The Emerging Global Consensus on Climate Change and Human Mobility

Mostafa M Naser

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351599900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines whether a global consensus is emerging on climate change and human mobility and presents evidence of a slow-moving but dynamic, step-by-step process of international policy development on climate-related mobility.

Naser reviews the range of solutions offered to address climate-related mobility problems, such as extending the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, adopting an additional protocol to the UNFCCC or creating a new international treaty to support those facing climate-related migration and displacement problems. He examines the accumulating stock of international policies and initiatives relevant to climate-related mobility using a framework of six policy areas: human rights, refugees, climate change, disaster risk reduction, migration, and sustainable development. He uses this framework to define and summarise the main UN actions and milestones on climate-related mobility. Despite the difficult context affecting the global community of worsening climate change impacts and human rights under threat, Naser asserts that the foundations of global consensus on climate-related mobility have been built, particularly in the last decade.

This book will be of great relevance to students, scholars and policy-makers with an interest in the increasing interface between climate change and human mobility policy issues.

1
Climate change and human mobility

A conceptual framework

Introduction

Environmental change has always been a unique trigger for human mobility since time immemorial, although a range of other factors, such as the economy, nationality, religion, war, ethnic hatred and political turmoil, motivate people’s migration decisions.¹ However, in the 21st century, accelerating environmental degradations, as a direct result of anthropogenic climate change, pose significant challenges to human mobility around the world. While natural climate variations have existed for millennia, the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries and the availability of cheap fossil fuels, especially after World War II, accelerated carbon emissions into the atmosphere exponentially. As a result, global warming, sea level rise and climate change now pose a combined threat to the modern human world.

From the mid-20th century onwards, scientists have warned the global community about the staggering impacts of climate change. From its inception, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has continuously highlighted that climate change, which alters the atmosphere and the global environment through anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, is changing the physical environment in ways that make human populations more vulnerable to environmental stress.² Currently there is a strong scientific consensus that ‘climate change is occurring’, and the causes of global warming and climate change are largely due to human activities.³ On the impacts of climate change on human mobility, the First Assessment Report (AR) had warned that one of the greatest effects of climate change may be on human migration.⁴ In the Fourth AR in 2007, the IPCC called human-induced climate change ‘unequivocal’ and authoritatively established that it is accelerating the severe effects on the environment and the deterioration of living conditions in many parts of the world, resulting in significant stress on ecosystems, socio-economic systems and human welfare.⁵ In its Fifth AR, the IPCC reiterates that ‘[c]limate change is projected to increase displacement of people’⁶ and projects that in low-lying areas alone, ‘[w]ithout adaptation, hundreds of millions of people … will be displaced due to land loss by year 2100; the majority of those affected are from East, Southeast, and South Asia’.⁷ As Marine Franck, of the Advisory Group on Climate Change and Human Mobility, said at a COP21 press conference: ‘[c]limate-related displacement is not a future phenomenon. It is a reality; it is already a global concern’.⁸ The World Bank (WB) report published in 2018 predicts that around 143 million people could be forced to migrate internally within their own countries by 2050 because of deteriorating conditions of climate change.⁹ However, the extent and type of migration depend on multifarious factors. The Figure 1.1 illustrates some key climate-related mobility variables.

Figure 1.1 Some key climate-related mobility variables

Source: Mostafa Naser and Steve Pope

Illustration summarises points made in:

Zetter, Roger. Protecting environmentally displaced people. Developing the capacity of legal and normative frameworks. Oxford: Refugee Studies Centre (2011) and Kraler, Albert, Tatiana Cernei and Marion Noack. ‘Climate Refugees’, Legal and policy responses to environmentally induced migration. ICMPD, requested by the European Parliament’s Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (2011).

