On November 8, Tuvalu’s foreign minister presented his speech for COP26 standing knee-deep in the ocean. Where he stood was once dry land. The steady engulfment of his nation by seawater is the same crisis that faces many island nations and coastal communities.

Western Pacific ocean levels are rising two to three times faster than the global average. For Tuvalu and many other Small Island Developing States (SIDS), this is a death sentence. Eight islands are already fully submerged. Tuvalu, like other island nations, has begun to plan for the worst-case scenario, forced to consider legal pathways to maintain ownership of its maritime zones and recognition under international law if the nation becomes completely submerged. They are also looking into relocation possibilities for the nation’s 12,000 residents. Some have already fled the rising waters, primarily emigrating to New Zealand.

This year alone, the world encountered climate events of unprecedented destruction. From catastrophic flooding in western Europe and central China, to raging wildfires across Greece, South America, and California, and deadly heatwaves that swept the Pacific Northwest, Siberia, and the Middle East, it is unequivocal that we are now in a climate crisis. But for global communities living at the edge of the ocean, this has been a reality for many years — a reality they saw coming, warned us about, and are now fleeing in the thousands. 

Displacement, Migration, and Disaster Risk

One of the most extensive manifestations of climate injustice is environmental and climate-driven human migration. Sudden climate events, such as hurricanes, can trigger emergency migration. It is easy for the media to become fixated with the former — wildfires, hurricanes, and other disasters that suddenly and forcefully displace people paint a startling, horrific picture. However, some climate impacts, like slow sea level rise, are more insidious and occur over a prolonged period of time, creating slow onset effects such as resource and food scarcity, desertification, and sea level rise that cumulatively erode livelihoods until it is no longer feasible for populations to stay. 

Communities may also choose to migrate elsewhere in their home country, in which case they are referred to as internally-displaced peoples (IDPs), or may be forced to flee across international borders. While the estimates for climate refugees are understandably hard to quantify, studies forecast the displacement of anywhere between two hundred million by 2050 to two billion people by 2100 from their homelands. 

The rationale behind why people migrate is complex; mass migration is not solely the result of climate events and a harsher environment. Climate migrants, or climate refugees, are equally victimized by political-economic structures that diminish adaptive, resilient, and mitigative capabilities. Whereas wealthier communities can buy themselves out of trouble, the climate refugee crisis most severely impacts historically oppressed populations and those who receive little governmental support protection from events beyond their control. 

Climate migrants, or climate refugees, are equally victimized by political-economic structures that diminish adaptive, resilient, and mitigative capabilities.

Lack of adequate technical financial assistance, secure land rights, and financial capital have some of the greatest magnifying effects on disaster risk. A history of land degradation, typically fueled by capitalist interests and polluting enterprise, erodes away viable land. Historically oppressed communities therefore often have no choice but to settle in disaster-prone zones more susceptible to climate-related stresses where land is cheaper and available, and are less likely to receive disaster insurance. 

Hurricane Katrina’s Lasting Impacts

In the early 1900s, Louisiana’s state government primarily financed itself by taxing oil companies. By the time a landmark Supreme Court decision cracked down on taxing offshore oil rigs 50 years later, the damage was already done. Oil drilling and access canals ate away at southern Louisiana’s freshwater marshes, leading to an annual loss of land and increased vulnerability to climate events. 

When Hurricane Katrina landed in New Orleans, 80 percent of the city was submerged in the floodwaters. But like many other metropolitan areas, New Orlean’s most socially vulnerable populations were also its most climate-vulnerable — communities of color made up nearly 80 percent of the population in the flooded neighborhoods. For decades, discriminatory housing practices restricted Black homeownership to the few outlying neighborhoods. Higher-ground housing was snatched up by the time banks began to loan money to Black residents.

In the wake of Katrina’s destruction, Black residents have struggled to recover from the storm to this day, seeing increased poverty and unemployment rates, as well as a growing wage gap between Black and White residents. In contrast, the city’s White communities are once again flourishing. Lakeview, a predominantly White neighborhood in East New Orleans, got an economic upgrade from its pre-Katrina state with sparkling new homes and businesses, some of them with built-in flood elevation preparation for future flooding. While most of the city’s White population was able to stay or temporarily vacate during the hurricane, nearly 100,000 Black residents — one out of every three Black residents — did not return after the storm due to severe housing damage. 

