Every day, dozens of migrants from Central America, Haiti and Venezuela come early in the morning to the offices of the governmental Mexican Commission for Refugee Aid in downtown Mexico City to apply for asylum. Mexico is overwhelmed by the influx of migrants, to whom it has begun to apply harsh restrictions. CREDIT: Emilio Godoy/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Oct 27 2021 (IPS)

In September, 31-year-old Yesenia decided to leave her home on the outskirts of the northern Honduran city of San Pedro Sula, driven out by violence and the lack of water.

“The maras (gangs) were threatening me, and it hadn’t rained, there was very little water. I had to leave, I had to go somewhere, anywhere. I want to stay wherever they let me,” the mother of a seven-year-old girl, who was a homemaker in one of the most violent cities in the world, told IPS.

It was the first time she had left her country. She reached the southern Mexican state of Chiapas (bordering Guatemala), and continued on by bus and hitchhiking. “We slept in the bushes, walked, went hungry, got rained on and sometimes froze,” she said, describing the journey she made with her daughter.

Yesenia, who is short and dark-haired with a round face, now lives in an area that she does not name for security reasons, and is applying for refugee status in the capital of Mexico, a country that has historically been a huge source of migrants to the United States as well as a transit route for people from other countries heading there as well. It has also become, over the last decade, a growing recipient of undocumented migrants.

Due to the large number of requests for asylum, which has stretched Mexico’s immigration and refugee system to the limit, it takes a long time for cases to be resolved. Although immigration advocacy organisations provide assistance in the form of money, food, lodging and clothing, these resources are limited and the aid eventually comes to an end.

Driven out by poverty, lack of basic services, violence and climate-related phenomena, millions of people leave their countries in Central America every year, heading mainly to the United States, to find work and to reunite with family.

But in the face of the increasing crackdown on immigration in the U.S. since 2016 under the administrations of Donald Trump (2016-January 2021) and current President Joe Biden, many undocumented migrants have opted to stay in places that were previously only transit points, such as Mexico.

The problem is that Mexico also tightened the screws, as part of the role it agreed with the U.S. to perform during the times of Trump, who successfully pressured the governments of Enrique Peña Nieto (2012-December 2018) and current President Andrés Manuel López Obrador to step up their own anti-immigration measures. And this has not changed since Biden took office.

Like the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean, Mexico and the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador) are highly vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis. Drought and devastating hurricanes drive people from their homes to safer areas or across borders in search of better lives.

Honduras is one illustration of this phenomenon. Since 1970, more than 30 major tropical storms have hit the country, leaving a trail of deaths and billions of dollars in property damage. Hurricanes Eta and Iota struck in 2020. For this year, the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) predicted 17 hurricanes on the Atlantic side before the official end of hurricane season on Nov. 30.

In early September, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández also declared a drought emergency, another increasingly recurrent and intense phenomenon in Central America.

The refugee club

Caribbean island nations such as Haiti are also suffering from the climate emergency. The country was hit by Hurricane Elsa in June and by Tropical Storm Fred and Hurricane Grace in August, on top of an Aug. 14 earthquake measuring 7.2 on the Richter scale that claimed thousands of lives.

In 2017, a particularly lethal year, hurricanes Harvey and Irma struck Haiti. As a result, Sadaam decided to leave, heading first to Chile that year and now to Mexico, where he has applied for humanitarian asylum.

“Things got very difficult. The hardware store where I worked had to close because of the rains and I couldn’t work. I can do any kind of job and that’s all I ask for: work,” the 30-year-old Haitian migrant told IPS.

Tall and lean, Sadaam, originally from Port-au-Prince, also arrived in Mexico in September, with his wife and his son, as well as his brother and sister-in-law and their daughter. They are living temporarily in a hotel, with support from humanitarian organisations.

On Oct. 6, the Mexican government deported 129 Haitians to Port-au-Prince on a chartered flight from Tapachula, a city in the southern state of Chiapas. The measure was criticised by social organisations, while the U.N. called for an evaluation of the need for protection of Haitians and the risks of returning them to their country. CREDIT: INM

Climate disaster = displacement

Recent studies and migration statistics show that the paths followed by migrants and climate disasters in the region are intertwined.

Between 2000 and 2019, Cuba, Mexico and Haiti were the hardest hit, by a total of 110 storms which caused 39 billion dollars in damage, affected 29 million people and left 5,000 dead, 85 percent of them in Haiti, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In 2020, internal and external displacement due to disasters soared in El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras. But the international migratory framework has not yet accepted the official category of climate refugee, despite growing clamor for its inclusion.

Armelle Gouritin, an academic at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences-Mexico, told IPS that the scientific community has linked the sudden events to the climate emergency, whose influence on internal and external migration flows is growing.

