La lutte contre les migrations climatiques et les considérations pour l'avenir

BRIAN MATEO: Hello, everyone. My name is Brian Mateo, and I serve as deputy director of programs and partnerships at Carnegie Council. To begin, I would like to welcome you all to our third event in the Council’s Ethics Empowered: Leadership in Practice series, which convenes scholars and practitioners to discuss pressing moral issues, reflect on their careers, and offer insights to young leaders. In today’s panel we will be addressing a crucial question: How can nations collaborate to ensure the rights of people moving due to climate change?

It is my pleasure to now introduce our moderator for this event, Jana Lucash, a member of the faculty at Hunter College High School and an advisory board member for our Next-Generation Leadership Initiative. We are also honored to welcome our panelists, Dan Boscov-Ellen, assistant professor of philosophy at Pratt Institute, alongside Ilgü Özler, professor of political science at State University of New York New Paltz. As we convene in Carnegie Council’s Global Ethics Hub in New York City, I want to welcome you again and will now pass the program over to Jana.

JANA LUCASH: Thank you, Brian. Over the last decade, climate migration has been on the rise. Estimates from the World Bank put the number of climate migrants within their countries at between 44 to 216 million people by the year 2050. Although currently most climate migrants stay within their own country, those who are forced to leave their country are often individuals who face a very dangerous journey, going through multiple countries, and possibly facing exploitation. Climate migration presents a distinct global-scale challenge that goes to the heart of the moral case for both sovereignty and human rights.

Rising global temperatures and a shift in climate patterns have rapidly increased the number of climate migrants. As all countries contend with this rise of population shift and climate effects, we need to contemplate how countries can collaborate while facing the competing pressures of the effect of climate change and at the same time ensure migrants’ human rights. This session, as Brian mentioned in his remarks, features two distinguished experts reflecting on the state of climate migration today and considerations for the future.

Before we begin our conversation I would like to thank everyone who is in the room with us, especially on this rainy, miserable day, and also for those of you who are with us online and your students. I am thrilled to see young faces.

I would like to open our conversation by asking each of you, Ilgü and Dan, to briefly describe the state of climate migration today and measures that have been taken to help address the issue. Thank you for being here with us.

Ș. ILGÜ ÖZLER: Thank you so much for the invitation. I thank the Council for the invitation and Brian and Jana for organizing us.

There is no single way to assess the situation right now. The main point that I want to make today and share with everyone is that we don’t have an overarching definition for who is a climate migrant. We don’t have a way to measure who is a climate migrant let alone a policy for who is a climate migrant at the global scale.

That creates a very difficult position in determining what the situation is, but we can look at this in notions of buckets. In the context of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), they define a climate migrant as “a person or group forced to leave their home due to climate change-related environmental changes, either suddenly or gradually.” That is the general definition that IOM gives, and somehow in the international realm people who are displaced due to climate fall under their realm.

Having said this, in the world of displacement, if you are displaced as somebody who is suffering from a climate-induced event like a hurricane and you are displaced into another part of your country, you are an internally displaced person, and that falls under the humanitarian realm of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) coordinates all these agencies to ensure that these people have their basic needs. That is the humanitarian response end of how you treat this issue.

People who cross over borders, on the other hand, when they cross over a border because they are displaced due to climate, do not have any rights or any position in the international realm, so it is at the behest of the host country whether to welcome them, turn them away, temporarily house them, or send them back. This is all in the sovereignty system that you were talking about. That is a second bucket, where if you cross a border you are out of luck. It is happenstance. There are countries like the United States that have historically extended temporary protective status to people who might be in danger if they go back to their homes due to environmental reasons, but that is temporary and is a protected status but not a right to stay in a place.

Planned relocations as well as unplanned permanent displacements to another country are very different from one another. There have been some planned relocations. Australia and Tuvalu are now talking about this. New Zealand at some point said they were going to issue a visa program for Kiribati, then they reserved that. Again, it is at the behest of the state and also the government that is running that state and which might change its mind.

