The challege of climate refugees

Managing immigration into the United Kingdom is currently in the news almost every day, but the discussions about what is driving immigration rarely discuss the factors compelling people to undertake long, dangerous journeys to an uncertain destination. While many factors influence these journeys, environmental factors are of increasing importance and as the 21st century develops they may well become the biggest single driver.

Reporting about immigration often uses different words to describe migrants, sometimes selected for political purposes. For clarity, a ‘migrant’ is anyone who moves from one place to another with an intention to stay. When people leave their homeland to find better job prospects in another country they are an ‘economic migrant’. A ‘refugee’ is someone who has been forced to become a migrant, perhaps because of war or natural disaster in their homeland. An increasingly common term is ‘environmental migrant’ or ‘environmental refugee’, and this is used to describe someone whose homeland has become impossible to inhabit so that they try to move to another country.

Neither migrants nor refugees have a legal right to move to another country, but countries may allow them to do this, as we have seen with refugees from Ukraine.

Then we have ‘asylum seekers’. This is where the biggest confusion happens. Asylum is a legal status which may be given to someone who has “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion”. This legal definition comes from the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, a treaty agreed in the aftermath of the Second World War by the then members of the United Nations. It is important to remember that the United Kingdom played a major part in its creation.

When a migrant arrives in the United Kingdom and claims asylum they need to be able to show proof of this fear of persecution. For example, they may have to prove that they are a Muslim in a Buddhist country or a socialist in a right-wing autocracy, or a homosexual in a country where that carries a death penalty.

Much reporting about the English Channel small boat crisis describes people in the boats as ‘illegal migrants’, a meaningless but inflammatory term. Undoubtedly many will be economic migrants who have no legal right to enter the United Kingdom, but many will be escaping persecution and will want to claim asylum. Under the terms of the 1951 Convention, to which the United Kingdom is a signatory, they have a legal right to come to the United Kingdom to do this.

So where does the environment come into this discussion? As climate change strengthens more and more countries will become impossible to inhabit and people will have to move. The scale of this displacement is hard to predict, but there are some estimates that as many as 200 million people could have to leave their homes by the end of this century. To put that into context, there are currently about 70 million displaced people around the world, so it is easy to see that the problems we now have with migration will become many times greater over the next decades.

Governments are responsible for looking after their own displaced people, but many of the worst affected countries are poor and unable to provide necessary basic protection. These countries have contributed little to cumulative global carbon dioxide emissions and it should be the responsibility of industrialised countries such as the United Kingdom, as historically and currently large emitters, to provide necessary financial support. After all, if your neighbour dumps rubbish in your garden you would expect them to pay to clear it up: this is known as the ‘polluter pays’ principle.

However, as conditions in these countries deteriorate and people displaced by environmental change try to survive, tensions will increase between them and existing residents. Incomers from different ethnic groups, with different religions, or with different social values may find themselves persecuted, and so they will look to migrate and seek asylum in other countries because they have “a well-founded fear of being persecuted”. So, although the 1951 Convention does not in itself provide protection for environmental refugees, if they can show that they are being persecuted because of having had to move within their homeland, then they will have a legitimate claim to asylum.

This is why the United Kingdom Government’s current attempts to stop people entering the country are misguided and ultimately futile. Much of the anti-immigrant political rhetoric claims that migrants all come to take our jobs, claim our benefits and put children in our schools. It is true that many migrants are looking for a better life, but many are coming and will continue to come because their homelands are uninhabitable and they are suffering persecution. Rather, we should try to improve the rate at which migrants are processed in order to distinguish between economic migrants who can be repatriated and legitimate asylum seekers. We should also engage with the international community to agree new migration conventions which will meet the demands of the late 21st century.

Violent anti-immigrant rhetoric will do nothing to stem the rising tide of environmental refugees.

(This article was originally published in the Sheffield Telegraph in December 2022)