What do we do with climate refugees?
The international community has no plan to care for the 1.2 billion people who could be forced to flee their homes by 2050 due to the climate crisis
OuagadougouBy 2050, up to 1.2 billion people could be forced to flee their homes due to the climate crisis, according to a report by the think tank Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) cited by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), although it points out that the "most widely cited" estimate is 200 million.The UN has long warned that climate migrations Migration is one of the great challenges of the 21st century, which has so far generated debate but few facts. Most are displacements within the borders of the same country, but more and more people are forced to migrate due to droughts, floods, hurricanes or simply because of the loss of their livelihood due to rising temperatures or rising sea levels. "Migrations could be managed if there were a rational migration policy, but the current one is based on racist and xenophobic prejudices," says Miguel Pajares, president of the Migration Policy Group. Honorary Member of the Catalan Commission for Aid to Refugees (CCAR).
Until now, the Geneva Convention of 1951, also known as the Statute of Refugees, the international agreement that defines the rights of refugees, restricts the term to those who must flee their country because of war or "persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, belonging." Thus, it does not contemplate the protection of climate refugees, a concept in the mouths of academics and representatives of international institutions, but which has not yet achieved a legal framework that defines it. What do we do with climate refugees?
"If there is political will, progress can be made on asylum rights, just as the European Union recognized as refugees people fleeing wars thanks to the approval of the Directive in 2011," says Pajares, author of the book Climate refugees, which defines this phenomenon as the great challenge of the 21st century. While there are some examples such as New Zealand, which in 2020 gave humanitarian visas to 100 people from Pacific islands which are at risk of disappearing due to rising sea levels, no law currently protects displacements caused by the climate crisis.
Who pays for climate change?
In September 2023 the storm called Daniel In Libya, it caused 12,000 deaths and 40,000 displaced people in the Mediterranean city of Derna. A year later, a storm of similar magnitude devastated the Valencian Community. The temperature of the Mediterranean Sea, and of the oceans in general, keeps breaking recordsIn 2022, floods in Pakistan caused 10 million displaced people and 6.9 million people have had to leave their homes due to Floods in sub-Saharan Africa by torrential rains.
"Climate change is a political cause because for 30 years governments have been failing to comply with climate agreements to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," says Pajares, referring to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which was created in 1992 with 154 countries and has now been the subject of a series of agreements on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It is within the framework of this convention that the Paris Agreement was agreed in 2015.
But who pays the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions? According to the Convention, "all countries must comply with climate objectives, but it is the rich countries, which are also the ones that have generated this situation the most and have benefited the most, that must bear the highest price," explains Pajares. COP29, the UN's annual climate conference, came to an end a key agreement on the money that poor countries should receive to face the challenges of the climate fight. The agreement signed in the early hours of the morning before the summit ended sets the annual direct aid to be received by poor countries from 2035 at 300 billion euros, thus tripling the current target of 100 billion euros, a figure agreed in 2009 and which countries considered developed owed2. A part – still too small, according to the recipient governments – of this money would be used for adaptation measures to the new climatic realities of these poor countries, measures that could prevent their populations from being forced to leave.
The data show a scenario of movement of people, but there are still no clear figures on "what is the climatic component of migration", a question that Pajares considers important in order to define and be able to move forward on "climate refugee" legislation. "Just as states made an effort to accommodate 5 million Ukrainians and social services did not collapse, it should also be possible now," he explains. For example, in Senegal, the country's fishing agreements with the European Union and fishing villages devastated by rising sea levels and storms are one of the main drivers of displacement, according to one CCAR report. In 2024, 47,000 migrants have arrived in the Canary Islands from the African coasts, 18% more than the previous year, According to a report published this January by Frontex, the European bloc's border agency.