“There is evidence that they are increasing. It is quite difficult to say to what extent the volume of migration is growing, because there is little quantitative data. It is hard to compare. It tends to be invisible, especially because of slow onset processes such as drought and desertification,” she explained.

In her 2021 book “The protection of internal climate migrants; a pending task in Mexico”, the expert described scenarios linked to migration, such as gradual-onset phenomena, sudden-onset disasters (hurricanes or violence generated by water shortages), relocations decided by the authorities, sea level rise and the impact of renewable energy megaprojects.

As Mexico has become a magnet for migration, measures against immigration have been stiffened. This year, through August alone, immigration authorities detained 148,903 people, almost twice as many as in all of 2020, when the total was 82,379.

Of the current total, according to official data, 67,847 came from Honduras, 44,712 from Guatemala, 12,010 from El Salvador and 7,172 from Haiti.

Deportations are also on the rise, as up to August, Mexico removed 65,799 undocumented migrants, compared to 60,315 in the whole of 2020. Of these, 25,660 were from Honduras, 25,660 from Guatemala, 2,583 from El Salvador and 223 from Haiti.

The Haitian influx was triggered after the United States announced in August that it would halt deportations of those already in the country because of the earthquake, which drew thousands of Haitians who were in Brazil and Chile, where they had migrated earlier and where policies against them had been tightened.

In Mexico, according to official figures refugee applications increased from 70,406 in all of 2019 to 90,314 this year up to and including September, of which 26,007 were filed by Haitian migrants. Migrants from Honduras, Haiti, Cuba, El Salvador, and Venezuela account for the largest number of applications.

Despite the large rise in applications, Mexico only approved 13,100 permanent refugees in September: 5,755 from Honduras, 1,454 from El Salvador, 733 from Haiti and 524 from Guatemala.

On the night of Oct. 7, a military checkpoint found 800 migrants from Central America in three truck trailers on a highway in the state of Tamaulipas in northeastern Mexico, bordering the United States, where they were headed. CREDIT: Elefante Blanco/Pie de Página

Fleeing the climate emergency

The World Bank study “Groundswell: Acting on Internal Climate Migration” warns that Mexico must prepare for the confluence of climate disasters and migration flows, and projects 86 million internal climate migrants in the world by 2050, including 17 million in Latin America.

The report, published on Sept. 13, estimates that the number of climate migrants will grow between 2020 and 2050, when between 1.4 and 2.1 million people will migrate in Mexico and Central America. Mexico’s central valley, where the capital city is located, and the western highlands of Guatemala will receive migrants, while people will flee arid, agricultural and low-lying coastal areas.

Although several international bodies link migration and the climate crisis, the concept of climate migrant or refugee does not exist in the international legal framework.

Gouritin understands the international reluctance to address the issue. “There are three narratives for mobility: responsibility, security and human rights. States are not willing to head towards the responsibility narrative. The security narrative predominates, we have seen it with the caravans from Central America (on the way to the United States through Mexico),” she said.

Few countries are prepared to address the climate dimension of migration, as is the case of Mexico. The general laws on Climate Change, of 2012, and on Forced Internal Displacement, of 2020, mention climate impacts but do not include measures or define people internally displaced by climate phenomena.

In the United States, undocumented Mexicans are experiencing the same thing, as deportations of Mexicans could well exceed the levels of all of 2020, since 184,402 people were deported that year compared to 148,584 as of last August alone.

Yesenia and Sadaam are two migrants who are suffering the statistics in the flesh, as victims of their own governments and the Mexican response.

“I’ll stay wherever I can get a job to support and educate my daughter,” said Yesenia. With refugee status, migrants can work freely.

Sadaam said: “I was offered a job as a cleaner in a hotel, but they asked me for a refugee card. The government told me that I have to wait for the call for the appointment. If I get a job, I will stay here.”

But above and beyond the detentions, deportations and refugee applications, migration will continue, as long as droughts, floods and storms devastate their places of origin.

Mitali Padhi (19) cradles her 3-month-old son in front of her parents’ new brick-asbestos one-room home. With her is her mother, Parvati Padhi. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS

By Manipadma Jena
BHUBANESWAR, India, Aug 25 2021 (IPS)

When 11-year-old Mitali Padhi hugged her childhood friends to say goodbye, she felt a deep-seated foreboding.

Around her, the mud walls of their home had collapsed, wrecking their meagre belongings. All were mired in mud. The straw roof lay splayed 100 metres away from the house – blown away by tropical storm Phailin.

The tropical storm made landfall at 136 mph wind speeds near Mitali’s village in India’s eastern coastal Odisha State. The storm left 3.7 million houses damaged in its wake.

However pitiable this mud hut, it was the only secure place the girl had ever known, and it was a place where, since birth, a larger community supported her.