On the legal front we have had some promising developments recently. An International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision came out in June. I am not a legal expert, so I am only going to refer to that as a promising decision that says that if a person is displaced due to climate and that individual does not feel safe going back to their country because their life might be endangered, they should be treated under non-refoulement, which is the legal aspect of the UN Refugee Convention that allows for somebody to seek asylum under very specific circumstances. This non-refoulement language in the International Court of Justice’s advisory decision can open up new arenas for perhaps a strategy in seeking court-based decision making to open up international law to climate refugees per se.

Then there is the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and maybe we can talk about that in some other context. I won’t go into that now.

DAN BOSCOV-ELLEN: This is really helpful, and we have some overlap in our thoughts about this.

First, I want to thank the organizers for having me. This is a lovely space and I think an important conversation to be having, so I appreciate you convening it.

I also want to start off by saying that though I appreciate the kind introduction I don’t consider myself an expert per se in this topic for a couple of reasons. Part of that is just acknowledging my own positionality here as a white U.S. citizen who has not had to navigate these systems in the same way that other people have, so there is inherently going to be knowledge actual migrants have that I don’t. I think it is often important for these kinds of things, insofar as a philosophy professor who gets to think about things that I think matter, I want to use the resources and opportunities that I have to try to think through what I take to be one of the central challenges of our time.

With that little asterisk, as we have already gotten into a little bit, I think climate migration is an inherently slippery concept. There are occasional cases where it is very clear that someone is forced to move as a result of climate impacts: You have low-lying island states where if you go past a certain threshold you have enough sea level rise that they will be displaced, but the large majority of cases where people are in one way or another being pushed to move by climate change are much more ambiguous.

It tends to be a mix of factors where you could have long-term changes to weather patterns that make agriculture more difficult, but it is also affected by local policy choices, poverty, and different kinds of adaptive capacities. It is often very difficult to say with absolute certainty that this person is a climate migrant. Often people who are pushed to move as a result of climate change may not see themselves in that way.

This poses particular challenges. As Ilgü mentioned, we don’t have an international framework that gives us a definition, let alone a way of conferring specific rights to people based on being displaced as a result of being forced by climate, but there are challenges to even conceive of how one would prove that. I want to be clear that when I am talking about climate migration here I am referring to cases where climate change has played, let’s say, a substantial role in pushing people to move.

Because this is difficult to quantify you get estimates that are all over the map in terms of how much is currently happening and how much is likely to happen in the future. You threw out the World Bank’s number, which is 50 to 250 million people by 2050, but there are other estimates that go up to 750 million people.

Ș. ILGÜ ÖZLER: I have a 1.2 billion.

JANA LUCASH: I saw that number too.

DAN BOSCOV-ELLEN: Again, this is partly due to uncertainties at various levels, including our mapping of where people live, in zones close enough to the coast that they could be inundated, et cetera. There are resources that give good information about the strengths and weaknesses of the data that we have. You mentioned the IOM. There is also the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. The IOM has something called the Migration Data Portal that goes through a lot of the caveats involved in trying to wrap your head around this if you are interested in getting into the weeds about it.

Generally it is easier to capture shorter-term, disaster-related internal migrations than it is to capture cross-border migrations due to longer-term environmental changes, but despite all that ambiguity we can say a few things with confidence. We know that climate change is already an important driver of displacement with disasters like floods and storms displacing at least 32 million people in 2022 globally, which accounts for more than half of internal displacement. That is likely to become an increasingly central factor in both internal migration and cross-border migration as the climate crisis worsens. Most climate migration is shorter-term and internal at this point, and we can talk about some of the factors that go into that.

As we have already discussed, there have been some efforts to address this reality, primarily in the form of regional free-movement agreements, so I will mention the East African Community Common Market Protocol, which includes a Free Movement of Persons Protocol and some language about climate as well as individual state policies, although as you also mentioned those can come and go. Briefly there were some Scandinavian countries that had language about including climate change and environmental harms in their considerations for admission, and then they got rid of those in 2015. For the moment, climate change is largely in the background of popular discussions about migration, and there isn’t that much happening. You mentioned the ICJ ruling.

