Sacha Moufarrej

HONORS 392: Science and Engineering for Social Justice

Final Paper
December 13, 2019

Climate Refugees: An Environmental, Political, and Rhetorical Crisis

Over the past few decades, environmental science research has repeatedly documented
trends of climate change and global warming, and has continued to predict impending
environmental catastrophes as industrial production and environmentally harmful consumerism
have run rampant. However, the issues of climate change are not just environmental; the
academic discourse on this phenomenon is rife with sociopolitical and economic implications,
and contributes to the understanding of overarching social injustices that marginalize certain
communities. Members of these marginalized communities, which are experiencing the
consequences of intersectionality between environmental and social effects of climate change,
are now receiving more and more attention. Interdisciplinary research and popular media have
begun using the label of “climate refugees,” defined as “persons who can no longer gain a secure
livelihood in their traditional homelands because of environmental factors of unusual scope… In
face of these environmental threats, people feel they have no alternative but to seek sustenance
elsewhere, whether within their own countries or beyond and whether on a semi-permanent or
permanent basis” (Myers, 1995, 18–19).

In order to better understand the complexities of the social justice issues experienced by
“climate refugees,” we must take an interdisciplinary approach to analyzing the relevant
research, in the context of environmental change, migration patterns, and national and
international asylum granting laws. Thus, in this paper, I propose the following questions:
1. What are the social, political, economic, and environmental effects of climate change on
marginalized communities, and where are these communities located?
2. What are the predicted migration trends as climate change renders certain global regions
uninhabitable?
3. What do current global migration policies look like, and how will they address asylum
for climate refugees?
4. What role does the developed world’s climate refugee rhetoric have in shaping these
global policies?

By utilizing multidisciplinary research, I aim to answer these four questions in order to develop a
more holistic understanding of the implications of this social justice issue, and to bring light to
the injustices that perpetuate global inequality.

I. The Disproportionate Effects of Climate Change on Marginalized Communities

Inconsistencies in environmental research on climate change have led to several

contestable debates about the magnitude of the global effects of this human-made phenomenon.
However, many researchers have agreed on four categories of large-scale changes in climate: (1)
an increase in air temperature by about 2°C by 2050, (2) an exacerbation of existing flooding and
drying patterns, (3) an increase in sea levels by 18-59 cm by 2100, and (4) significant alterations
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in regional climate phenomena and natural disasters, such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation
(ENSO) and Asian monsoons (Barnett and Webber, 10-11). Subsequently, these changes are
predicted to have serious ramifications, such as habitat erosion, reduced quantity and quality of
water and food resources, reduced agricultural productivity, impacts on human health, and
livelihood insecurity (for example, through decreases in marine and land resources that allow for
the employment of many fishers and farmers, which make up a large percentage of workers in
low-latitude countries) (Barnett and Webber, 11; Campbell, 5). The study of these ramifications
has also led researchers to focus on eight global regions of concern, where the effects of climate
change are expected to be most drastic: Northern, Southern, and Western Africa; Central Asia;
coastal areas of South Asia; the Caribbean islands; the Arctic; South America; and small islands
in the Pacific and Indian Oceans (Barnett and Webber, 13).
Based on these accepted regions of concern, we can see how the effects of climate change
are primarily creating vulnerabilities in the Global South, which consists of developing countries
of lower geographic latitude. This conclusion is consistent with statistical analyses of historical
temperature trajectories and economic growth: as published in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science (PNAS), “the estimated parabolic relationship between temperature and
economic growth means that long-term warming will generally increase growth in cool countries
and decrease growth in warm countries” (Diffenbaugh and Burke, 9809). In other words, cooler
countries, primarily in the northern hemisphere, benefit economically from global warming,
while warmer countries, found in the southern hemisphere and the Arctic, will experience a
decrease in economic growth.