Rice paddies had turned into sea-water pools. Mitali’s father, a farm labourer, would have no work for a year until monsoons washed away the salt from farmlands.

Her family of five, her parents and two elder brothers, took a high-interest local loan and migrated to the nearest urban centre Bhubaneswar. This was 2013.

When IPS met Mitali Padhi, she had a 3-month-old baby boy in her arms. The frail 19-year-old says she is breastfeeding but feels extremely weak.

“We got a protein drink for her (Mitali), but she dislikes it,” her Mitali’s mother, Pravati Padhi, 50, interjects.

We stand between two parallel rows of one-room brick and asbestos hutments that the Padhi family built and moved into after super cyclone Fani in 2019. This cyclone, described as the worst since 1999, decimated their tiny mud-walled, plastic-sheet covered hut that squatted illegally against a university’s compound wall – displacing the family for a second time.

Mitali’s father runs a 3-wheeler tuk-tuk but is “lazy, moody, and his earnings are erratic,” according to his wife, Pravati. After leaving their village in 2013, the burden of providing for her three children was on her, she tells IPS. Since then, she sells spicy snacks on roadsides earning $10 a day.

After migrating to the city, the 11-year Mitali looked after the cooking for the family. After lunch, she helped her mother roll out tiny puffed poori (bread) and fry them crisp while her mother prepared the boiled potato filling and spicy, tangy water for the popular snacks.

In a dire financial state once again after the 2019 cyclone, Pravati decided to marry off Mitali. It would mean one less mouth to feed, “and the young man was earning well.”

“We were eating out our savings after the storm. My daughter was already ‘mature,’ (reached puberty), she was not in school, and when I was away from home vending, and she was alone, young boys from our slum tried to chat her up, come into the house,” Mitali’s mother told IPS, justifying the marriage of her teenage daughter.

Soon Mitali was pregnant – at barely 18.

“I would have liked to learn sewing, earn and get married only when I was 22,” she tells IPS.

2. A pre-teen girl migrating with her family to a brick kiln in India’s Telangana State after drought hit her native province of Bolangir in Odisha State. Here she looks after her sibling while her parents work.
Credit: Umi Daniel/IPS

The family are an example of increasingly vulnerable people affected by climate change disasters.

“As (the number of) climate disasters rise in Odisha, drought (is experienced) in its western part, cyclones in the coastal region, floods in over half of its 30 provinces,” Ghasiram Panda, Programme Manager for ActionAid, told IPS. “Because of poverty, because of their vulnerability, there are concerns for the safety (of vulnerable communities). We are seeing an increasing trend of girls being married off before the age of 18.”

This is not only in the rural areas.

“In Bhubaneswar city slums, populated by rural migrants in search of livelihoods, child marriages are (also) on the rise,” Ghasiram Panda says. “While rural families migrate to cities to better their income, girl children more particularly are unable to access education, they do poorly in school or drop out, and parents think marriage is the best way out.”

Umi Daniel, Director, Migration & Education, Aide et Action, South Asia, says children are adversely affected because “a quarter of all migrating population (from Odisha to brick kilns) are children.”

According to the UN, in India, internal migrants accounted for around 20 percent of the country’s workforce in 2017, which currently equals 100 million people.

Around the world, approximately 1 in 45 children are on the move. Nearly 50 million boys and girls have migrated across borders or forcibly displaced within their own countries, UNICEF estimated in 2017.

Climate-related events and their impacts are already contributing significantly to these staggering numbers, with 14.7 million people facing internal displacement due to weather-related disasters in 2015 alone.

The annual average since 2008 is increasing and now at 21.5 million is equivalent to almost 2 500 people being displaced every day.

Owing to climate change, 27 of the 37 Indian states are now disaster-prone. Some 68 percent of the cultivated land is vulnerable to drought, 58.6 percent landmass is prone to earthquakes, 12 percent to floods, 5,700 km of the coastline is prone to cyclones, and 15 percent of the area is susceptible to landslides, according to India’s National Disaster Management Authority.

“Mitali still is fortunate,” Gitanjali Panda, community mobiliser of local non-profit Centre for Child and Women Development, tells IPS.

Another internal migrant girl, ‘fell in love’ and eloped with a boy when she was 15, Gitanjali Panda says. The infatuation wore off within a year, and the family got her back but hastily married her off to another man.

Gitanjali Panda frequently visits the slum and says the young woman, a mother of a 5-year child at 21, had complained of excruciating stomach pain. She miscarried her second child. The doctor then diagnosed a ‘cracked uterus’ – the result of a fall during her first pregnancy at aged 16.

