Climate refugees are a group of people without name, description, recognition, or protection in international law. As the climate crisis continues to worsen with each passing year, immediate change is essential. Yet, before we can develop solutions for the problems that climate refugees face, we must better understand these multidimensional challenges.
Displacement is one of a series of these challenges that we can easily recognize. Outside of displacement, however, there are many additional obstacles standing in the way of climate refugees achieving a meaningful and secure life away from home. This week in our Impactfull series on climate refugees, we will examine the central challenges that these refugees face in the twenty-first century.
Displacement from Home
As the most visible consequence of migration, displacement receives a lot of attention. But what does this displacement look like? For climate refugees, displacement can be temporary or permanent, with those forms of displacement resulting in different challenges for refugees and those seeking to protect them.
Some climate refugees may have to flee the immediate aftermath of severe natural disasters, such as Tropical Cyclone Idai, which hit Mozambique in 2019 and resulted in the destruction of more than 100,000 homes. This created a massive humanitarian crisis for residents of the country who became temporarily displaced by the storm. The World Meteorological Organization provided a series of recommendations for Mozambique, including plans for reconstruction, rehabilitation, and modernization of infrastructure. These plans would enable internally displaced people (IDPs) to return to the coastal city of Beira and be better prepared for stronger coastal storms in the future.
However, climate refugees can also face more permanent displacement, which often tends to cross regional and national borders and occur as a result of long-term environmental processes. The Brookings Institute identifies a reduction in water availability, desertification, long-term effects of recurrent flooding, sinking coastal areas, and other environmental changes as “slow onset disasters.” These slow onset disasters may not immediately forcibly displace people, but over time they make entire regions uninhabitable. Areas lost to these forms of climate change will not recover in the foreseeable future for humans to return, resulting in the permanent displacement of millions of climate refugees, often across international borders.
Experiences of Insecurity and Conflict
If you have ever heard the statistic that crime rises with the temperature, it may not be surprising to learn that climate change and conflict go hand in hand. For climate refugees facing incremental or sudden natural disasters, conflict is another concern to worry about. Although we will dive more deeply into this during next week’s article on the climate-migration nexus, climate-driven migration is inextricably tied to conflict.
In a USAID report written by the Environmental Change and Security Program, researchers found that climate-driven conflicts can rapidly expand from the community-level to regional and even international violence. Peace agreements to resolve conflict at these multiple levels necessarily become more complex and difficult to broker. The report considers the cases of Syria and Darfur, recent domestic conflicts driven by climate change which have led to massive IDP and refugee populations.
Former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon wrote at the time, “the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.” Recognizing that conflict can be driven by both the short and long-term processes of climate change is an essential first step toward disentangling the relationship between climate change and conflict, but much work remains to be done to ensure climate refugees can achieve security and peace.
Loss of Cultural and Community Identity
Climate refugees face many difficult challenges that receive attention from aid groups and governments, but the loss of cultural heritage is one challenge that remains under-discussed in conversations about the effects of climate migration. Debates about climate change often focus on how to effectively resettle and integrate climate refugees in new societies where they can be more secure, but fail to consider the essential role of cultural practices in generating social cohesion.
As more and more individuals are forced to flee, sometimes permanently, from the effects of climate change, it is crucial to attempt to preserve cultural practices and identity for these vulnerable groups. Resettlement can produce diasporas where individuals spread out widely across a region or the globe. In the case of Syria, it is estimated that 18 million individuals live in over 30 countries across the world after fleeing climate-driven conflict. When diasporas occur, individuals may lose access to important markers of cultural identity, leading to mental health problems and struggles with acculturation in host societies.
Importantly, cultural heritage and identity is something inherently tied to humans’ interactions and relationship with their natural environment. As more individuals and societies face the prospect of leaving their ancestral homes, we have to more thoughtfully consider how we can best preserve the identities and practices of these groups as they become climate refugees isolated from their home environments.
Indecision and Hesitation over Responsibility
Although each of these problems harm climate refugees, indecision is perhaps the most threatening obstacle to identifying and carrying out solutions to benefit climate refugees. Who is responsible for caring for vulnerable climate refugees? In the case of internally displaced persons, the state is held responsible for protecting this population. But when the entire state becomes uninhabitable, who should climate refugees turn to for aid?
This is a crisis that has begun to unfold on small island developing states (SIDS). As ocean water rises and more land becomes unusable for agriculture, entire countries are at risk of being literally wiped off the map. When the climate crisis happens at this scale, the international community has struggled to determine how to respond to these refugees. Ultimately, Western states which industrialized early have contributed the most carbon emissions driving climate change, but does that mean these states should be held responsible for the refugees that must flee the effects of a warming climate?
This question drives a debate that paralyzes the international community from taking meaningful steps to protect climate refugees. As growing states like India and China become industrialized and contribute higher levels of emissions, the question of responsibility becomes murkier. This debate cannot and should not be used to stall action to protect climate refugees.
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