Figure 1. Global impacts of climate change on economic growth. Taken from Diffenbaugh and Burke, 9810.
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As seen in Figure 1, a negative percent change in GDP per capita between 1961 and 2010
is largest in parts of South America and Africa, indicated in the red and orange in maps A and B,
and the largest positive percent change is seen in Canada, Europe, and Russia (Figure 1).
Similarly, probability of economic damage, increasing on a scale of 0 to 1, is greatest in the
southern hemisphere, as seen in maps C and D. These economic impacts have already been
quantified in individual countries like Sudan, Burkina Faso, and Niger, where per capita GDP is
20% lower than predictions that do not include climate change as a confounding factor
(Diffenbaugh and Burke, 9808).
The disparate effects of global warming on global economies bring into question
implications of international injustice: based on a study of greenhouse gas emissions conducted
in 2004, annual GHG emissions per capita were about 6 metric tons in the United States, Canada,
and Australia, while more than 50 developing countries had per capita emissions less than 0.2
metric tons (Levy and Patz, 311). Thus, poorer, developing countries are far less accountable for
the climate change crisis, yet are clearly suffering the vast majority of environmental and
economic consequences of climate change. Within these countries, the greatest impact is also
suffered by already marginalized populations: low-income communities, minority groups,
unemployed people, people with disabilities, women, and children (Levy and Patz, 314).

II. Predicted Migration Trends in Response to Climate Change

As climate change renders certain environments and human habitats uninhabitable, a

potential response is an increase of migration, both within and across national borders. Various
predictions provide very different estimates on the magnitude of population movement that will
be caused by environmental changes: the most drastic figure, provided by the NGO Christian
Aid in 2007, claimed that 1 billion people would be displaced by 2050, while the most accepted
prediction, provided in 2001, argued a number closer to 200 million (Barnett and Webber, 14). A
more recent, publicized number was much smaller, with an estimate of about 1 million refugees
a year migrating to the EU by 2100 (Harvey, 2017). However, it is important to note that these
numbers are not based in empirical analysis of data, and provide more of a qualitative, politically
charged prediction of migration.
Migration in response to climate change is heavily influenced by many intersecting
factors. For example, rapid environmental changes, such as extreme natural disaster events, may
cause fast, temporary displacement of communities, while slower changes may cause more
gradual increases in permanent population movement (Barnett and Webber, 17). Therefore,
researchers describe several patterns of movement that vary in permanence, numbers, and areas
of relocation:
(1) international labor migrants, who move abroad in search of improved employment
and livelihood opportunities;
(2) internally displaced persons, defined as “persons or groups of persons who have been
forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in
particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of
generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and
who have not crossed an internationally recognized State border” (UNHCR, emphasis
added);
(3) internationally displaced persons;
(4) internal and international permanent migrants; and
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(5) relocated communities (Barnett and Webber, 18-19).

Contrary to most international political discourse on issues of refugee crises, most population
movement is within national borders: less than 10% of international migrants are considered
refugees, as defined by the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention (Nicholson and Kumin, 2017). In
many cases, migration due to environmental changes actually presents a decrease from past and
current trends, due to a lack of financial resources and information barriers (Barnett and Webber,
p. 16).
As a case example of climate-induced migration, a national survey-based study on
internal migration conducted by the Tanzania National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) showed that
42% of participants that reported having migrated within the 5-year period between 2004 and
2008 had experienced an environmental shock prior to their move. A more meta-analytical,
globalized study of asylum applications to the EU showed a statistically significant relationship
between an increase in applications and extreme weather changes (Missirian and Schlenker,
358).
The Pacific Island countries and territories (PICTs) provide an interesting look at
expected migration destinations. While many will relocate within national borders, a significant
proportion of migrants look internationally to freely associated or previous colonial countries,
such as Australia, New Zealand, France, and the United States (Campbell, 16). While not
specifically tailored for environmental migrants, New Zealand has created the Pacific Access
Category (PAC) agreement that has established an annual quota of permitted Tuvaluan migrants
that will be granted residence in New Zealand (Williams, 515).
A prominent difficulty in generalizing the results of studies on climate-based migration
trends results from the inability to separate migration induced by environmental pressures from
other compounding social, political, and economic factors. When considering population
movements over a longer period of time, in which we are focused on the slow effects of climate
change, “economic, political, social, and demographic processes may significantly affect
environmental drives and vice versa. The only clearly identifiable environmental driver that
might unequivocally link climate change to migration is the most extreme scenario, in which the
origin becomes uninhabitable” (Campbell, 11). The Syrian refugee crisis provides a recent
example of the intersectionality of various factors of migration. A 2015 study showed that the
Syrian conflict was preceded by a record drought that forced many farmers to migrate to urban
centers, leading to greater economic stress that may have exacerbated existing sociopolitical
unrest (Missirian and Schlenker, 358). Thus, climate change often cannot be regarded as the sole
reason for changing global migration patterns, but rather as a factor both compounding and
compounded by political upheaval and economic stress.

