A treaty for 'climate refugees'?

By Daniel Nelson A Convention for People Displaced By Climate Change – who the World Bank says could total 200 million – is being promoted by two Australian lawyers, Tess Burton and David Hodgkinson. The two will this week visit Copenhagen, venue for the UN climate change summit in December, to discuss their proposal. Presenting the case for a convention at a seminar at the London School of Economics last week, they said the existing UN refugee convention would not cover people forced from their homes by global warming. Hodgkinson said there were concerns that extending the refugee convention to cover climate change refugees would weaken international protection for refugees with “a well-founded fear of persecution”. [Fear of diluting refugee protection was a major factor in opposition by rights, development and refugee campaigners, at three recent meetings in London, to the idea of trying to stretch the 1951 Refugee Convention to people fleeing the effects of climate change. At the most recent of these meetings, earlier in March, criticism was made of use of the phrase “climate refugees” by development NGOs because of the way it blurred the two issues.] Burton told the LSE meeting that the “pretty frightening” figures for the likely number of environmental refugees could provide a wake-up call but ran the risk of provoking hostility and fuelling anti-asylum sentiment. Although Burton described prospects for multilateral action as “pretty gloomy”, she and Hodgkinson felt there was a chance that the magnitude of the climate problem might provoke action on displaced people. Forecasters envisaged that many of those displaced by climate change would remain in their own countries, so looking after the displaced should be seen as a form of adaptation to climate change, they said. Hodgkinson noted that planning for a future of mass displacement would allow action to be taken before “panic reactions” against displaced people set in. A convention, he said, would give “certainty and consistency”, provide a mechanism for governments to act together, undertake research to plan and prepare for the impacts of large-scale displacement, and establish a fund to help pay for resettlement as well as for climate adaptation and mitigation measures. A convention could also include a limited range of human rights provision, such as protection against forcing people to return to high-risk areas. Previous support for a new international convention has come from: * the New Economics Foundation, which in 2003 suggested a new international convention "focusing on people whose way of life is being destroyed by a lost, ruined or degraded environment" * The Norwegian Refugee Council, which suggested a convention might provide legal status and protection for the "environmental refugee/migrant" * The Council of Europe's parliamentary assembly, which has put forward the idea of a European Union convention for environmental migrants. But a report by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights for a meeting of the Human Rights Coluncil this month says: "Human rights law does not provide clear answers as to the status of populations who have been displaced from sinking islands states. Arguably, dealing with such possible disasters and protecting the human rights of the people affected will first and foremost require adequate long-term political solutions, rather than new legal instruments." + Other climate refugee estimates: * Environmentalist Norman Myers: 150 million in 50 years * The UN University's Institute for Environment and Human Security: 50 million 'environmentally displaced people' by 2010 * Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: 150 million environmental refugees by 2050

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