CIGI: Climate Migrants Face a Gap in International Law
Even with the GCM, climate-displaced people are falling through the cracks.
Photo by Tim McDonnell
In December, diplomats from more than 160 nations met for two days in Morocco to adopt the United Nations’ Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM), a non-binding agreement that aims to make life a little easier for the unprecedented number of people worldwide who are on the move away from home.
One of the agreement’s signature achievements was to recognize the role that extreme weather and other climate-related disasters can play in prompting displacement and migration. According to the Nansen Initiative, a research collaborative backed by the European Union, between 2008 and 2014 an average of 22.5 million people were displaced every year by natural disasters. Experts expect that number to grow as sea levels rise, droughts last longer and storms worsen. By 2050, the total number of climate-displaced people could grow beyond 200 million — about two percent of the global population. And yet, there remains no legally binding international recognition or protection for climate migrants.
The GCM took the biggest step yet toward solving that problem. It calls on its signatories to “better map, understand, predict and address migration movements, such as those that may result from sudden-onset and slow-onset natural disasters, the adverse effects of climate change, environmental degradation...” The GCM also calls on signatories to “cooperate to identify, develop and strengthen solutions...including by devising planned relocation and visa options” for climate migrants. Its recommendations mirror those put forward in September by aspecial UN task force on displacement, which was created during the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris.
Still, there’s a long way to go before any of this language translates to tangible benefits for climate migrants. The GCM has yet to yield substantive regional or national policy changes aimed at climate migrants. The United States, as well as Australia, Israel, Italy, Hungary and other key players in global migration politics, pulled out of the agreement over concerns that it could impede their domestic immigration agendas. In the meantime, as climate displacement escalates, more evidence is accumulating about the complex ways in which climate change interacts with the panoply of other factors that might compel a person to migrate, and what the impacts of this unprecedented surge of human mobility might be.
The stakes of this issue were vividly on display on the southern US border late in 2018, when thousands of Central American migrants joined caravans. A September assessment by US border officials pointed to drought-stricken farms and hunger as the primary driver for those migrants. US President Donald Trump responded by deploying National Guard troops to the border and instigating an unprecedented federal government shutdown over funding for a border wall.
Even with the GCM, climate-displaced people are falling through the cracks.