Climate Change Disasters And People On The Move

The open access publication of this book has been published with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Climate change is forcing us to consider the right of people to leave their disappearing homelands, and the shape this right should take. Climate Change, Disasters and People on the Move proposes international protection as a solution with three pillars: granting protection against return to the country of origin (non-refoulement); preventing future displacement; and facilitating safe, orderly, and regular migration in the context of disasters and climate change. Dr. Aylin Yildiz Noorda uses the theories of common concern of humankind and community interests to operationalise her proposal, providing a blueprint for future claims.

Revealing the role of discrimination in disasters challenges received wisdom about who is a refugee.

“Deals masterfully with a neglected crisis, how climate change is driving migration . . . The work broaches solutions both practical . . . and political.”—Christopher E. Goldthwait, former US Ambassador With global climate change upon us, it is imperative to start thinking about the massive numbers of people who will be displaced by environmental crises. The rise in sea levels alone will account for hundreds of millions of refugees around the globe. In Rising Tides, John R. Wennersten and Denise Robbins face the difficult questions that will have to be answered: How will people be relocated and settled? Is it possible to offer environmental refugees temporary or permanent asylum? Will these refugees have any collective rights in the new areas they inhabit? And lastly, who will pay the costs of all the affected countries during the process of resettlement? Offering an essential, continent-by-continent look at these dangers, Rising Tides is “a passionately argued, well-documented wake-up call on the dire, current and undeniable human fallout from climate change. Looking behind the headlines, it connects the dots in a way that will inform and should alarm us all” (Eugene L. Meyer, author of Five for Freedom). “This chilling and urgent call to action spares no detail in its mission to present the facts on a looming humanitarian disaster. Climate-change warning messages too often focus on the environment without going into specifics of how humans will be hurt by global warming. Rising Tides singlehandedly rectifies this issue.”—Foreword Reviews “A must read for policymakers and those in positions of power, especially the ones who remain in a state of denial about climate change and refuse to do enough to address the crisis.”—The Hindu

Climate change, sometimes thought of as a problem for the future, is already impacting people’s lives around the world: families are losing their homes, lands and livelihoods as a result of sea level rise, increased frequency and intensity of storms, drought and other phenomena. Following several years of preparatory work across the globe, legal scholars, judges, UN officials and climate change experts from 11 countries came together to finalise a new normative framework aiming to strengthen the right of climate-displaced persons, households and communities. This resulted in the approval of the Peninsula Principles on Climate Displacement within States in August 2013. This book provides detailed explanations and interpretations of the Peninsula Principles and includes in-depth discussion of the legal, policy and programmatic efforts needed to uphold the standards and norms embedded in the Principles. The book provides policy-makers with the conceptual understanding necessary to ensure that national-level policies are in place to respond to the climate displacement challenge, as well as a firm sense of the programme-level approaches that can be taken to anticipate, reduce and manage climate displacement. It also provides students and policy advocates with the necessary information to debate and critique responses to climate displacement at different levels. Drawing together key thinkers in the field, this volume will be of great relevance to scholars, lawyers, legal advisors and policy-makers with an interest in climate change, environmental policy, disaster management and human rights law and policy.

While politicians debate whether or not climate change is real, extreme weather rages around the world. Whatever the cause, the effects are real, as evidenced by staggering numbers of displaced people. These climate refugees, through no fault of their own, have meaningful impacts on populations, economies, and even cultural makeup. How can world leaders adapt to these changes? In this fascinating resource, writers from around the world offer their takes on the current crises as well as predictions for the future.

This book applies a justice framework to analysis of the actual and potential role of international law with respect to people on the move in the context of anthropogenic climate change. That people are affected by the impacts of climate change is no longer doubted, including with implications for people movement (migration, displacement, relocation, etc.). Climate Change and People on the Move tackles unique questions concerning international responsibility for people movement arising from the inequities inherent to climate change. Corrective and distributive justice provide the analytical backbone, and are explored in a substantial theoretical chapter and then applied to subsequent contextual analysis. Corrective justice supports analysis as to whether people movement in the climate change context could be conceived or framed as harm, loss, or damage which is compensable under international law, either through fault-centred regimes or no-fault regimes (i.e. insurance). Distributive justice supports analysis as to whether such movement could be conceived or framed as a disproportionate burden, either for those faced with movement or those faced with sheltering people on the move, from which duties of re-distribution may stem. This book contributes to the growing scholarship and analysis concerning international law or governance and people movement in response to the impacts of climate change by investigating the bounds of the law where the phenomenon is viewed as one of (in)justice.

This book examines how states in eight countries across Asia and the Pacific address internal displacement in the context of disasters and climate change. The Asia and the Pacific region accounts for the majority of global disaster-related displacement, but the experience of the millions of individuals displaced differs according to gender, age, ethnicity, (dis)ability, caste, and so forth and is dependent on the legal, administrative, social, and economic structures and processes in place to support them. This book adopts a human rights-based approach, investigating the role of law and policy in preventing displacement, protecting people who are displaced, and engendering durable solutions across cases drawn from Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Nepal, Bangladesh, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands. The specific cases in the book also reflect critically on the term ‘displacement’ and the wider normative framework within which this phenomenon is conceptualised and addressed. The book will be of interest to students, researchers, and practitioners working at the intersection of human rights, human mobility, development, disaster risk reduction and management, and climate change adaptation.

The apocalyptic visions of climate change that are projected in the media often involve extreme weather events, disasters and mass migration of poor people. This book takes a critical look at this notion, drawing on research in Bangladesh, a country located at the heart of debates on climate change and migration. This book argues that rather than leading to dramatic events, climatic and environmental impacts often cause incremental changes in people’s habitats and livelihoods, making them migrate in search of better places and income. With or without climate change, climatic and environmental factors can impoverish people, and drive displacement and migration, especially in the global South. These influences, including disasters, need not necessarily make people move, but instead sometimes trap the poorest and the most vulnerable people in their places exposed to hazards or make them migrate to even riskier places, such as crowded and flood-prone urban slums. This book argues that restrictions placed on people’s mobility options could increase their vulnerability and favours proactive migration policies. This timely contribution explains the climate-hazard-migration nexus in an accessible, engaging language for students of geography, development studies, politics and environmental studies, as well as humanitarian and development practitioners and policymakers.