200 Million Climate-Change Refugees by 2050

by Dave Bennion

category: Foreign Policy

Published June 28, 2009 @ 08:44PM PT

The United States House passed a bill designed to combat climate change on Friday.  The cuts in carbon emissions production the bill proposes are not as deep as those in most of the developed world.  It could have been a much better piece of legislation, but what I'm hearing from those who follow this issue more closely is that something is better than nothing.  And what we had gotten so far from the U.S. Congress is a whole lot of nothing.

This bill, watered down as it was, barely squeaked by in the House by 7 votes.  44 Democrats voted against it, 8 Republicans voted in favor.  My question for the politicians in both parties who voted against the climate bill is this: Why are you voting in favor of dramatically higher levels of immigration to the U.S.?  It can't be that they want to raise levels of legal immigration through the roof, or that they want to see hugely greater numbers of unauthorized immigrants make their way into the U.S. by land or sea.

But large increases in global migration tomorrow will be the effect of inaction today on global warming.  Perhaps these conservative representatives haven't been reading up on the latest literature.  From this week's Economist:

The International Organisation for Migration thinks there will be 200m climate-change migrants by 2050, when the world’s population is set to peak at 9 billion. Others put the total at 700m.

. . .

A new report—“In Search of Shelter”—by the United Nations University, the charity CARE and Columbia University in New York lists the eco-migration “hot spots”: dry bits of Africa; river systems in Asia; the interior and coast of Mexico and the Caribbean; and low islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

A one-metre rise in sea levels could displace 24m people along the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irrawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow rivers—which together support a quarter of humanity. A two-metre rise could uproot 14m people on the Mekong alone and swamp much of its farmland. Meanwhile, the melting of the Himalayan glacier will cause floods and erosion upstream, boosting the price of rice and other staples. And many regional conflicts could be exacerbated.

The scale of the likely population shift raises big questions. Will climate-change migrants be recognised? The classic definition of refugees—tossed between states by war or tyranny—is outdated. Eco-migrants will be paperless paupers, whose multiple woes are hard to disentangle.

The current refugee system cannot handle an increase in migration on this scale.  And requirements for legal migration have stiffened across the developed world in recent decades.  Reactions by the governments of the EU and U.S. to unauthorized immigration in the last few years do not give cause for hope that these governments will respond in a reasonable or humane way to a large increase in the number of intending migrants.

Charles Ehrhart of CARE thinks UNHCR will remain central, but wonders how it or anybody can now distinguish between “forced” and “voluntary” migration. He says climate change may cut agricultural output by half in lowland Africa by 2020. “In such a context, does migration constitute a choice or a necessity?”

Migrants’ rights may be easy to assert for islanders whose homes are drowned—but hard in the case of big, messy movements across Africa and Asia. Most of the displaced will drift to the next-most-liveable place, as the poor do anyway.

. . .

Gloom abounds. James Lovelock, an environmental guru, posits a collapse in human population, in part related to migration, with a few “lifeboat” regions surviving. Then there is the pace of social change. The number of “megacities”—with populations in the tens of millions—may grow to several hundred by the middle of the 21st century. Most are poorly planned.

Would a migrant from a collapsed city receive aid? “We’ve not experienced anything of this kind, where whole regions, whole countries, may well become unviable,” says Jeffrey Sachs, head of Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

Developed countries will bear the bulk of responsibility for the climate change catastrophe if it comes to pass.  Their governments will then have some hard choices to make about how to respond in the face of massive movements of people.  I would be surprised if the international political system predicated on the nation-state survived those kinds of stresses in its current form.  Democratic principles have become too deeply engrained around the world to support the continued domination of the many by the wealthy few.  Building a higher border wall and sending troops to the border is not going to solve this problem.

Check Emily Gertz's blog for updates on the climate bill as it works its way through the Senate, and for other global warming news and analysis.