the U.N. may need to modify the status of refugees to make it inclusive of climate migration.
Bhaskar Anand (abhaskar@hanyang.ac.kr) is a doctoral student working in the field of air quality and material application at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Hanyang University.