Critical Climatics, Forced Migration and Social Justice

Abstract

United Nations Secretary General, declaring 2009 as the year of Climate Change, has called for 'responsibility to protect' in the realm of human rights and 'responsibility to deliver' in larger sphere of common international action. Anthropogenic climate change leads to biophysical transformation on the global scale engendering localised stresses in the forms of coastal erosion, ice melt, infertile land and deteriorating water sources.These stresses threaten critical minimum basic needs of vulnerable socities without the capabilities of adaption and resilence. Neither the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, nor its Kyoto Protocol has any provision of protection or rehabilitation to numerous affected poor people of less developed world. Refugee Convention does not confer refugee status for environmental persecution. Northern knowledge-power had set the norms to reinforce dominance over the international system that can not reflect on the environment in a broader political and cultural context of a region or a country. The twentieth century has spanned through two world wars, post-war recovery-boom-burst and emergence of neo-liberal globalisation .The treadmill of production is founded on classical Say's law of capitalist circulation-supply creates its own demand and drives the expansion of production and consumption synergistically. The industrialised North has emitted massive greenhouse gases, with increasing energy- and chemical-intensive production since the 'outbreak' of cold war, and has polluted the environment to a catastrophic extent that is largely irreversible.The zero-sum game has its obvious toll on wretched teeming millions of 'other' world as the 'development of underdevelopment' diversifies with deadlier dimensions. The victimised populations become uprooted from their habitats and forced to migrate, even to foreign countries to join the researve army of lobour there and get entrapped in new conflicts and crises. The citizens of a bordered territory are entitled to fundamental rights which their fellow human beings, the irregular migrants, can never be provided. As with capabilities approach by Sen and Nussbaum, if outcome of climate degradation potentially undermine fundamental rights and human security, enshrined as global norms, policy as well as national policies of the industrialised countries, the concerns about justice should be the prime mover of global climate governance. The emancipatory ideas about rights, justice and responsibility should transcend the 'bordered' confines with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This insight has definite resemblance with Derridan concepts of 'new international' and 'democracy to come'. Ultimately, a successful adaptation process has to reflect on how the command of natural resources and environmental goods has forged the plunder of climate and human habitats by the interplay of a host of historical, ecological, social and economic factors. An internationally agreed measure of ecological debt would clarify 'over-polluting' countries’ contribution towards climate change-enforced human vulnerabilities.Beyond the refugee definition contained in the Refugee Convention, the pertaining issue is to be addressed by a new legal instrument - a Protocol on Recognition, Protection, and Resettlement of Climate Refugees to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.