The markers of climate change are both the gradual rise in ambient temperatures and sea levels and the greater frequency and magnitude of the extreme events (droughts, fires, hurricanes, floods) accompanying those rises. Any of these conditions may induce or compel the people affected to move. The moves may be more or less voluntary, in-country or international, and temporary or permanent. The movers are all, in Lawrence Palinkas's expansive category, environmental migrants—“climigrants” in the unappealing neologism he uses throughout this book. Although often termed environmental refugees, unless they are also fleeing political violence or persecution none can claim refugee status under the 1951 convention. The roughness of the conceptualization is suggested by the range of guesses of the potential numbers of persons displaced cited in the book: 20 million to 200 million by 2050 according to Norman Myers, an early writer on the issue; 500–600 million “at risk of displacement” according to the Environmental Justice Foundation; perhaps 2 billion by the end of the century reported in an extravagant scenario of sea-level rise. More concrete figures come from actual events, as in the series of brief case studies the author assembles. Three are weather-related—Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2017, and the wildfires in California in 2017 and 2018—where displacement numbers are known even if there is not an assured connection to climate change. Prospective enforced retreat in the face of coastal erosion along the US Atlantic seaboard may seem a similarly clear-cut situation, as is the eventual resettlement from low-lying Pacific island states. On the perennial poster case of Bangladesh, beset by ever-greater floods and storm surges, Palinkas is cautious: climate change “may be viewed as a factor that contributes to existing patterns of migration” but “it is not the primary driver.” His caution does not extend to a chapter titled “Fleeing the drought: the great migration to Europe.” The migration referred to here is from the Middle East and Africa. Climate change is supposedly implicated in the Syrian civil war and in the conflict between sub-Saharan herders and grazers, in turn fueling the migrant stream to Europe. It is acknowledged that the great majority of those originally displaced—typically nine out of ten—remain in the same or a neighboring country. Their designation as environmental migrants seems arguable: at least proximately, they had likely fled not drought but barrel bombs or the depredations of Boko Haram and Tuareg jihadists. The relative few who then choose the hazardous path to Europe certainly include some with strong asylum claims but for the most part seem almost the embodiment of economic migrants, many of whom have staked large financial bets on the services of people smugglers. The study is well-sourced in a large secondary literature. It is light on demography (population growth—adding one or two billion over this century—is barely mentioned as a force compounding environmental problems). On the other hand, it gives a fair amount of attention to the damaging effects of dislocation on migrants themselves. Palinkas is a professor of social policy and health at the University of Southern California and expert on the psychological effects of disasters. On policy and practice, the book mostly avoids the geopolitical realism that might point to still more stringent migrant vetting and hardened state borders, in favor of “efforts to enforce existing mechanisms such as the Sendai or Cancun frameworks or the Nansen Initiative” to assist all environmental migrants, whatever the reason for displacement. It supports “strategies for preventing, managing, and mitigating climate-related population displacement and its effects through the development and maintenance of partnerships involving academics, policy makers, service providers, communities, and climigrants themselves.”
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Sep 1, 2020
Marcela Montes De Oca + 2
Open Access
