That sinking feeling – climate change and climatic statelessness

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this year’s COP26 UN climate change conference has been postponed.  But the urgency of tackling climate change has not gone away in the face of the pandemic.  As the UN explains:

“COVID-19 is the most urgent threat facing humanity today, but we cannot forget that climate change is the biggest threat facing humanity over the long term.” ¹

In this, the first of a mini-series on climatic statelessness, I start by exploring the issues, the people and the states it affects.  I look at what will be some of the challenges in protecting those who have, or might become, stateless as a result of climate change displacement or migration.  To what extent can international law respond to that challenge?

At this stage, there are more questions than answers.  In further blogs, I will explore climatic statelessness in the context of statelessness norms, refugee law, the law on self-determination and of statehood. Can existing international norms adequately protect the most vulnerable victims of climate change?

 

What is climatic statelessness?

The effects of climate change on communities are numerous.  Sea levels rising cause coastal inundation or erosion, or river plain flooding or erosion, making habitation difficult or impossible.  Climate events impact on livelihoods, both cash-based and subsistence.  Habitats degrade because of climate change.  This can mean new diseases spreading, loss of water or water quality or the expose to extreme events ².

The UN and parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) recognise that a key impact of climate change on humans is displacement, migration and planned relocation as individuals, communities and states seek to adapt ³.

Climatic statelessness is not yet a firmed-up concept, more of a way to think about what happens, in reality and under international law, to those displaced because their state no longer exists as a result of slow-onset climate change.  It’s also about applying a rights-based approach to climate action and thinking about how we might need to strengthen legal and international frameworks to protect, remedy and respect the rights of individuals and communities that could permanently lose their homes ⁴.

 

Who might be affected by climatic statelessness?

When it comes to climatic statelessness, small Island States are most at risk. The concern is real – some islands have already disappeared.  In 2016 five islands which formed part of the Solomon Islands disappeared.  Those islands were not inhabited, but on nearby populated islands, seawater has already started to swallow up and destroy villages causing internal migration ⁵.

The concern is not new.  Nearly 15 years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body mandated to assess the science related to climate change, issued the stark warning:

“sea level rise impacts on the low lying pacific island atoll states of Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tokelau and the Marshall islands may, at some threshold, pose risks to their sovereignty or existence” ⁶.

Tuvalu, for example, could disappear in the next 50 years.  Its average altitude is 1 metre above sea level ⁷.   Estimates place rising sea levels globally at somewhere between 3.2mm and 3.6mm annually.  Tuvalu’s 1 metre buffer is not going to provide much protection.  Internal migration for island states like Kiribati and Tuvalu may not be a durable solution to the pressures of climate change ⁸.

The Summit of Leaders of the Pacific Islands Development Forum in the 2015 Suva Declaration on Climate Change recognise that:

“climate change is already resulting in forced displacement of island populations and the loss of land and territorial integrity and further highlight[s] that such loss and damage results in breaches of social and economic rights” ⁹.

 

Surviving climate change

Of course, the main way to deal with climate change is to change our consumption patterns and reduce our carbon emissions ¹⁰.  But while we grapple with how to achieve this and put measures in place, the people, states and regions which are most impacted have two likely outcomes.  Communities can stay and adapt or individuals and even whole communities can move away from the affected area.

Those who stay in the affected areas can take action, at individual and on a state or regional level to adapt their environment and manage the effects of climate change.  Examples of adaptation efforts include building sea walls and flood defences, adjusting planting dates and crop varieties, or improving climate sensitive disease surveillance.

For those that choose to move or are forced to move, displacement or migration need not be the opposite of adaptation.  We can see it as adapting the self, rather than one’s environment in the face of worsening conditions ¹¹.  Whether by choice, in anticipation of hardship, or because there is no other choice left for survival, there has been a marked increase in both internal and cross-border displacement.  In 2019, nearly 2,000 disasters triggered 24.9 million new internal displacements across 140 countries and territories ¹².  Cross-border migration and migration resulting in part from slow-onset processes such as rising sea levels and drought are harder to quantify, but we do know they are occurring more and more ¹³.

 

Why is it a problem and how might it create stateless people?

Calls to deal with environmental displacement through resettlement ¹⁴ are common, but they work on the premise that some citizens of affected states might move to another state.  What happens if a whole state is wiped out due to slow-onset climate events such as coastal inundation or erosion resulting in its citizens being displaced and made homeless and stateless?  What happens when that state no longer exists?  Can the citizens of that state still be citizens of the state if the whole territory is gone and a permanent population can no longer inhabit it?

How would we deal with the risk of statelessness then?  Ideally it won’t happen and mitigating action might be taken. But what if that is not possible or we are just too late?  At present, tthose displaced by climate change are not treated as an identifiable group with expressly articulated rights ¹⁵.  Is there room to adapt existing international law and legal principles to these new circumstances and offer the necessary protection?

 

Next on the Torn Identity…

In my next blog I will look at what protection the law on statelessness can provide for those who might be displaced because their entire state has disappeared from slow-onset climate change events.