III. Current International and National Migration Policies and Climate Refugees

When considering the national and foreign policies for provisions and asylum granting
for climate refugees, various divisions of law must be analyzed. The responsibilities of
individual states, as well as international governing bodies, can be inferred based on a combined
understanding of international human rights law, migration law, and environmental law.

International Human Rights Law

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the 1966 International
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Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) outline several human rights whose violations
can play a role in informing international asylum-granting, such as “the right to life, the right not
to be subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, and the right not to be deprived of
means of subsistence”; the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
(ICESCR) also protects “the right to an adequate standard of living, including food and housing”
(Morel, 250). In order to remain in accordance with these international human rights standards,
individual nations should be held to adhere to the non-refoulement principle of the 1951
Convention, which states: “No Contracting State shall expel or return (‘refouler’) a refugee in
any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be
threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group
or political opinion” (Nicholson and Kumin, 2017).

International Migration Law

Migration is commonly defined as the “internal, external, voluntary, and forced

movement of people” (Morel, 258). This definition can be used in international refugee law,
which is also closely related to the aforementioned human rights policies. International refugee
law applies more specifically to situations in which someone “has left his or her country of origin
and is unable or unwilling to return there because of a serious threat to his or her life or
freedom,” as outlined by the 1951 Refugee Convention (Nicholson and Kumin, 2017). Since this
international convention, several other regional declarations have provided definitions and
general protocols for the protection of refugees: the 1969 African Union (AU) Convention, the
1984 Organization of American States (OAS) Declaration, and the EU Council Directions of
2001 and 2004 (Morel, 252-253). In the context of internally displaced persons (IDPs), former
UN Secretary-General Representative on IDPs set guiding principles in a 1998 protocol that was
later fully adopted by the United Nations. (Morel, 257).

International Environmental Law

The international environmental laws most relevant to discussions of climate-induced

migration are the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention of Climate Change (UNFCCC),
the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, and the 1994 United Nations
Convention to Combat Desertification in Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and/or
Desertification (UNCCD) (Morel, 259). Of these four international documents, only the UNCCD
discussed environmental migration, emphasizing the need to provide “mechanisms for assisting
environmentally displaced persons” (UNCCD Article 10, 1994).

The Absence of Environmental Factors within the Discourse on Refugee Law

The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee eligible for legal protection as someone
who: “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality,
membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his
nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the projection of
that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former
habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to
return to it” (1951 Refugee Convention, Article 1A). Within this relatively restrictive definition,
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there is no clearly stated provision for “environmental refugees,” whose own definition varies
within the literature on migration and refugee law (Williams, 508). While this has not proven to
be a significant problem just yet, the ambiguous definition of environmental or climate refugees
will most likely lead to discrepancies in asylum granting for people displaced due to permanent
environmental change. Thus, in order to be eligible for asylum or any form of legal protection,
climate refugees would need to also be able to show another, traditionally accepted form of
persecution.
More hope is found for IDPs who have experienced “violations of human rights or
natural or human-made disasters” under the provisions of UN’s Guiding Principles on Internal
Displacement (Williams, 511). However, national accountability and the UN’s power limitations
bring the actual manifestations of these provisions into question, especially within low-income
states.

