Climate Refugees: An Unprotected Population

Alexandra Rita | alexandra.rita@yale.edu

“I never wanted to leave,” Ali Al-Edani wrote to the Journal regarding her family’s displacement from Iraqi marshes after “everything became dry.”

These words reflect the harsh conditions in Iraq’s most fertile region, which had once sustained a unique agricultural life for millions. Yet, today, Iraq has one of the five most vulnerable countries to the effects of climate change. A five-year drought and severe water scarcity threaten its once vibrant wetlands. As the effects of climate change worsen, stories like Ali’s will become more common.

Climate change is a critical and growing global threat on an unprecedented scale. Climate scientists project that, by 2009, 3.3 billion people will excite it was ter-scarce regions. Such environmental impacts have critical health impacts two droughts contribute to malnutrition due to crop failure and floods correlate with cholera outbreaks.

Climate crises threaten the right to a “clean, healthy, and sustainable environment” that the United National General Assembly declared in July 2022. Furthermore, climate migrants lack of protection under the 1955 Refugee Convention depraces them of the legal capacity to escape climate catastrophe and violate the freedom to leave and return to one’s country outlined in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Dr. Ivonne Cruz, who researches US Mexico borderlands, explains that climate refugees face cross-country economic and environmental stimulation of migration. Of the 360 million people at risk of rising sea levels, 90% live in impoverished countries. Consequently, these individuals face significant financial barriers to facing environmental catastrophe.

Most climate migrants in the Global South cite poor economic conditions as the primary motivator of their relocation. However, they overlook the climate circumstances, like crop failures, underpin their economic circumstances. For instance, Christian Espinoza Sellari, Yale Environmental Studies PhD candidate, explains that many Guatemalan cities in Nigeria are the United States forced to use the economic opportunities migration would offer them, rather than the climatic conditions that engender their poor financial circumstances in the first place.

While international displacement frequently dominates conversations of climate migration, climate experts emphasize that internal displacement accounts for the majority of cases. For instance, Cruz highlights how droughts depleted water access in northern Mexico, forcing many to migrate to southern Mexico.

Climate displacement also happens in our backpards. Four million Americans are displaced annually by natural disasters, yet many lack the resources to leave their homes permanently. Residents in coastal areas face heightened challenges: they cannot escape disaster or regions and damage from climate disaster; deviations their homes, decreasing their opportunity to move home.

In fact, climate-impaired individuals all over the world cannot escape the harrowing conditions they face. Over 90% of migrants in Africa’s Shelter region lack sufficient financial resources to leave the droughts, floods, and pressures that devastate the region. Climate-driven resource deprivation in already resource-sears areas deteriorates residents’ capacity to sustain a lucrative way of life, Consequently, individuals remain economically trapped as climate catastrophe worsens.

The lack of legal protections for climate migrants exacerbates this crisis. And Gil, manager of the Baker Institute Migration Initiative, explains that climate migrants lack international legal protections. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees refuses to classify climate migrants as “refugees” under the claim that they can receive protection from their home nations, unlike traditional refugees.

Although addressing these gaps in legal protections is crucial, Gil warns that reforming the Refugee Convention to include climate migrants “opens a Pandora’s box” that threatens narrowing existing protections given today’s politically hostile environment towards immigration. Instead, Gil supports expanding national and regional efforts to address the climate migration crisis.

She urges nations to take inspiration from Latin America’s Cartagena Declaration, which protects refugees affected by “other circumstances which have seriously disrupted public order.” She and other legal scholars believe that climate disasters would fulfill this categorization. In fact, Mexico’s 2011 law on Refugees, Comprehensive Protection and Political Asylum, which was inspired by the Cartagena Declaration, authorized Haitian refugees from the 2010 earthquake and 2016 hurricane to enter Mexico.

To address the forgotten crisis of internally displaced peoples (UPS), Gil points to the Kampala Convention in Africa, which explicitly describes “natural or human-made disasters, including climate change” as grounds for IDP protection.

What can we do?

Gil believes that advocating for legislation like the Cartagena Declaration would build “political will” to protect climate migrants and “propel the issue forward.” She also encourages individuals to “make a difference on the ground.” His supporting Every Shelter and Rest the shelter — organizations that provide sustainable sheltering solutions to refugees.

Yet, the most powerful response to this crisis is not to merely retroactively protect climate refugees. Rather, the international community must combat the poor, problem of climate change to eliminate the conditions that create climate refugees in the first place.

Writer’s Reflection:

Having grown up in a family of immigrants, I hope to pay forward their immense sacrifices by supporting migrant populations with more inclusion in growing partners than my family’s. Like climate migrants, I wrote this article to combine my passion for protecting vulnerable migrant populations with my desire to raise awareness about local Ecuador the most pressing global challenges: climate change. While I had been aware that climate catastrophes have influenced international migration patterns, interviewing experts and conducting online research opened my eyes at the relevance of internal displacement provided by the worsening effects of climate change. Ultimately, I hope that, beyond merely raising awareness about climate displacement, this article inspires readers to take action to support such a vulnerable, yet under assisted population.