Phenomenon called Climate Refugees

Who is a climate refugee? It is a person displaced by climatically induced environmental disasters. Such disasters result from incremental and rapid ecological change, resulting in increased droughts, desertification, sea level rise, and the more frequent occurrence of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, cyclones, fires, mass flooding and tornadoes. But, even though it sounds quit logical, can we really say Climate Refugee?

According to the UN Convention on Refugees: a refugee is “(...) any person who (...) owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country”

Therefore, technically someone changing habitat due to environmental degradation does not fall into this category since they are not persecuted directly by anyone. There is also a fact that most of the people that are forced to migrate, never leave their home country, and thereby also do not qualify to be a “refugee” according to the UNHCR definition. Of the ones that do leave their countries, most stay in neighboring countries.

Speaking about neighboring countries, we need to mention story about Tuvalu Islands. Just to give you an example how it functions in a reality.

The Pacific Ocean is home to 22 Island States with a total of 7 million inhabitants, one of the culturally most diverse regions in the world. What is really interesting, these Pacific Islanders emit approximately 0,06% of the world's greenhouse gases, at the same time they are three times more at risk to climate change than countries in the developing world. The highest point on the Tuvalu Islands is only 4.5 meter above the sea level. Yes. And it is the home of 11000 people. By 2050, Tuvalu is expected to become uninhabitable. The islanders risk becoming stateless not only the physical island, but all the institutions of a modern state –parliament, police, law course, state education, health care and other welfare institutions – may disappear. This means that their cultural heritage might be lost, and migration or relocation to other states may be the only realistic option; the complete extinction of a state without there being any successor state.

And here we come to the point about neighboring countries. Facing the fact that the islands will disappear due to the rising sea level, local politicians have been trying to make arrangements with their neighbor countries Australia and New Zealand to accept them as climate refugees. And what happened? Well… Australia has said no. How come? Easily. They don't want to create any special arrangements with single countries. This is particularly ironic since Australia is one of the countries in the world with the highest CO2 emissions per capita, and thereby a main contributor to global warming. What about New Zealand? New Zealand has proposed an immigration scheme, allowing 75 immigrants per year. However, these immigrants must comply with a range of prerequisites such as being between 18-45 years old, speak English, and having a concrete job offer in New Zealand once they arrive. Sounds difficult? Considering the location and level of access to resources, it is practically impossible. And even if it was, there is still a fact that the elderly and the poor, the most vulnerable, will have trouble being accepted as refugees. In other words, they are left on their own.

Obviously, mitigation achieving the rights to a new country is not the principal goal of the Tuvaluans. In the worlds of their Governor-General, known as “The Tuvalu Statement”; “Taking us as environmental refugees, is not what Tuvalu is after in the long run. We want the islands of Tuvalu and our nation to remain permanently and not be submerged as a result of greed and uncontrolled consumption of industrialized countries. We want our children to grow up the way we grew up in our own islands and in our own culture.

The U.N. currently states that more refugees are now displaced by environmental disasters than by war, more than 25 million climate refugees (ecologically induced migrants), and experts have projected that number will double within the next five years to over 50 million. Several organizations like the IPCC, Red Cross and The Christian Monitor estimate between 150 million and 1 billion climate refugees will be displaced within the next four decades, yet not one single international law gives asylum or even a helping hand to environmental refugees.