An adolescent boy takes a break from extracting burnt bricks from the kiln with his father and stacks them for transportation in Tamil Nadu State.
Credit: Umi Daniel/IPS

In Daniel’s experience, children are “invisible entities” – they don’t even count. Always migration in India is seen as male-dominated. The government doesn’t even (acknowledge) families are migrating, let alone formulating pro-child migration policies.”

Daniel has worked on migration and child rights for three decades, heading the Aide et Action’s Migration Information and Resource Centre (MIRC) in Bhubaneswar.

Internally displaced families live in rows of temporary tin huts next to brick kilns in the suburban areas where they congregate. In these tin boxes, without doors and with just a torn sari hanging at the door for privacy, boys may get beaten and made to work inhumanly as bonded labour, but girls are “several times more vulnerable,” Daniel says.

Girls and women face “disproportionate threats to their safety and most basic human rights,” Action Aid’s Ghasiram Panda agrees. They are, too often, “the silent victims of climate disasters.”

Governments rarely consider their specific needs and vulnerabilities, he says.

“Rape is frequent,” Daniel told IPS. MIRC took up a case where three minor girls were raped in front of their parents in a brick kiln by the drunk kiln owner and his friends. They were from Karimnagar in Telangana State, which is a climate migrants’ destination. It took MIRC five to six years in a fast-tracked court to bring the wealthier culprits to justice.

As climate displacement and internal migration increases with more intense natural disasters impacting the poorest, Umi says solutions are being implemented by the non-profit organisations but “urgently need scaling-up by governments.”

Inside a learning centre at a brick kiln site in Odisha where adolescents to infants are creatively engaged while their parents make bricks.
Credit: Umi Daniel/IPS

Among the hopelessness, there are stories of success. A decade ago, Aide et Action’s Migration Information and Resource Centre started sourcing youth volunteers from India’s migrants’ origin provinces to go to destination locations and teach migrant children in their local dialect at the kiln sites.

Initially, the kiln owners refused to allow these informal learning centres.

“Now owners are putting in money themselves because they see women’s outputs increase when their children, adolescents to infants, are taken care of,” Umi says.

Government schools often agree to allow two rooms for these informal teaching classes. When migrants’ children return home for the four paddy-sowing months of August to November, they can seamlessly continue their schooling.

“In these ten years, we were able to reach out to 30 000 children with this facility. We started with just 250 children,” Umi says.

Ghasiram Panda says, however, there is a lot more that needs doing.

“Strengthening the government system to be more sensitive towards children’s issues, linking (migrant) youth to re-integrate and fully utilise schemes meant for their benefit, is Action Aid’s main focus now.”

• This feature was produced on behalf of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development.

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Calling for climate action at the People’s Climate March in Paris, Sep. 21, 2014. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

By A. D. McKenzie
PARIS, Sep 21 2014 (IPS)

As if to highlight the reality of climate change, the rain came pouring down here as demonstrators prepared to rally for political action to combat global warming.

But as the march got under way from Paris’ historic Place de la Republique, bright sunshine broke from behind the ominous clouds, giving a boost to the several thousand people who had heeded the call to send a message to world leaders.

“I’m here because we need to make governments realise that a new economic model that respects nature must be possible,” street artist Rémi Gautier told IPS. “We need to work for the future.”“It’s the poor who feel the greatest impact of global warming. Laws on the environment must do more for more people. We can’t continue with the status quo” – Monique Morellec, Front de Gauche (Left Front) activist

The Paris march was one of 2,500 events that took place around the world Sunday, involving 158 countries, according to Avaaz, the international civic organisation that coordinated the “People’s Climate March” in Paris.  French cities Lyon, Marseille and Bordeaux also held marches.

The demonstrations came two days ahead of the United Nations Climate Change Summit scheduled for Tuesday, when world leaders will gather in New York to discuss the wide-ranging effects of global warming, including ocean acidification, extreme weather conditions and rising sea levels.

“The leaders can’t ignore this massive call for action,” said Marie Yared, an Avaaz global campaigner in Paris. “The message is much stronger now because we’re seeing people in all their diversity making their voices heard. It’s not just activists.

To reflect the global concern, the rallying cry at the march was: “To change everything, we need everyone (Pour tout changer, il faut tout le monde).” The diversity of those taking part was notable, with demonstrators including senior citizens, students, children, non-governmental organisations, union members and religious groups.

Citizen carrying a succinct CLIMATE IN DANGER warning at the People’s Climate March in Paris, Sep. 21, 2014. Credit: A.D. McKenzie/IPS

They chanted, beat drums, danced and carried large banners as well as self-made drawings and signs. Other demonstrators met the marchers as the rally moved to the square in front of the city’s town hall.

The largest French Protestant organization, the Fédération Protestante de France, had urged its members to participate in the movement, saying “it’s time to change the course of things”.

