By Lucy-Claire Saunders
22 December 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: Lately, there has been much talk about the Pacific islands and rising sea levels, especially about the Maldives. The newly elected president of the Maldives Mohamed Anni Nasheed made international headlines last month when he announced a plan to use his country’s tourism revenues to buy another homeland.
Experts warn that rising sea levels could engulf the 1,200-island nation, whose highest point is a mere 2.3 meters above sea level. Indeed, the Maldives is at the forefront of the battle against climate change.
Small islands, including those in the South Pacific, have been identified as one of the key global regions to be most affected by climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) fourth assessment report.
Instead of letting his people become refugees on foreign soil, President Nasheed is looking at plans to relocate all 370,000 people of the Maldives to another country, including India or Iceland.
But until such a feat can be accomplished – that is, if it can be done at all – President Nasheed’s government is looking at resettlement options within his own country. Speaking to MediaGlobal, the Permanent Representative of the Maldives to the United Nations, H.E. Ahmed Khaleel, described the “Safer Islands Strategy” whereby communities living on smaller, less populated and potentially more vulnerable islands would be resettled on larger islands with better natural protection and enhanced coastal defenses.
“Migration and resettlement from smaller to larger islands has become an important prerequisite for development and for our survival,” he said. “My government fully understands the difficulties and the enormity of implementing this formidable task.”
For a developing nation like the Maldives, part of the difficulty is due in part to a lack of technical and human resources. Initial capacity-building strategies will alone cost $36.6 million, according to Khaleel.
“Currently, there are three adaptation funds created under the climate change conventions – the Special Climate Change Fund, the Least Developed Countries Fund, and the Kyoto Protocol Adaptation Fund. The amount of funding provided through these mechanisms, however, is grossly inadequate to meet adaptation needs. We are hopeful that the newly created Bali Adaptation Fund could provide funding for implementing adaptation plans, particularly to the small island developing countries.”
On the front line of climate change, the Maldives, along with the other Pacific islands, are the guinea pigs in the ultimate experiment of how humans will adapt the environment’s slow degradation.
President Nasheed’s comments about resettling his entire nation have no doubt added weight to a critical conversation about migration and climate change – one that social scientists and human rights advocates have been debating for several years.
Academics and international agencies estimate that there are currently several million people who are displaced due to floods, famine and other environmental disasters. Taking climate change into account, this number will rise to tens of millions within the next 20 years, or hundreds of millions within the next 50 years.
As the Maldivian government considers the very drastic decision of moving its entire people to another country before disaster strikes, the questions and uncertainties steadily rise just as the sea level itself.
Who would pay for the nation’s relocation? Is it solely the responsibility of the government of Maldives? Or are industrialized nations, who have been held responsible for climate change, morally obliged to contribute?
And even if the Maldives continued to exist in legal terms and its government attempted to operate from another territory, it is unclear just how the rights of citizenship would be secured.
There is also talk of ad-hoc migration to neighboring countries. However, the slow but sure degradation of a people’s environment has yet to become a legitimate reason for creating specific migration legislation; for example, despite rumors circulating on the Internet, New Zealand is not accepting migrants from Pacific island countries due to climate change.
“The New Zealand government does not have an immigration policy responding to climate change,” Angie Enoka, spokesperson for New Zealand’s Department of Labor told MediaGlobal. “The Pacific Access Category is run by ballot, and allows up to 75 citizens of Kiribati, 75 citizens of Tuvalu and 250 citizens of Tonga to be granted residence in New Zealand every year, but this has no relation to the issue of environmental migration.”
To date no country has explicitly created an immigration policy tailored to those who knock at their borders due to climate change.
But as time marches on, the pressure will mount to create international guidelines that will help individual countries create an immigration policy that better reflects the oncoming crisis.
“I think there must be a lot of regional cooperation in developing countries to manage migration and human mobility, especially as it relates to climate change,” Koko Warner, head of the United Nation University’s Institute for the Environment and Human Security Section on Social Vulnerability and Environmental Migration told MediaGlobal.
“So few of the migrants we encountered in our fieldwork worldwide were able to migrate internationally – the vast majority face a situation where they ‘only make it’ to the next live-able place. This will increasingly require countries to work together, especially developing countries,” added Warner, who is currently at the climate conference in Poznan, Poland.
But before the international community can undertake this, it is necessary to determine who should be included in the category. This is tricky, even for the experts.
Defining migration caused by the environment’s slow deterioration is extremely difficult in part because of the confusion in what constitutes forced versus voluntary migration.
At what point is the line drawn?
According to Tamer Afifi, a junior academic officer at the United Nations University, who specializes in environmental change and forced migration, those whose livelihoods are affected by long-term climate change are included in the term, ‘Environmental Migrants.’ What they are not called are Environmental Emergency Migrants – une mot du jour circulating at the United Nations.
“The term Environmental Emergency Migrant is more suited to explain sudden environmental change and not climate change because climate change is quite gradual, like sea rise, for example. It does not happen in a day,” Afifi told MediaGlobal.
In a world where actions and policies are created based around titles and categories, definitions are extremely important. Appropriate assistance can only be given to displaced people falling under the definition if it exists.
As climate change is a human rights issue, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is beholden to define these types of displaced people so the appropriate assistance will be secured if an entire people are forced to migrate because of climate change.
“Some form of UNHCR role regarding those obliged to seek safety abroad may be called for, certainly inasmuch as statelessness would be a concern,” according to a UNHCR report released in October.
However, it is still unclear what capacity the UNHCR would have in protecting the human rights of migrants forced to flee environmental deterioration. Despite several attempts to contact UNHCR deputy director Wei-Meng Lim Kabaa, she did not respond before press time.
Although some believe that climate change migrants should be afforded the same protection as a refugee, the United Nations does not currently recognize them as such. And for good reason, according to Afifi
“The word, refugee, is quite shocking,” he said. “It’s quite an impressive word that we try to avoid.”
A refugee is someone who has escaped violence or persecution and has a right to protection under the 1951 Refugee Convention. Using the word ‘refugee’ to define a climate change migrant runs the risk of muddying a conduit that currently offers millions of people crucial protection.
However, while the 1951 Refugee Convention does not offer all the solutions, it does offer tools that can help policymakers, suggests a study released in October by the Refugee Studies Centre of the Oxford Department of International Development.
“In determining whether or not someone is a ‘Convention refugee’ it is not necessary to determine whether or not the reason leading to persecution (political opinion, race, nationality, religion or membership of a particular social group) is the main reason for displacement but whether or not it happened,” writes the article’s authors, Olivia Dun and Francios Gemenne, who are both involved in the EU’s Environmental Change and Forced Migration Scenarios project.
“Once this link is established then the decision maker can grant the person refugee status without considering whether or not the reason was the main cause leading to the persecution. Could/should the same be done for people displaced by environmental factors?”
Until an exact definition is agreed upon by the international community one thing is certain – a humanitarian response must be addressed if the developing world is to adapt to climate change.