The United States: A Case Example of the Unfortunate Realities of International Aid

In 2003, the Pentagon issued a security scenario regarding the worldwide human effects
of climate change, describing an apocalyptic nightmare of starvation, violence, and widespread
population displacements that would bring hordes of displaced persons into the United States and
other developed countries (Hartmann, 235). This widely publicized scenario only proved to
cause panic and fear-mongering throughout the United States’ governing bodies, especially in
the context of foreign policy and national security. This led to a greater involvement of the
military in international developmental assistance and humanitarian aid agreements and
popularized the idea of an “aid-military complex” that primarily targeted “ungoverned spaces,”
which included “failed or failing states” (Hartmann, 240).
Since 2007, much of the United States’ militarized focus on “climate conflict” has been
in Africa, showcased by the development of the U.S. military command AFRICOM (Hartmann,
241). The political discourse on climate conflict may begin to justify the sending of troops into
threatened parts of Africa.
This claim of military responsibility for international climate conflicts is contrasted by
other government disputes about the United States’ responsibility for economic climate change
mitigation (Worland, 2019). For some time, the conservative narrative on climate change has
been based in opposition to the US’s overpayment for climate change mitigation strategies,
regardless of its disproportionately high contribution to global warming through excessive use of
resources and greenhouse gas emissions. While the Paris Agreement implies that richer countries
should “bear a greater burden in addressing climate change,” the lack of a detailed protocol has
made this policy difficult to implement and uphold. And now, as the US threatens to pull out of
the Paris Agreement, the probability of internationally upheld accountability for the United
States’ contributions to climate change are in question.

IV. A Rhetorical Analysis of the Climate Refugee Narrative and its Political Influence

While the effects of climate change on population displacement and migration patterns is
based in strong scientific evidence, the rhetoric in which researchers and policymakers discuss
climate refugees and the “impending climate refugee crisis” is rife with political significance and
problematic assumptions. Phrases like the “human tide,” and persistent use of words such as
“threat,” “fear” and “danger” play a significant role in fear-mongering, and the figures that are
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commonly found in discussions of population movement, as described above, dramatically

exaggerate the effects that migration will have across national borders. These estimates also
“overlook…the fact that long-term impacts of climate change are going to be intertwined with
other social, political and economic transformations,” as well as existing sociopolitical factors
that play a significant role in the marginalization of developing countries and the future
development of mass migration trends, and which are largely caused by developed countries in
the northern hemisphere (Bettini, 67). In this way, first-world countries are not held accountable
for their massive contributions to the development of these global problems, and instead, they
create scapegoats out of marginalized, low-income populations.
Rather than promoting greater improvements in terms of developing world infrastructure
and international aid and collaboration, this “alarmist rhetoric” has legitimized “exceptional”
measures, such as more restrictive immigration policies or mass relocations into communities
that are void of financial or educational resources (Bettini, 68). Publicizing the “inevitability” of
such massive population movements has discouraged present-day implementation of
preventative measures, and has fueled widely accepted xenophobia and racism. By
simultaneously victimizing and dehumanizing climate refugees, the climate refugee narrative—
and the powers that have created it—does not account for the developed world’s role in the
development of this potential refugee crisis.
The Pacific Island communities exemplify the effects of this narrative on the identities of
nations that are at high risk of experiencing the effects of climate change. Researchers have
dubbed Pacific Islanders, especially citizens of Papua New Guinea and Tuvalu, as the world’s
“first environmental refugees,” making headlines that place these nations at the frontlines of
climate refugee discourse (Farbotko and Lazrus, 382). This publicized narrative has
misrepresented the migration trends that serve as an ancient part of Pacific Islanders’ history. It
has also made questionable assumptions that most of this migration will be to the developed
world, and has dismissed the necessity for creating sustainable migration policies that benefit
refugees and migrants as well as the host nations, thus depicting an incorrect image of the
dangerous poor that mobilizes social inequality (Hartmann). Farbotko and Lazrus employ the
metaphor of the canary in the coal-mine to discuss the use of Tuvalu as a case example within
international climate change debates: “Tuvalu is consistently being imagined (by outsiders rather
than inhabitants) as a laboratory and a litmus test for the effects of climate change on the
planet… ‘The metaphorical force of the canary in the coalmine rests with the idea that the canary
– the Tuvalu islands – is not valuable in and of itself but rather is in service to a larger (global)
environmental purpose’” (Farbotko and Lazrus, 385).
While climate change is real, a climate refugee crisis does not necessarily have to be.
Rather than allocating resources to increase national and international migration restrictions, and
militarizing responses to alleged “climate conflicts,” adaptive and preventative protocols can
minimize the effects on developing countries, and turning the discussion from climate refugees
to perpetrators of climate change will allow us to start mending the injustices that have plagued
the global south for decades.