“From New York to Berlin, from Bogota to New Delhi, from Paris to Melbourne, thousands of people are marching together to make their voices heard and to remind heads of state that the climate issue is universal, urgent and affects ecosystems and the future of mankind,” the Federation stated.

Joining in were farmers organisations, Oxfam France, Action Contre la Faim (Action Against Hunger), Catholic groups and others who wanted to draw attention to the less obvious consequences of global warming, which also affects food security and has created “climate refugees”.

“It’s the poor who feel the greatest impact of global warming,” Monique Morellec, a Front de Gauche (Left Front) activist, told IPS. “Laws on the environment must do more for more people. We can’t continue with the status quo.”

The Left Front was one of the political parties, including Europe Ecologie Les Verts (Greens) and Jeunes Socialistes (Young Socialists), that was out in support as well, with members handing out leaflets bearing the slogan: “We must change the system, not the climate”.

Participating groups stressed that France has a crucial role to play because Paris will be the host city of the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference (COP 21) where binding agreements are expected to be made on reducing carbon emissions.

“People need to stay alert and to keep the politicians awake until we see what happens next year in Paris,” Yared of Avaaz told IPS.

Some rights organisations that did not take part in the march are planning their own events to put pressure on politicians to act. Amnesty International is launching a campaign on Sep. 23 titled “Faites Pas l’Autruche (Don’t be an ostrich, don’t ignore what’s going on) to highlight the lack of laws governing multinational companies whose local subsidiaries may cause human rights violations.

The group wants French lawmakers to enact a law that will hold companies to account, an Amnesty spokesperson told IPS, citing incidents such as oil pollution in Nigeria and the dumping of toxic waste in Cote d’Ivoire.

The group said that victims of corporate malfeasance should have recourse to French law and courts, wherever they happen to live.  To raise public awareness, Amnesty will hold demonstrations at political landmarks in Paris, such as at the Assemblée Nationale, the seat of parliament, on the day that leaders meet in New York.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

A boy walks his bicycle down a flooded street in Georgetown, Guyana. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 25 2014 (IPS)

An international conference on small island developing states (SIDS), scheduled to take place in Samoa next week, will bypass a politically sensitive issue: a proposal to create a new category of “environmental refugees” fleeing tiny island nations threatened by rising seas.

“It’s not on the final declaration called the outcome document,” a SIDS diplomat told IPS."It's clear that governments have an obligation to reduce the risk of climate-related disasters, and displaced individuals and communities should be provided legal protection in their countries and abroad." -- Kristin Casper of Greenpeace

The rich countries that neighbour small island states are not in favour of a flood of refugees inundating them, he added.

Such a proposal also involves an amendment to the 1951 U.N. Convention on the Status of Refugees, making it even more divisive.

The outcome document, already agreed upon at a U.N. Preparatory Committee meeting last month, will be adopted at the Sep. 1-4 meeting in the Samoan capital of Apia.

Sara Shaw, climate justice and energy coordinator at Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), told IPS, “We believe that climate refugees have a legitimate claim for asylum and should be recognised under the U.N. refugee convention and offered international protection.”

Unfortunately, she said, the very developed nations responsible for the vast majority of the climate-changing gases present in the atmosphere today are those refusing to extend the refugee convention to include climate refugees.

“Worse still, they are trying to weaken existing international protection for refugees,” Shaw added.

The world’s first-ever “climate change refugee” claimant, a national of Kiribati, lost his asylum appeal in a New Zealand courtroom last May on the ground that international refugee law does not recognise global warming and rising sea levels as a valid basis for asylum status.

Ioane Teitiota, a 37-year-old native of the Pacific island nation, claimed his island home was sinking – and that he was seeking greener and safer pastures overseas.

But the New Zealand court ruled that the 1951 international convention on refugees, which never foresaw the phenomenon of climate change, permits refugee status only if one “has a well-founded fear of persecution because of his/her race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.”

The U.N.’s electronic newsletter, U.N. Daily News, quoted Francois Crepeau, the special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, as saying, “We don’t have, in international law, or any kind of mechanisms to allow people to enter a State against the will of the State, unless they are refugees.”

And even then, he said, they don’t technically have the right to enter, but cannot be punished for entering.

Addressing the General Assembly last September, the Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda Winston Baldwin Spencer told delegates, “It is a recognised fact – but it is worth repeating – that small island states contribute the least to the causes of climate change, yet we suffer the most from its effects.”

He said small island states have expressed their “profound disappointment” at the lack of tangible action at U.N. climate change talks.

Developed countries, he said, should shoulder their moral, ethical and historical responsibilities for emitting high levels of anthropogenic greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

“It is those actions which have put the planet in jeopardy and compromised the well-being of present and future generations,” he said.