There are a few exceptions to what I just said, but they are generally not especially heartening exceptions. If you are thinking about who is actually thinking and doing something about this problem, it is primarily military strategists and people who are involved in profiting from private detention and surveillance. They are very much on this issue, and regardless of what administrations come and go and what they say they believe about climate change they are doing that work because they understand what is coming. I suspect they probably have better data available to them than we do in the same way that Exxon scientists in the 1970s correctly predicted exactly how much climate change we would have right now, like on the dot, and they are using this in their internal projections, thinking about, When are we going to be able to access all this oil that is currently under the ice up there?

There are a few things to be hopeful about too. The one I would stress is the climate movement’s growing internationalism and convergence with other movements, in particular immigration justice movements and anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) protests as well as connecting the dots with the Palestine Solidarity Movement.

I think environmentalism in general has a checkered history of understanding that environmental harms are inextricably bound up with social injustices, so you can think of guys like Garrett Hardin, who is famous for the idea of “the tragedy of the commons” and “lifeboat ethics”—an unrepentant white supremacist—a factually groundless thing but picked up in a lot of environmental philosophy. I think this spreading awareness of the interconnected character of those struggles is important and something that gives me hope.

JANA LUCASH: Thank you. Dan, you just mentioned that East Africa has been working a little bit on this and that Scandinavian countries dipped their toe in and then came back. How do both of you think that countries can best deal with climate change and the rise of migration internally and externally? If you were able to advise, what would you advise countries?

Ș. ILGÜ ÖZLER: I will add that one of the important declarations is the Cartagena Declaration on Refugees that the Latin American countries have, and that declaration along with some of the African regional declarations extend the definition of refugee generally to people who have cause to seriously fear going back due to “public disturbance,” which can be interpreted as any kind of climate-related event as well, but its implementation has been spotty, so it is kind of piecemeal. Again, we know that sovereignty trumps it all. It is at the behest of the state even if we come up with a general, wonderful, fantastic, overarching way of how to deal with this.

You are asking how we deal with climate change and migration internally and externally?

JANA LUCASH: It is a little question.

Ș. ILGÜ ÖZLER: How much time do we have? It is a huge question.

On the climate front I would say some countries are better equipped to deal with it than others. We know that European countries have been trying to have this energy transition and are spending trillions of dollars and have this giant plan to do that. There are mitigation efforts on the European front. The United States had a big plan that was kind of abandoned, but I don’t know what is happening with that. I don’t follow the United States as much.

I would say that the small islands and developing states are the ones that are the most amazing to follow because they are not just asking for the international community to do things, but they are also walking the walk. They are doing mitigation and adaptation in their island states. Fiji has, for example, a planned relocation program that they have been doing, but they are also welcoming citizens from other small island states.

What is the best way to deal with climate change? You have to fulfil your obligations as a state to the Paris Climate Agreement. I would recommend that they actually not only meet their obligations for Paris but surpass them because the Paris Agreement does not go far enough in demanding states to transition their economies.

The national action plans for adaptation to climate need financing. The financing falls short on that front. The national adaptation funds that were created under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change promised something like $230 million per year for adaptation, when we know the UN Environment Programme says that the gap for adaptation is $250 billion, with a B, so what the international community from the Global North has promised the Global South in adaptation plans is a drop in the bucket. It is really nothing. The European Union has a promise of $300 billion, but that money is for green transitions, which is a mitigation effort and not an adaptation effort. As far as adapting to climate change which is coming we do not actually see adaptation going on.

The numbers you were quoting from the World Bank, the $246 million additional displacement due to climate change, I read that as additional people who are migrating across borders, and they also say that if states fulfil their obligations under the Paris Agreement, they can actually cut that number by about 80 percent. That means that if states really do fulfil their obligations for mitigation and adaptation under the Paris Agreement we would not have as much pressure for climate migration and climate mobility.

People who live in their communities in the Global South don’t want to move. People who live in their communities in the Global North don’t want to move. They want adaptation if they can live where they do because they are happy where they are. That is where they live; those are their communities.

In a way, if there are solutions where people are, that is the way to deal with climate change and migration. Let’s help people where they are. That only can take place effectively if we have a human rights-based, nonreactive policy framework where it involves the communities themselves in actually responding to their own problems and then these resources are provided to them.

