More on Forced Migration and Climate Change

OCHA notes: "As fiercer and bigger weather events hit the news headlines daily, the temperature of debates on providing protection to people displaced by the vagaries of nature is rising." Natural disasters can lead to permanent migration, as illustrated by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. The tsunami displaced more than two million people, many of whom are still living in refugee camps in the region.

Low-lying coastal areas constitute only two percent of the total land surface of the earth, but contain 10 percent of the world’s current population. A policy paper by the UN University Institute for Environment and Human Security Section (UNU-EHS) noted that about 75 percent of all vulnerable people living in low-lying areas are in Asia.

The Maldives, threatened by rising sea-levels, has played a leading role in trying to create awareness of the issue for the past two decades. In March 2008 the UN Human Rights Council agreed to conduct a study on the effects of climate change on human rights, especially livelihoods. Maldives hopes the findings will inform the negotiation process between industrialised and developing countries at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (the Kyoto Protocol) on how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

For any country to provide protection and a home to people fleeing natural disasters, the displaced need to have legal status. And it is here that policymakers are struggling with several key questions:

- How do you determine whether a person has been displaced by environmental factors?
- How do you define a person displaced by environmental factors?
- What do you call them?
- What kind of protection can be afforded to the person – short-term or long-term?
- Do those affected have to be relocated? Why not help them adapt to their changed environment?
- Who will pay for relocation or adaptation measures? Are the industrialized countries, who have been held responsible for global warming, morally obliged to pay?

The UNU-EHS is constructing a preliminary classification that would take into account the trigger and type of assistance available to help potential migrants cope in their own countries. ssentially, two kinds of displacement could potentially be caused by global warming: firstly, intensification of weather events, such as cyclones and droughts; secondly, rising sea-levels. But these raise conceptual problems on defining a potential migrant forced to flee. Some analysts argue that migration as a result of natural disasters, such as drought, could be seen as a coping strategy rather than a trigger.