Kristin Casper, legal counsel for campaigns and actions at Greenpeace International, told IPS, “It’s a scandal that low-lying coastal and small island developing states stand to lose their territory by the end of this century due to sea level rise.”

She said climate-driven migration will increase, “therefore we salute all efforts by Pacific Small Island Developing States, other governments and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to call for urgent action to allow the world to fairly deal with climate-forced migration.

“It’s clear that governments have an obligation to reduce the risk of climate-related disasters, and displaced individuals and communities should be provided legal protection in their countries and abroad,” Casper said.

The Samoa conference is officially titled the Third International Conference on SIDS, the last two conferences being held in Barbados in 1994 and Mauritius in 2005.

The 52 SIDS include Antigua and Barbuda, Cuba, Fiji, Grenada, Bahamas, Suriname, Timor-Leste, Tuvalu and Vanuatu.

Addressing reporters last week, the Secretary-General of the Samoa conference Wu Hongbo told reporters he expects over 700 participants, including world political leaders, 21 heads of U.N agencies and over 100 NGOs.

The outcome document, he said, has several recommendations for action on how to move forward. But these goals, he stressed, cannot be achieved by governments alone.

“All of us are affected by climate change,” he said, pointing out that there was a broad agreement among member states on the challenges ahead.

FoEI’s Shaw told IPS millions of people around the world are internally displaced or forced to seek refuge in other countries because of hunger or conflict. Many of these crises are being directly exacerbated by climate change as resources such as fresh water become scarcer and conflicts arise.

“The impacts of climate change, which include increased sea-level rise, droughts, and more frequent extreme weather events, will lead to a growing number of climate refugees around the world,” she warned.

Friends of the Earth would welcome climate refugees being recognised under the U.N. refugee convention and offered international protection, she said.

“However we remain doubtful that these refugees would ever receive a warm welcome from the rich countries whose climate polluting actions forced them from their homes.”

The reality is that the overwhelming majority of climate refugees like those escaping conflict or persecution will end up in other poor countries, whilst rich countries build ever greater walls and fences to keep out those seeking a safer life for their families,
Shaw said.

According to the United Nations, SIDS are located among the most vulnerable regions in the world in terms of the intensity and frequency of natural and environmental disasters and their increasing impact.

SIDS face disproportionately high economic, social and environmental consequences when disasters occur.

These vulnerabilities accentuate other issues facing developing countries in general.

These include challenges around trade liberalisation and globalisation, food security, energy dependence and access; freshwater resources; land degradation, waste management, and biodiversity.

Edited by: Kitty Stapp

The writer can be contacted at thalifdeen@aol.com

The new, relocated village of Vunidogoloa on Vanua Levu, the second largest island of Fiji. Credit: Government of Fiji

By Catherine Wilson
SYDNEY, May 25 2014 (IPS)

Still a long way off in many parts of the world, climate displacement is already a reality in the Pacific Islands, where rising seas are contaminating fresh water and agricultural land, and rendering some coastal areas uninhabitable.

In Fiji, where the survival of 676 communities is now precarious, the government is set to establish the region’s first national policy to address the challenges of internal migration as the last option in adaptation.

Home to over 870,000 people in the central South Pacific Ocean, the 300 volcanic islands that comprise this nation include low-lying atolls, and are highly susceptibility to cyclones, floods and earthquakes. Thus Fiji is no stranger to the devastation wrought by climate change, and its national policies hold valuable lessons for all governments bracing for climate-induced population movements.

During its recent chairmanship of the Group of 77 nations plus China (G77), Fiji brought the plight of Small Island Developing States to the international arena, highlighting the disproportionate nature of the climate crisis.

The Pacific Islands, for instance, are responsible for only 0.006 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet they are experiencing its worst impacts. According to the Pacific Climate Change Science Program, the sea level near Fiji rose by six millimetres per year over the past decade, double the global average. During this century, ocean acidification, temperatures and the intensity of rainfall are also predicted to increase.

When adaptation measures, such as building seawalls and planting mangroves, no longer stem the tide, survival depends on moving the affected population to new land and safer ground. The London School of Economics estimates that across the Pacific Islands, home to 10 million people, up to 1.7 million could be displaced due to climate change by 2050.

Mahendra Kumar, director of the climate change division at the ministry of foreign affairs and international co-operation in the capital, Suva, told IPS that “the Fiji government recognises it has a primary duty and responsibility to provide protection and assistance to people at risk of climate change.”

"[T]he Fiji government recognises it has a primary duty and responsibility to provide protection and assistance to people at risk of climate change.” -- Mahendra Kumar, director of the climate change division at the ministry of foreign affairs
The guidelines for internal population movements will become an addendum to the national climate change policy, introduced in 2012. They will be aligned with the broader policy’s principles of community ownership, involvement and consent, equitable benefits for all, including disadvantaged social groups, and the mainstreaming of climate change issues into national planning and budgeting.

