Climate refugees: our greatest responsibility

Being a climate activist, I tend to engage in some pretty intense and discouraging discourse. Still, the most terrifying conversation I’ve ever had was with a representative of the International Red Cross, at the UN Climate Negotiations in Copenhagen last December. We were discussing climate refugees ­— that is, persons displaced by greenhouse gas-induced rising seas, drought and/or starvation, or more frequent, stronger tropical storms. Looking back, every bit of that exchange has faded to black, except for one idea: the notion that we would never be able to, with certainty, identify a refugee as a victim of the climate crisis; to separate a climate from civil conflict, discrimination or natural disaster as a potential root cause of an individual’s statelessness. Climate change, as a colorless, tasteless, amorphous phenomenon, would never reveal its true nature to us enough to enable truly identifying its victims.

Here’s the problem: having millions upon millions of refugees has rarely fazed the international political community as a whole. Refugee counts today run as high as 62 million, 34 million of whom are internally displaced, or by war. These people are left to fester in camps; deprived of the right to work or to build durable homes (because that would betray a sense of permanence in territory that presumably belongs to another nation/individual), and suffering from extreme food and water shortages and poor sanitation. Disease, trafficking, crime and deportation are faced every second of every day, most commonly by vulnerable widows and orphans. There is little precedent for the idea that we possess the ideal combination of readiness, resources and compassion necessary to coping with and caring for the millions of people who will be uprooted by runaway climate change.

The desire to draw a distinction between climate and non-climate refugees does not stem from my overt passion for the issue of climate change, negligence toward civil conflict or helplessness concerning natural, inevitable disaster. It comes instead from a realization that the countries responsible for inducing the displacement and suffering of climate refugees have both the resources and the obligation to provide aid and support in a way that no countries ever have before.

Let me explain. The world’s largest emitters of greenhouse gases, responsible for the 0.7 degrees Celsius of warming already recorded, and future warming to come, happen to also be the world’s richest nations (with the exception of China and India): the United States, European Union, Australia, Japan and Canada. In a way that these nations do not necessarily have a literal obligation to Sudanese refugees fleeing ethno-religious discrimination by their own government (who has the obligation but not the resources), we do toward the millions of people who will be displaced by the unfettered dumping of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and we have the money and the know-how to back it up.

Which is why I was especially frustrated by the perception of climate change induced displacement in last week’s screening of Climate Refugees. The film did much to portray refugees of the climate crisis through the lens of a national security issue; to convey the idea that when hundreds of thousands of Sub-Saharan Africans flee their homeland because their predominantly rain-fed crops are failing in drought, and potentially go knocking on the doors of the European Union, they pose grave threats to an otherwise stable, peaceful coalition; that when Pacific islanders take to boats and end up on the shores of New Zealand and Australia, civil conflict and social unrest could ensue; that when millions of Bangladeshis migrate to the Indian border, an already crowded country could be destabilized.

But what the movie failed to communicate was that these wealthy nations who’s citizenship, arable land, and services would be asked for by the new displaced were the ones with the historical responsibility for the climate problem. In some ways, their arrival on our doorsteps would be entirely justified; after all, it’s not as if we didn’t know this was coming.

In the end, I hope that we can look deeply enough to motivate climate action both today and tomorrow not by fear, but by compassion and a sense of collective responsibility. What is at stake here extends far beyond national security in the developed world, or what precious little prosperity, safety, and stability exists in the developing world, but our potential to act with a sense of global community, and a reverence for a higher moral code.