Protecting Environmentally Displaced People
Research by the Refugee Studies Centre is being used to inform policy towards a new category of involuntary migrants: environmentally displaced people.
International and national legal and normative frameworks protect the rights of many different groups of forced and involuntary migrants – refugees, stateless persons, people who are trafficked, and those displaced in their own countries by disasters and conflict.
However, a new category of involuntary migrant is emerging for whom there is a significant rights ‘protection gap’. These are people who are impelled or induced to migrate because their livelihoods are rendered unsustainable by proliferating natural disasters or the irreversible degradation of environmental resources resulting from the slow-onset impacts of rising sea levels and desertification. The potential scale of displacement and permanent resettlement related to climate change – estimated at between 50 and 200 million people by 2050, mostly in developing countries – constitutes a significant policy challenge.
Over the last 18 months RSC Director Professor Roger Zetter has been invited to make presentations to a number of international policy making fora on his research on environmental displacement and rights protection, helping to raise the profile of these issues and to shape international responses.
In April 2009, he briefed the IASC (Inter Agency Standing Committee) Principals in New York – the most senior UN Co-ordinating Committee dealing with humanitarian and emergency affairs. In 2010, he made presentations to the Geneva Centre for Peace and Security, the European Policy Centre/International Centre for Migration Policy Development in Brussels, a joint UK/French government seminar, the IASC Policy Forum in Geneva and the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He was also commissioned to write a policy paper on Climate Change and the Humanitarian Challenge in Urban Areas for the IASC Task Force on Climate Change and by the International Organisation for Migration to write a chapter on the issue for their widely disseminated publication Migration, Environment and Climate Change: Assessing the Evidence.
His main contribution has been a study completed in September 2010, co-funded by the UNHCR, and the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the Governments of Norway and Switzerland, entitled Protecting Environmentally Displaced People: Developing the Capacity of Legal and Normative Instruments. Based in four exemplar countries – Ghana, Kenya, Bangladesh and Vietnam – this is the first systematic empirical study of the issues. The study findings will have important policy impacts. For the UNHCR, it will form part of the High Commissioner’s Dialogue in December 2010 and will also be a major focal point of the UNHCR’s 60th anniversary celebration, in 2011, of the 1951 Geneva Convention on the Status of Refugees. For the Governments of Norway and Switzerland the study will inform a range of policy objectives in their international development programmes – supporting resettlement policies for those who will be permanently displaced, advocacy and capacity building for protecting human rights, and strengthening policies for sustainable environmental and livelihood development in countries most affected by climate change.