Going back to what Dan was talking about earlier, we don’t know. Myself, as a person who has not been through climate displacement or climate pressure in my community, I don’t know what they need. I would say first of all human rights-based approaches are the most important in developing the policies around this and making sure that the multilateral framework is not top-down but is bottom-up as well.

JANA LUCASH: Dan, off of that, do you think that having a human rights-based approach is the most under-discussed ethical question related to climate migration, or do you think there might be something else?

DAN BOSCOV-ELLEN: That is a tough question. I want to say first that I agree very much with the idea that this needs to be at the level of what actually is owed to people internationally and is not just about benevolence but about people’s rights.

Since my specialization is in philosophy around this sort of stuff, I will say that I think a number of philosophers have done excellent work in trying to think through aspects of this problem, but I would say that those contributions are fairly fragmentary and often climate is not the primary focus. I think mainstream philosophical frameworks for thinking about migration are generally ill-suited to accurately capture the ethics of migration for a few interrelated reasons.

One is that they take the validity of extensive discretion over immigration controls for granted. A philosopher named Joseph Carens calls this “the conventional view on migration,” where we assume that states as part of their sovereignty can decide who comes in and not. Climate change in various ways calls aspects of the way we think about sovereignty into question or at least highlights problems that were already there in starker relief.

You mentioned the efforts of small island states to do their mitigation part too. There is a great documentary called The Island President about the Maldives and President Mohamed Nasheed of Maldives and his attempt to do this. It is a tragic story in some respects because he is a democracy activist. They managed to finally get rid of this dictatorship and institute democracy in the Maldives, then he has his first cabinet meeting and realizes that the country is sinking and is about to be under water.

They are trying to figure out what they can do and holding conferences in scuba gear under water to raise the media profile for this, but the reality is that it is great that they are putting solar panels on their own buildings and saying, “Look, if we can do it, you can too,” but the Maldives is less than a drop in the bucket of global emissions. They could go way carbon negative and it would not make a difference. Whether or not their country exists in a hundred years is not up to them.

In that context, when you are talking about sovereignty you have to ask yourself, “What are we really talking about here?” When you are talking about democracy, you have to ask yourself, “What does that mean in this context?” That is the first thing I want to say.

I think this is connected to a kind of sanitizing or idealizing that often happens in the ethical literature. For example, philosophers like Phillip Cole and Sarah Fine have both pointed out the conspicuous absence of race in the philosophical literature on immigration despite the central reality of racism to the development of modern immigration controls and its continuing if disavowed racist character. I would suggest, for example, Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds’ book Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality but also James Whitman’s disturbing book, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, as excellent in pointing to the ways in which the Nazis actually looked to U.S. immigration policy for inspiration for the Nuremburg Laws. There is an extensive record of this.

Those were at the time explicitly based on racial categories and eugenic ideas of how to preserve the purity of the nation. That became less politically correct in polite company, but to bracket it completely and be like, “Okay, yes, excluding people based on race is not acceptable, but having said that we are now going to talk about the ethics of immigration without ever talking about this ever again,” seems like a backward way to do this.

In fact, it is not just that those policies are racist themselves but that borders actually are part of what produces racialization. It is a way of dividing populations among themselves and putting them in a hierarchical relationship. Harsha Walia’s book Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism is a good book on that.

There is more that I could say, but I think basically if you were going to ask me what is the most under-discussed ethical question related to climate migration, I would probably ask something like, “How might specific historical and structural relationships produce or underline our obligations to climate migrants?” I think this calls attention to the ways in which the existing ethical literature covers that over and engages in a formalism that I think ultimately enables a lot of the problematic things we are seeing today, including the weaponization of the language of anti-sexism and anti-racism in defense of white supremacy, where they are like, “We can’t have affirmative action because it discriminates against white people,” or whatever it is. There is a formalism there that does not take into account the actual historical realities and complexities of the situation and prevents us from having any kind of realistic ethical treatment of the problem.

JANA LUCASH: Ilgü, you mentioned that the European Union has bucketed off about $300 billion for mitigation, is that right?

