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CLIMATE CHANGE: U.N. Braces for New Breed of Refugees

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, May 23 2007 (IPS) - As the international community continues to express fears over the potentially devastating impact of global warming worldwide, there is also growing concern over the steady increase in a new category of displaced persons: environmental refugees.

“I believe it is high time that the United Nations take the lead in addressing this matter that threatens to affect the lives of so many, particularly those living in the coastal areas in the least developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing states (SIDS),” U.N. Under-Secretary-General Anwarul Karim Chowdhury told IPS.

“We need to prepare ahead of time to know what kind of support they would need, and what could be offered,” said Chowdhury, U.N. High Representative for LDCs, Landlocked Developing Countries and SIDS.

The Tokyo-based U.N. University – which sponsored a panel discussion on “Environmental Refugees: the Forgotten Migrants” in New York last week – says that victims of political upheavals or violence have access to financial grants, food, tools, shelter, schools and clinics, but environmental refugees receive no such aid because they are not yet recognised in international conventions.

The seminar was co-sponsored by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, the International Organisation for Migration and the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP).

Addressing the seminar, Maryam Niamir-Fuller, principal technical adviser at the UNDP’s Environment and Energy Group, said that some are beginning to talk about “climate refugees”, especially in the context of sea-level rise, “which is the most dramatic and visible form of change.”

“The poor have the least access to support systems, both as a result of their vulnerability and marginalisation, as well as their lack of empowerment, representation and knowledge,” she added.

Niamir-Fuller said there is a need to raise awareness not just among policy makers but also the potential refugees themselves.

“The state has an obligation to plan and manage the change. There is a need for orderly ‘exit strategies’ to help the poor – and one of these could be environmentally motivated, and beneficial migration,” she said.

Niamir-Fuller said the label “environmental refugees” has a negative connotation because it implies that “we need to return these people back to their homes”.

“Our goal should be to eliminate environmental refugees, reduce environmentally forced migrants, and promote more flexible environmentally motivated mobility,” she added.

Chowdhury told IPS that the U.N. definition of a refugee, according to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, excludes “environmental refugees”.

He pointed out that about a third of the world’s 50 LDCs are threatened by global warming and sea-level rise, including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Kiribati, Maldives, Comoros, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

And seven out of 10 countries are SIDS, which have large proportions of their population (about 40 percent) in low elevation coastal areas. But as they have small populations, their total number is small.

According to Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation in Britain and author of a book titled “Environmental Refugees: The Case for Recognition”, scholars are predicting that about 50 million people worldwide will be displaced by 2010 because of rising sea levels, desertification, dried up aquifers, weather-induced flooding and other serious environmental changes.

By one rough estimate, as many as 100 million people worldwide live in areas below sea-level.

Brian Gorlick, senior policy advisor at the New York Office at the U.N. refugee agency, told the seminar there is no agreed definition of environmental refugees – in international law, at the United Nations or among environmental experts.

He said one of the proposed definitions of environmentally displaced persons reads: “People who are displaced from or who feel obliged to leave their usual place of residence, because their lives, livelihoods and welfare have been placed at serious risk as a result of adverse environmental, ecological or climatic processes and events.”

These “processes” include climate change, global warming, desertification and land degradation, rising sea-levels, deforestation, soil erosion and crop deletion. And “events” include earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, floods, droughts and famines.

Gorlick also pointed out the different estimates of recent statistics on environmental refugees: 50 million more by the end of this decade (United Nations University); 150 million by 2050 (Oxford University); 50 million by 2060 in Africa alone (the U.N. Environment Programme in Nairobi) and; one billion displaced globally by 2050 (Christian Aid).

He said the existing definition of a refugee as spelled out in the Refugee Convention reads: “People outside of their own country because of a well-founded fear of persecution on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a social group or political opinion, and where there is a failure of state protection in the country of origin or habitual residence.”

Dr. Ing Janos J.Bogardi, director of the United Nations University’s Institute for Environment and Human Security, said the environment should be included as a dimension of the ongoing international debates on migration.

According to some of the conclusions of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment in 2005, he said, 10 to 20 percent of drylands are already degraded and pressure is increasing on dryland ecosystems to provide services such as food and water for humans and livestock, as well as irrigation and sanitation.

Moreover, climate change is likely to increase water scarcity in regions that are already under water stress.

Additionally, droughts are becoming more frequent and their continuous re-occurrence can overcome the coping mechanisms of communities.

Lester R. Brown of the Earth Policy Institute says those who track the effects of global warming had assumed that the first flow of climate refugees would likely be with the abandonment of Tuvalu in the South Pacific or other low-lying islands.

“We were wrong. The first massive movement of climate refugees has been that of people away from the Gulf Coast of the United States,” Brown said.

He points out that Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 “forced a million people from New Orleans and other small towns on the Mississippi and Louisiana coasts in the United States to move inland, either within states or neighbouring states, such as Texas and Arkansas.”