The new “relocation procedure is to be followed in all cases when communities seek the assistance of the government,” Kumar clarified.

The preference of many Pacific Islanders is to relocate within their own country. More than 80 percent of land in Fiji is under customary ownership and has been for generations. Land is the main source of livelihoods, food, social security and ancestral identity for clans and extended families.

Melanesian society places great importance on community self-reliance with solutions to local challenges historically driven by traditional leaders. This has determined people’s survival for generations and is one reason why, today, many refute the term ‘climate refugee’.

But that doesn’t diminish the socioeconomic repercussions of, or financial resources needed, for physically moving large numbers of people, housing and infrastructure.

Vunidogoloa: An exercise in inclusive adaptation

Now in its final draft, the climate policy was first informed by the move and reconstruction of the Vunidogoloa village on Vanua Levu, one of Fiji’s two main islands, back in January.

Living by the edge of Natewa Bay, as the people of Vunidogoloa had for generations, became untenable when the encroaching sea breached seawall barriers, daily flooding homes, while saltwater degraded the soil and destroyed crops like taro and sweet potato.

While villagers had watched the gradual encroachment of the sea over a period of years, the ultimate loss of their traditional ancestral land and homes, they say, was distressing.

The move, which took a total of three years, began in 2010, before the relocation policy was conceived last year. However, since then the experiences of both the government and local residents have been incorporated.

“We are happy in our new village,” Suluwegi, a villager from Vunidogoloa, told IPS. “The houses are good and we are able to grow new crops for food.” The ministry of agriculture provided the new community with pineapple plants and technical support to promote new farming livelihoods.

The ministry of rural and maritime development and national disaster management led the multi-sector process of moving 150 people and building 30 new houses, with each costing approximately 5,400 dollars.

Suluwegi said that villagers actively participated in the decision about where the new settlement would be situated. Plans for relocation only went ahead after the community had given consent. Fortunately, customary land owned by the community was available about two kilometres away on higher ground, which was quickly identified as the preferred new site.

“There were no land issues or disputes, which made our work much easier,” George Dregaso of the national disaster management office told IPS, hinting that the acquisition of additional customary land could have involved long, complex negotiations and substantial compensation to host landowners.

Various ministries and authorities responsible for local government, agriculture, water, fisheries, forests and labour contributed funding and resources for the provision of basic services and new livelihoods.

New water tanks and a solar power system were installed in the community. Villagers received assistance in re-establishing agriculture, including plants, breeding livestock and farming materials, as well as new ponds for fish farming as an income-generating initiative.

Government funds covered 75 percent of costs associated with the relocation of Vunidogoloa, which totalled close to 535,000 dollars (about 978,000 Fijian dollars). The remainder represented the value of the timber that the community contributed to the project.

While the villagers of Vunidogoloa were fortunate enough to find refuge close to their old home, others who are impacted by climate change might not be so lucky.

Globally there is a critical lack of policies and laws to address the plight of climate migrants, either within states or across national borders. For instance, people internationally displaced due to climate extremes are not recognised under the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention.

But last year international lawyers, climate change experts and U.N. representatives devised the Peninsula Principles on climate displacement within states as an initial guiding framework for policy and lawmakers, based on current international law.

Many of those principles, such as community participation and consent, provision of affordable housing, land solutions, basic services and economic opportunities to those affected, have been observed in Vunidogoloa.

Kumar emphasised, however, that formal discussions about the legislative implications of Fiji’s relocation policy are yet to occur.

“We are taking this one step at a time,” he said. “The policy will need to be considered by all stakeholders, including relevant ministries, before it can be considered by cabinet. Cabinet’s decision and response to recommendations will be key to determining what the next steps will be.”

Fiji’s current climate change policy is supported by existing laws and a new constitution established last year, which recognises that all Fijians, irrespective of ethnicity or status, have equal rights to housing, public services, health and economic participation.

However, all Pacific Island states face challenges in fully implementing government policies due to limited technical, human resource and financial capacities. According to Kumar, further work on solutions to issues of land availability and sustainable funding ahead of future relocation projects will be needed as the policy draft enters its final stages.

The learning process for all concerned continues, with the government still to undertake post-relocation monitoring and evaluation at Vunidogoloa in order to address any long term or unforeseen impacts.

(END)

By Sudeshna Chowdhury
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 1 2013 (IPS)

Untold thousands dead and thousands more stranded or missing – these are the latest figures from various reports on the devastation caused by flash floods in the Indian state of Uttarakhand.

Susan Martin. Credit: ISIM

According to the United Nations, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami displaced 2.2 million people in 12 countries. In Bangladesh, 4.4 million people were displaced by Cyclone Sidr and floods in 2007, estimates the world body.