V. Why Climate Refugees? Why Do I Care?

During my recent family visits to Lebanon, I have witnessed the seriousness of the
regional changes caused by the Syrian war and subsequent refugee crisis. As I walked through
Beirut, I saw first-hand the homelessness and social conflict that have ensued as displaced
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communities as well as marginalized citizens are neglected by any and all forms of government.
Since this issue hits close to home, I started doing more research about refugee crises and
migration, with a specific focus on health care accessibility and disparities, this past summer.
And I soon developed a passionate interest in pursuing medical anthropology before medical
school in order to further explore this topic through research.
Over the past few months, I have also become more cognizant of the realities of climate
change, and about the effects it has begun to have on our environment. Through my research on
migration and global refugees, and as I prepared to apply for graduate programs, I learned about
this “impending climate refugee crisis,” and was intrigued by the research. Thus, when
brainstorming ideas for the final paper in this course, I realized that this would be the perfect
opportunity to learn more about the scientific data and political policies that have contributed to
these predictions and connect them through a discourse of social justice. I plan to continue
pursuing this topic through my own research as a graduate student, focusing on the intersection
between migration studies and global health. Like with all other research on science and social
justice, my goal is to lead to more awareness about the human effects of climate change,
acknowledge and critique the role that systemic inequalities play in perpetuating marginalization
in health care on a global level, and provide a basic model for global policy reform through my
own research.
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Works Cited

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Climate Change: Background Paper to the 2010 World Development Report.” The World
Bank, April 2010.

Bettini, Giovanni. “Climate Barbarians at the Gate? A critique of apocalyptic narratives on

‘climate refugees’.” Geoforum, vol. 45, 2013, pp. 63-72.

Campbell, John R. “Climate-Change Migration in the Pacific.” The Contemporary Pacific, vol.
26, no. 1, 2014, pp. 1-28.

Diffenbaugh, Noah S., and Burke, Marshall. “Global warming has increased global economic
inequality.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS), vol. 116, no. 20,
2019, pp. 9808-9813.

Farbotko, Carol, and Lazrus, Heather. “The first climate refugees? Contesting global narratives
of climate change in Tuvalu.” Global Environmental Change, vol. 22, 2012, pp. 382-390.

Hartmann, Betsy. “Rethinking Climate Refugees and Climate Conflict: Rhetoric, Reality, and the
Politics of Policy Discourse.” Journal of International Development, vol. 22, 2010, pp.
233-246.

Harvey, Fiona. “Devastating climate change could lead to 1m migrants a year entering EU by
2100.” The Guardian. 21 December 2017.

Levy, Barry S., and Patz, Jonathan A. “Climate Change, Human Rights, and Social Justice.”
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Missirian, Anouch, and Schlenker, Wolfram. “Asylum applications respond to temperature

fluctuations.” Science, vol. 358, 2017, pp. 1610-1614.

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exploring their contributions in the context of ‘environmental migration’.” Environmental
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248-265.

Nicholson, Frances, and Kumin, Judith. “A guide to international refugee protection and building
state asylum systems: Handbook for Parliamentarians N° 27, 2017.” UNHCR, 2017.

Williams, Angela. “Turning the Tide: Recognizing Climate Change Refugees in International
Law.” Law and Policy, vol. 30, no. 4, 2008, pp. 502-529.

Worland, Justin. “Climate Change Has Already Increased Global Inequality. It Will Only Get
Worse.” TIME. 22 April, 2019.