Ș. ILGÜ ÖZLER: For the Global South.

JANA LUCASH: I know that also the European Union has been looking at climate change and has been focused on this. You have the European Green Deal. My question, though, is, how then does the European Union not become a “green fortress?” They are going to be looking at this; how do they not be this fortress that then actually builds on more vulnerable Global South states?

Ș. ILGÜ ÖZLER: The EU Green Deal does not take into consideration migration. I think the term “migration” in the entire document is mentioned only once or something. It is a “green transition” plan, an adaptation plan, but it is for Europe and Europeans.

When I was doing my work in Spain I noted that the next-gen plan was spending about $69 billion just in Spain for COVID-19 transition, and most of it was going to be on technology on green stuff, but again that does not include any of the migrants or any migration questions. Climate migration is not part of the European Green Deal focus area.

Europe has not necessarily been open to this. There was apparently one case in Italy that was approved based on climate displacement, so that is held as an example. That might actually create some litigation. A lot of organizations are going to be going the litigation route to try to get some clear language on climate-displaced people to have those rights for seeking refuge in another country, some kind of visa, even if you don’t want to call it “refugee.”

Let me clarify that here. The 1951 Refugee Convention gives the right to seek asylum for people who are persecuted in their own countries because of their political beliefs, religious faith, some social categories that they belong to, or that they are ideologically unwanted. If the state is not willing to protect them or the state is targeting them because of those characteristics, then they can seek asylum in another country, and the international law says that states should not turn away those people who say they need to seek asylum.

That space has been narrowly interpreted by the people who work in that community, and they have been very protective of that community. If you look, in 2018 there was a High-Level Meeting at the United Nations between the states, and in that High-Level Meeting there was supposed to be a declaration on migrants and refugees. There was a push to divide the discussion on migrants and refugees, and we have two declarations, one declaration on refugees and the other declaration on migrants because the refugee space did not want to be confused with the migrant space because migrants, people who cross borders—it could be economic, it could be climate, it could be whatever, you want to go see your father—is not an allowable border crossing. If you are an asylum seeker or a refugee you fit into the 1951 Convention.

When we use the term “climate refugee” that makes the refugee folks think, Oh, my God, if they’re going to reopen this discussion about who is a refugee, we might lose ground in what we already have, because we already know that even if you have this notion of non-refoulement, and that you should not send somebody back because they are fearful, states constantly are violating this and not necessarily fulfilling their obligations.

Not all states. In many states in the Global South people cross borders and live in those countries for many years, in some cases for 30 years. An average refugee, I believe—don’t quote me on this because I did not put that number here—remains a refugee for about 20 years. Refugee status was supposed to be something temporary: You are fearful to go back to your house, there is complex emergency, then the political situation in your household is going to be okay, and now you are going to go back.

We can think of this similarly for climate. We think that if you are displaced because of a hurricane you should be able to go back, but maybe not. This is why there are planned relocations. They are already moving people from small island states to Australia or Fiji, another small island state—actually they like to call themselves the “big ocean states” and not “small island states,” if you look at the mass of those countries with the ocean around them.

We need to have one upbeat thing to say. For those people who are losing their lands if their island goes under the water, the International Court of Justice’s advisory opinion actually says that those people, even if the land is gone, don’t lose their rights to the ocean. Citizens of Tuvalu will still have the right to that ocean space, so “big ocean state” is a good terminology to use for those countries at this point, especially if the islands are gone.

JANA LUCASH: I am glad there was something positive.

Dan, based on your expertise, what do you think the best ways are to address misinformation about climate migrants? We‘ll add climate refugees now, though some might be upset by the term. What do you think?

DAN BOSCOV-ELLEN: If it’s all right with you, I am going to tie this back to what I was trying to get at a moment ago in a convoluted way, which is that I think it is important for us to have general philosophical commitments and principles, but I also think it is important for us to recognize the kinds of specific obligations that we have to each other that grow out of our actual intertwined histories and various positions in a global system that philosopher Olúfẹʹmi Táiwò called “global racial empire.” To give an example of that, imagine that some folks are internally displaced by the recent Hurricane Melissa, which is still barreling through the Atlantic as we speak and which hit Jamaica yesterday as I think the second strongest storm to make landfall. It has already killed over 30 people, many of them in Haiti actually for reasons we can talk about.

