The World Isn't Ready For Climate Refugees
You can batten the hatches against a storm, but bureaucracy is harder to ride out. Last week, one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record made a direct hit on the northern Bahamas and stalled there, destroying nearly half the homes on Great Abaco and Grand Bahamas islands. Days later, with their homes in ruins and food and water scarce, hundreds of fleeing Bahamians were asked to leave a ferry bound for Fort Lauderdale, Fla., because they didn’t have a U.S. visa — despite visas not being required in the past. And while U.S. Customs and Border Protection officials blamed the ferry operator, the federal government announced Wednesday it wouldn’t be extending the Dorian survivors temporary protected status.
Rising sea levels, wildfires, drought or a slow-moving hurricane can all threaten your way of life as surely as a bomb. But unlike victims of war for whom the causes and effects of the threats are clear and codified, there are no protections for environmental migrants. That’s despite World Bank estimates that tens of millions of people could be climate refugees by 2050, research showing asylum seeking already increases in response to climate-related issues like rising temperatures, and the fact that researchers have been talking about the plight of people who must escape not-entirely-natural disasters since at least 1988. Technically, in the context of legal and political systems, climate refugees don’t exist. There’s no space for them in international law and no special plans for how to treat them in the United States when they arrive. Here and around the world, fleeing climate change means running to bureaucracies as inhospitable to your survival as the places you left behind.
Just ask Ioane Teitiota, a man from the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati who applied for asylum in New Zealand in 2010 on the basis that rising sea levels were slowly swallowing the land under his feet. His claim was denied because he didn’t fit existing definitions of what a refugee can be. Same with the other Pacific Islanders who have been seeking status as environmental migrants in Australia and New Zealand since at least 2000. The problem for Teitiota and others wasn’t that immigration officials didn’t believe climate change was happening. If only it were that simple and easy to judge. Instead, the rulings centered on the fact that systems designed in the 1950s simply aren’t accommodating the needs of the modern world.
Life-threatening climate change crises are almost never just one thing. In Teitiota’s case, New Zealand’s Immigration and Protection Tribunal pointed out (correctly) that climate change was stacked on top of other problems on Kiribati — too much population growth, not enough sanitation infrastructure and greater numbers of people packing into urban areas. Sure, Teitota’s house was increasingly threatened by high tides, but other parts of the island were still safe. And, anyway, the Tribunal argued, refugee status in New Zealand is dependent on both the prospect of long-term human rights violations and a failure of the migrant’s own state to act. If climate change exacerbates a downward spiral in Kiribatians’ standard of living while developed nations that produce far more of the world’s greenhouse gases do nothing — well, there’s no legal precedent to call that a problem big enough for them to run from.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-world-isnt-ready-for-climate-refugees/
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