Cultures and communities around the world, like that of New Orleans’ Black population, face the same dilemma. Whether permanently uprooting from the African Sahel due to desertification and widespread crop failure, or from Bangladesh due to salinization and landslides, it is often the most vulnerable who must pack up and go. 

Communities are Stuck In Limbo…

There are also places where communities at high risk cannot move. The three requisites for migration are: the need, the desire, and the ability to migrate. The concept of trapped populations, a term put forward in the 2011 Foresight Migration and Global Environmental Change report, describes a group of people of elevated vulnerability with the strong need and desire to migrate, but who are trapped by a number of economic, health, social, political, and/or geographic factors. These trapped populations become increasingly vulnerable over time. Eventually, they are forced to disperse, leaving behind their ways of living. 

Shishmaref, Alaska, is an Inupiat village of 600 residents. It sits on the westernmost coastline of Alaska, where it is protected by a naturally-formed ice pack that shields the village from extreme weather surges. As the average global temperature rises, the ice has begun to disperse, and the permafrost — which forms the very literal foundation of the village — begins to thaw, the village has started to lose as many as 50 feet of land annually. Although Shishmaref residents have voted to relocate, albeit reluctantly, the town cannot afford the $179 million it would cost to move. So, its residents await the next major storm, during which they would be forced to abandon their community, heritage, and identity in an emergency evacuation. 

…While Policymakers are Trapped by Terms

Despite worsening climate impacts and threat of a massive surge in human migration, international law has been reluctant to address the climate refugee crisis in any impactful way. Current legal frameworks on all scales reveal that there are few policies which even acknowledge the existence of climate refugees, in part because of controversy over terminology. 

The term “refugee” carries weight in international politics. By precedent in the 1951 Geneva Convention, the legal term refers to “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.” Refugees that conform with these classifications are subject to certain international protections and privileges, such as the principle of non-refoulement, which establishes that recognized refugees seeking asylum cannot be deported.

As it stands, people displaced by climate-induced events and processes do not fall under the existing qualifications to be considered refugees; instead, they are referred to as climate migrants. Redefining “climate migrants” as “climate refugees” is one of the biggest hurdles to providing climate refugees the protection they deserve. 

So, why can they not just be reclassified as climate refugees? Historically, there has been significant resistance in the political landscape from the global North towards the inclusion of climate refugees under international law. Using the tired national security rationale, alongside very real anti-immigrant and xenophobic sentiments, global North countries seek to shirk their duties to refugees from a climate crisis the North helped to fuel. Given the global North’s power in international negotiations, the topic is difficult to approach and doing so risks cutting down on existing refugee protections rather than expanding them. 

Using the tired national security rationale, alongside very real anti-immigrant and xenophobic sentiments, global North countries seek to shirk their duties to refugees from a climate crisis the North helped to fuel.

Not Waiting on the World to Change

The scope of the climate refugee crisis calls for extensive bilateral and multilateral engagement.  Endorsing existing international refugee protections such as the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees, which is “the first international document of its kind to explicitly acknowledge climate change as a driver of migration and encourage progress on enhanced protection and migration pathways for people moving in such contexts,” is among the first steps nations should take. 

While protection under international law is crucial, it is also important that nations, particularly those in the global North, pick up the slack. In addition to having the financial capability to support resettling refugees, wealthy nations can scale up foreign climate resilience and adaptation investments to improve the capacities of communities so they do not have to migrate. Funding development, modernizing agriculture and water infrastructure, and supporting livelihood security are among the many medium-term investments that could increase resilience. On a local scale, cities and states can move to protect refugees through enabling sanctuary cities.

The climate refugee crisis must be approached as an issue of climate justice. It disproportionately impacts the world’s most vulnerable, compounding upon decades of oppression, colonization, and dispossession. We can no longer afford to sit back and wait for billions to be displaced. In the coming year, the Global Center for Climate Justice will be releasing a landmark report on the climate refugee crisis. It analyzes the ways in which neoliberal capitalism and its institutions create and perpetuate the crisis, as well as the international systems that inhibit change. Stay tuned!

Interested in getting a copy of the report? Let us know by emailing: comms@climatejusticecenter.org.