Imagine that some of these people find that they are not able to rebuild the life that they had and that they need to move. Set aside the islands themselves disappearing. Let’s say that they just lose the coral reefs, which is what is happening right now. At 1.5°C we will lose most of the world’s coral reefs, which house a quarter of all marine biodiversity, but they also are crucial to the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people in coastal areas.

So let’s say the reefs disappear and your way of life becomes impossible and you have to move. If somebody from Jamaica or Haiti comes to the United States, is our responsibility to them purely humanitarian, or would we have to also take into account the long colonial histories of those places that were integral to producing the kinds of vulnerability that push people to move?

Through the middle of the 20th century Jamaica was one of the most internally economically unequal places in the entire world. Because of the long legacy of, first, extermination of Indigenous peoples and then of chattel slavery, producing sugar and other goods for European markets, it made a couple of slave-owning wealthy elites tremendously wealthy and everybody else just barely scraped by.

It is not like those things just happened in the past and don’t impact the present. You can look at those maps of colonial exploitation, neocolonial pressure through structural adjustment policies, and neoliberal straitjacketing; they map on perfectly to maps of climate vulnerability.

Insofar as that is the case, I think it is great to say, “Okay, we have general kinds of humanitarian responsibilities to people that we should meet,” but I think often those kinds of arguments come across as fairly abstract. It is crucial that people actually hear from migrants themselves and that they understand their relationship to those people, that they see them as other people and understand that our lives and their lives are not actually separate from each other, that our lives only look the way they do because their lives look the way that they do.

That is to say we need to tell the truth, but I also think we need to do it in a careful way. Climate denialism and the demonization of migrants often are protective responses that are at least in part meant to deflect a perceived threat to privilege or a suggestion of culpability or responsibility to have to change something, the same reason that the American right wants to get rid of critical race theory and erase the history of genocide and slavery in this country. They don’t want people to know about that because then you might actually feel some sort of responsibility to people to do something about it.

We need to tell the truth about that stuff in an accessible and inviting way based on common ground. That does not mean pandering to racists or jumping on the bandwagon of xenophobia, but it also means that we shouldn’t be gatekeepers or castigate ordinary people as being racist or whatever. I want to emphasize that this is not about blaming normal people; it is about the obligations that arise out of our distinct positions within that global structure.

I would want to keep the focus on who is profiting from the situation, the tech firms that are profiting from it, the weapons manufacturers, the private prisons, the far-right politicians who want to gin up fear, rather than on the ordinary people who just find themselves in this situation. I think it is crucial to emphasize to them that they are not living in a vacuum.

JANA LUCASH: Ilgü, do you think there are specific best practices or ways to address misinformation on this topic?

Ș. ILGÜ ÖZLER: Wow. That is a question I did not think about. Let me think about this.

What is most important in my mind about misinformation is that we need to be able to translate scientific knowledge about climate change and also migration and mobility into everyday language and make it accessible. We need to demand that our leaders communicate that knowledge based on science as opposed to fiction. We need to expect education at all levels on these issues.

I was part of an organization that demanded that there be climate education from kindergarten on. This was not part of the UN’s agenda, and we were trying to sneak language into the documents to ensure it, because they always talk about “youth education” but never about children’s education on climate, and by the time you are a youth you have framed your thought process anyway about these issues.

Then there is also the issue of demanding that elected officials provide accurate and timely information about climate impacts. Sustainable Development Goal 17 becomes very key here. In countries like the United States it is a matter of will, but in countries that don’t necessarily have the ability to collect all that information, they might need the resources to be able to do that. In all of this resources become an important factor.

I want to add one thing to what you were talking about as far as obligations. I am going to go back to our discussion today in my class, where we were talking about climate. One of the things we were talking about was in the development of the Paris Agreement. The nongovernmental world historically when going into these UN framework conventions and the Conference of Parties used to talk about the science of climate change, like, “We have to mitigate, we have to mitigate.” The second they switched to understanding this issue from the perspective of adaptation and just transitions they became more allied with the states that are facing threats from climate change and have become stronger allies in a way for this kind of change.