However, these predictions are often ‘contentious’ and challenged by ‘sceptic’ scholars on various grounds, including scientific uncertainty, methodological error, multi-causality of migration and so on.¹⁰ Irrespective of the accuracy of those forecasts, all the projections made by credible scientific bodies and international organisations such as the IPCC, International Organization for Migration (IOM) and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) indicate that the number of people displaced by climate change will not only outplace the number of traditional refugees, but it will more than triple between 2009 and 2030. The scope and extent of the problem are massive and expanding step-by-step.¹¹ It is believed that, if urgent action is not taken soon, the issue will appear as a bigger humanitarian disaster than the current refugee crisis.¹²

This apparent conundrum highlights the importance of both international and national initiatives and actions. However, climate change and human mobility do not fit neatly into any academic or, more importantly, any government policy category. Rather, it is an amalgam of cross-cutting issues, some of which demand immediate and appropriate responses from both international and national authorities.

Other issues may be long-term, slow-release problems, which, because of their gradual, incremental nature are missed or avoided by governments and other agencies. In the absence of a nationally and internationally recognised uniform definition¹³ and legal and moral recognition as a separate category requiring protection, climate-related mobility needs have, in the past, been largely unaddressed in legal and policy responses. While the rights of persons displaced by war, persecution or conflict are protected by a number of international, regional and national legal instruments, norms and covenants, no international framework has been developed to date for the protection of persons displaced for environmental reasons.¹⁴ Despite the predictions of significant displacements due to the effects of climate change, the formulation of legal frameworks and policy at national and international levels has been slow. This book examines whether progress is being made. Keeping this in context, the main aim of this book is to consider whether a global ‘consensus’ on climate change-related displacement and migration is emerging. We look at six policy areas defining the main UN actions on climate-related mobility: human rights; refugees; climate change; disaster risk reduction; migration; and sustainable development.

Climate change, environment and human mobility: a complex nexus

There is growing scientific certainty on the increasing vulnerability and risks resulting from projected climate change, and widespread consensus that sea level rise, salinisation of coastal areas and hydro-meteorological natural catastrophes are climatic processes and events having significant implications on human lives and livelihoods around the world.¹⁵

However, some sceptics question whether climate-related migration and displacement really exist, basing their arguments on scientific uncertainty of the effects of climate change, multi-causality factors and other related issues; hence, they deny the appropriateness of the international community’s recognition of and responsibility for vulnerable people impacted by climate-related mobility issues. Some argue that a matrix of factors, including environmental, social, economic and political issues, encourages people to move and that it is difficult to segregate environmental causes from other factors.¹⁶ Although they admit that sudden or slow-onset changes in environmental conditions can be indirect factors in decisions to move, social processes that create poverty and marginality are more important factors than environmental changes per se.¹⁷ For some, environmental degradation resulting from climate change is one of the many triggering factors, and not even a significant one.¹⁸

Notwithstanding the fact that there are non-climatic migration factors to consider – migration is not necessarily going to occur for reasons of climatic events alone¹⁹ – environmental factors are increasingly recognised as an important component of people’s migration decisions.²⁰ In some locales and communities, especially in rural areas, people remain exclusively dependent on natural resources for their sustenance.²¹ For these people, ecology is indistinguishable from economy,²² and they are often identified as among the most vulnerable to climate change impacts. The interrelationship between environment and livelihood is so intricate that the depletion of natural resources due to environmental degradation may play a contributing role in affecting human mobility due to direct and indirect results of loss of land, poverty, food deficiency, social inequity and personal insecurity. In this type of displacement, push factors relating to people’s homes are more important than pull factors such as social and economic conditions.²³

Various studies, including IPCC reports, confirm that a profound connection exists between climate change and human mobility and that the numbers concerning climate-related migration and displacement will grow in magnitude due to the direct effects of climate change.²⁴ The challenges may become too great unless these persons are recognised as a separate group for protection and unless targeted protection systems are developed to manage the increasing numbers of people internally and externally displaced because of climate change.

Climate change and human mobility: as a discrete area of study

McLeman, questioning the legitimacy of climate change and human mobility as a discrete area of study, emphasises the need to think ‘beyond the speculative climate change refugee scenarios’.²⁵ Clearly, as he asserts, ‘climate influences human migration’ and ‘climate has always had an influence on human ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Preface
• List of acronyms and abbreviations
• 1 Climate change and human mobility: a conceptual framework
• 2 Climate change and human mobility: recognition and protection in international law
• 3 Emerging global consensus towards recognition and protection of climate change and human mobility
• 4 Concluding remarks
• Index