Soaring temperatures, rising sea levels, floods, and extreme weather events in recent decades. The world has witnessed a significant increase in environmental changes and extreme weather events caused by climate change. Exacerbating the challenges and demanding urgent attention from policymakers, humanitarian organizations, and the global community.
In addition, the disastrous effects of climate change could lead to an incredible rise in displaced people in the next thirty years.
Despite the surging influx, governments have developed ways for migrants to flee natural disasters. However, they do not have mechanisms in place to protect people displaced by the ‘slow-onset’ of climate change, which includes rising ocean levels, an increasing number of droughts, etc.
Absence of climate conflict in the World Order
There are myriad stressors to the world order vis-à-vis the nation-state system formulated by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, the devastation of the world wars, or the current world order of sovereign state participation.
These stressors include emerging global powers or increasing terrorism across the globe. However, the list includes a comparatively underexplored yet much-talked-about stressor: climate change and how it critically impacts natural resources and weakens the legitimacy of the sovereign nation-state.
For instance, Teitiota, from Kiribati, a small island state in the Pacific, will be swallowed up by the sea due to climate change. Therefore, in the modern sense too, it poses a threat to the stability of a state. Exacerbating stresses on all the crucial resources, from food to water to livelihoods, etc., and fueling population influx and political unrest.
International law
According to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its Protocol of 1967, “refugee” is defined as “someone unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being prosecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a social group, or political opinion.”
However, it is quite difficult to incorporate ‘climate migrants’ into the same paradigm.
Climate-displaced persons are those who are compelled to leave their homes due to environmental factors that make their lives uninhabitable or extremely difficult to sustain.
Such displacement could be caused by a variety of factors.
- Rising sea level: low-lying areas and small islands are particularly vulnerable to rising sea levels, which makes them prone to inundation and forces the community to relocate.
- Extreme weather events: Global warming intensifies the frequency of extreme weather conditions, which include hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods. Such events render several communities uninhabitable.
- Impact on ecosystems: rapid climate change critically impacts ecosystems, leading to loss of biodiversity and degradation of natural resources. As a consequence of disappearing habitats, indigenous communities and those relying on ecosystems are pushed into displacement.
- Drought and Desertification: the increasing prevalence of droughts and desertification severely impact agricultural productivity and water availability. As a result, people dependent on agriculture or those living in arid regions are forced to abandon their homes in search of better living conditions.
At this juncture, where the legal definition and mechanism are absent in international law, they have pushed the states to adopt their own definitions and apparatus to protect climate migrants.
However, it fails to acknowledge the characteristics of ‘slow-onset’ climate change that have far more severe repercussions.
Call for a legal system for displaced people
An independent UN body called for legal protection to be given to those displaced by the impacts of climate change to guarantee their human rights.
Ian Fry, the independent human rights expert on climate change, said: “The effects of climate change are becoming more severe, and the number of people displaced across international borders is rapidly increasing.”
Furthermore, he shed light on his recent thematic report to the United Nations Human Rights Council, weather-related events have led to the displacement of 30.7 million people from their homes in 2020 alone. Putting lives and human rights at risk since this year was a pandemic year.
There is no end to this unfortunate trend, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives or went missing during the migratory movements.
“The international community must realize its responsibility to protect people displaced across borders by climate change impacts,” he added.