What we see in this context is that in the Paris Agreement the Global North wanted to make adaptation and loss and damage the same thing, but that was rejected. Going back to your question about who is owed what, at least the language of loss and damage was included, even though it is not very clear about pointing at who did what to whom, in the Framework Convention that allows for further discussion about who owes what to whom maybe in the future.

I am always like the glass-half-full person: “Where can we find those margins so that we can move the needle forward on this,” even though I totally recognize that these hurricanes are getting more frequent and we need to move more quickly in our responses.

JANA LUCASH: Thank you. I am going to turn to the audience.

QUESTION: My name is Kevin Bach. I am a junior at Drew University. I know it is probably not defined by the international community yet, but when does someone become a climate refugee in your eyes? I know, for example, Dan, you brought up coral reefs when they start being eroded causing more flooding. Can someone be considered a climate refugee when the writing on the wall that there is going to be flooding and they are fleeing that, or is it better to define someone as a climate refugee if the flood already happened, their home is destroyed, and now they cannot return to their home? How would you personally define that?

DAN BOSCOV-ELLEN: Part of the reason I was speaking in terms of climate migration rather than in terms of climate refugees is because I think there are arguments for different approaches here. One way of thinking about it would be to say, “Okay, if we can come up with a criterion that says, ‘If you check these boxes, you will count as a refugee under the Refugee Convention and have all the protections such as they are these days of that framework.’” There are some concerns about trying to do it that way. One is, as you mentioned, the actual in practice meeting of those responsibilities by states is not trending in a great direction.

One of the things I have not talked about is the way that borders themselves have changed. It is not just a line on the map, you put a fence there, and that is your border. If you are the United States or Europe now, you are training immigration enforcement in various buffer zones between your country and the other to make sure that you don’t have people arriving on your shores in the first place claiming asylum. Regardless of the various bipartisan flouting of international law that happens, they are just trying to make sure the people don’t get here in the first place to be able to claim those protections, and that is a massive business.

Also, if you create that category too stringently you are going to exclude most of the people who are actually being harmed by climate change to the extent that their existing ways of life are becoming in one way or another unmanageable. It is very hard to prove that, to say, “Over a 20-year period my crops have declined X amount,” and tie that to the emissions of a particular state. It might be possible to formulate that; people have tried to do it.

I am wary of taking that approach because I think rather than trying to say, “Okay, you only officially count as a climate migrant if you show up with your possessions on your back,” we should be thinking about the ways in which climate change is part of a larger story of the extraction of wealth and labor from some parts of the world for the benefit of other parts of the world.

The climate change, poverty, and inequality that we are talking about don’t just exist. They are generated by the same processes. When you look at things through that lens it becomes a little less important to say, “Okay, this person is a climate migrant and not an economic migrant,” and you are able to say that there is a whole range of historical legacies and ongoing policies that have contributed to undermining your way of life and making it so that you don’t feel like you can stay where you are. What can we do to change that? That is the fundamental question for me. I realize that doesn’t address the direct question of how should states define this, so maybe it is a bit of a copout.

Ș. ILGÜ ÖZLER: There are two ways to answer this question, what is doable and what I would want to see? Which one do you want?

We have an international system that allows for financing, goods, money, everything to move around freely—or used to; it is changing a little bit now—the “liberal order,” but it never allowed for humans to move around freely from point A to point B.

Most people in the world don’t want to move. They are happy where they are. But other people want to move. Hirschman wrote in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States, you’re going to succeed if people can vote with their feet and just leave if they’re not happy in a place. I am one of those people who think that in an ideal world we would be able to move to wherever we want whenever we want, but most likely we would stay where we are because that is what most people do, they grow up and live where they are.

Having said that, in reality we have this sovereign system, and sovereignty is not going anywhere anytime soon. The world’s federalist movement is not that strong. We are going to see that sovereignty is going to trump everything that gets in its way, so we need to convince states to extend those rights.