And an estimated additional 200 million people will be displaced due to climate change and natural disaster by 2050, according to Refugees International.

Experts say that the assessment of damage in natural disasters becomes all the more difficult simply because of the underlying uncertainty that accompanies such calamities.

The international community has long been mulling over the impact of climate change on migration.  It is high time that climate refugees or environmental migrants get some serious attention, said Susan F. Martin, director of the Institute for the Study of International Migration (ISIM) in Washington, tells IPS correspondent Sudeshna Chowdhury.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: How can climate change affect migration? Is it mostly internal displacement or is it large-scale country-to-country displacement?

A: The first point is that environmental factors are seldom the principal reason that people move. People generally migrate when environmental problems intersect with other factors, such as economic (loss of livelihoods), political (lack of governmental safety nets), and social (networks of people who have already migrated) ones.

There are four pathways through which climate change is likely to increase the propensity of human mobility in the context of these other factors:

Changes in weather patterns that contribute to longer-term drying trends that affect access to essential resources such as water and negatively impact the sustainability of a variety of environment-related livelihoods including agriculture, forestry, fishing, etc.

Rising sea levels and glacier melt that cause massive and repeated flooding that render coastal and low-lying areas uninhabitable in the longer-term.

Increased frequency and magnitude of weather-related acute natural hazards.

Competition over natural resources that may exacerbate pressures, which contribute to conflict, which in turn precipitates movements of people.

The first two are slow-onset processes that are likely to lead to gradual increases in migration.

The latter two involve acute events and are likely to lead to more immediate, large-scale displacement.

We expect most of these movements to be within the borders of countries but in some cases, the migration and displacement is likely to be across international borders.

Much of the international migration is likely to be into neighbouring countries – for example, Bangladesh to India. A minority of the movements will likely be to more distant countries. There are cases, however, in which whole communities and even countries may need to be relocated, particularly in the small island states facing significant levels of rising sea levels and no interior to which people can move.

Q: Are the displaced mostly farmers and workforce from the rural sector whenever we talk about migration due to climate change?

A: It depends on the specific ways in which the impacts of climate change manifest themselves. In situations of prolonged drought, for example, the displaced are likely to be farmers and others dependent on rain-fed agriculture.

On the other hand, intense and frequent cyclones and hurricanes may displace thousands of people from urban areas along the coast. Generally, though, the extent of displacement in both rural and urban areas is tied to the way in which governments and communities prepare for and respond to these events.

With advanced planning, communities can increase their resilience to adapt to the effects of climate change in situ.

Q: Critics often argue that it is too soon to take climate change seriously. What will you tell them?

A: Ignoring the migration implications of climate change has considerable risks. If we wait too long, more people will move in emergency circumstances with little choice of destination and few opportunities to protect themselves from harm.

Policies should avoid situations where affected populations are forced to move (distress migration) or move in emergency situations. Special attention should be paid to providing alternatives to irregular migration through targeted temporary and circular work programmes. In cases, however, where the impacts of climate change preclude return to home countries, the focus should be on permanent admissions.

Q: Has there been enough documentation that can establish the link between climate change and migration?

A: There are still many gaps in our understanding of the interconnections between climate change and migration. Perhaps the most important involves numbers. As of today, there are no credible projections of the number or characteristics of persons who are likely to migrate principally as a result of environmental change.

Many of the estimates that have been published conflate different forms of movement: short-distance movements, longer-distance internal movements, cross-border movements into neighbouring countries, and longer distance international movements.

The estimates do not distinguish between temporary displacement and permanent relocation within each of these forms of migration. Nor do they provide information about the gender, sex, age, or socio-economic characteristics of those who are likely to migrate in each of these categories. And, there is little information about the likely migration corridors – that is, projecting from where and to where people will migrate.

We need considerably more empirical research on communities already experiencing significant environmental impacts to help develop the evidence base needed to make more accurate projections, not only of overall levels of migration but, more importantly, of how migration is likely to manifest itself.

Q: Which are the regions to be worst affected by climate change?

A: Climate change will have impacts on both developing and developed countries. The difference is that developed countries generally have the financial resources to be able to prepare, respond and recover from the effects of climate change.

The impacts will be felt more acutely in poor countries and, especially, in those weak governance or experiencing conflict and political instability.

If the experience with the 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile is a harbinger of what is likely to happen, particularly in acute events, it is worth noting that a much stronger earthquake in Chile led to little loss of life, largely because of building codes and other preparatory actions, whereas a weaker earthquake in Haiti led to devastating loss of life and displaced millions.

The natural hazard (the earthquake) was not the principal culprit; poor governance and poverty made people in Haiti much more vulnerable.

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