That was the effort, the Model International Mobility Convention. Carnegie Council is housing this now. Professor Michael Doyle and a group of experts have gotten together and written a mobility convention that gives rights to people who cross borders. If you are a refugee, a laborer, or an undocumented person, when you cross the border what are your rights? Those rights are what we should start from. I come from the human rights world. I think if we grant basic rights to all humans we can overcome 90 percent of our problems.

In this document a “forced migrant” is defined as a person facing serious harm if they return back to their homelands. This gives the right to that person to seek asylum.

Again, I think in a very basic realm, if somebody says, “I fear going back to my country because there is a famine,” does it matter that the famine was because of climate or because there was a mis-distribution based on a dictator who is not letting food get through humanitarian corridors? Does that matter if that person is going to face starvation if they go back to where they were?

If we are couching these questions about who should be acceptable and who shouldn’t be acceptable, first of all we should take humans as they are and they should be afforded the rights that we have decided all humans have in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and does it matter that it is attached to your citizenship, or is it attached to you as a human? In the legal realm we have treated that as mostly belonging the citizen himself or herself, but I think ethically—I don’t know; correct me if I am wrong—it seems to me that that should belong to the person and not to the citizen.

Again, does it matter where you belong? I don’t think it should. It is a difficult one, but I think we need to get the legal folks to expand their interpretation of those rights a little further.

QUESTION: Over the last several hundred thousand years that humans have been on this planet, in the instances when climate radically changes over a short period of time it correlates and connects to diseases becoming exacerbated. We talked about the coral reefs and see that food supply is affected, livestock is affected, and people have to congregate into more densely populated areas. Many scientists understand that this is a precursor to spreads of different diseases and to evolutions and changes in different viruses and bacteria.

Why do you think this variable and aspect of the problem of climate migration in which we are going to see diseases is under-discussed, and how can we get it discussed more?

JANA LUCASH: We all had very small questions for you today.

Ș. ILGÜ ÖZLER: The global health issue is a messy issue to begin with. The World Health Organization is the house where global health issues are discussed, and it has come under criticism in its response to the Ebola crisis originally. They also came under criticism because of certain aspects of how they responded to the COVID-19 crisis, but then they were able to pick up and respond to it.

It seems to me that climate and global health overlap, and that would be the natural home for this discussion to take place. The United States I believe is not participating right now in the World Health Organization, so that is a concern, that one of the biggest countries where health research takes place is abandoning this multilateral forum.

We have the infrastructure to be able to discuss these issues and bring attention to them. I don’t know actually if the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has a global health aspect, but I don’t remember. The Conference of Parties I don’t think has a health realm. You might be right that migration and health are ignored issues, but don’t quote me on that either. I don’t really know. Look up whether the UNFCCC has an area of health, but I don’t recall that.

DAN BOSCOV-ELLEN: This is an interesting question. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, as I am sure you’ve seen, do have some discussion of this in terms of the increase of zoonotic disease in particular. That is a slightly different dynamic from what I think you are talking about, but one of the major human health aspects of climate change is that mosquitos don’t care about borders.

This is part of a larger set of questions that are often marginalized. We tend to focus on displacement and disaster, these big, highly visible things, but we have more and more people dying every year just from the effects of air pollution.

There was a study—again, I might be making these numbers up, but I think David Wallace-Wells has an article about this—where in one estimate the difference between 1.5°C and 2.0°C of warming, just if you look at the difference in the total amount of pollutants that are put into the atmosphere, you are looking at an extra potential 150 million deaths from air pollution. It is a huge killer already and disproportionately burdens people in disadvantaged communities.

I appreciate you bringing that in, but that is all I would want to say about it right now.

Ș. ILGÜ ÖZLER: Also, when you look at prioritization of research, malaria research is not necessarily prioritized, but we have other research that is prioritized that tend to be regarded as first-world diseases. Certain diseases will increase and will need attention, but we let the markets decide where that goes, and the less states invest in this the less public interest is going to be there. I like it when we start to talk about these issues in the context of the intergovernmental world because at least there is some public perspective that is in that space.

JANA LUCASH: Thank you both and thank you to the audience both here and online. That concludes our program.