Confronting the Ethical Questions around Climate Change and Migration

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CHAPTERS 

[00:04:07]: Planned relocation and emergency displacement as distinct ethical contexts 

[00:06:06]: Constraints on mobility and the ethics of relocation decisions 

[00:09:21]: The term “climate refugee” and its legal and political limitations 

[00:13:13]: Broader sources of responsibility: conflict, colonialism, and extractive industries 

[00:19:23]: Labor migration as a potential adaptation strategy and its limitations 

[00:23:22]: Public narratives and perceptions of climate-related migration 

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:03.11] 

Do countries, and in particular countries viewed as the most responsible for man made climate change, have a moral duty to provide sanctuary or support to climate migrants? If so, which countries and to whom is that duty owed? This is Changing Climate, Changing Migration from the Migration Policy Institute. This is a podcast all about the nexus between global migration, climate change. My name is Julian Hattem, I'm your host and I'm also The editor of MPI's online magazine called the Migration Information Source. Find us online at migrationinformation.org. Ethics and morals are not something that we often talk about explicitly on this podcast, although they might lurk in the background of some of our conversations. Today we're going to put them center stage. To help me do that, I'm speaking with Jamie Draper. Jamie is a political philosopher at Utrecht University's Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies who has done a lot of thinking about climate change and migration and global justice and has a book on this topic. Jamie, hello. Thank you so much for your time.

[00:01:20.11] 

Well, hi, thanks very much for having me.

[00:01:23.00] 

So when I think about the key ethical issues regarding climate change and migration, I assume we're generally talking about the notion that the countries most responsible for human caused climate change have a moral duty to accommodate people displaced by those climate change impacts. I guess in some way this is kind of similar to the notion of loss and damage, which we just had an episode about, in a nutshell. Is that right? What am I missing in that calculation?

[00:01:47.22] 

Yeah, I mean, so I do think that responsibility is a really kind of crucial moral idea for when we're thinking about climate displacement. I think one thing I would say is that I think the moral responsibilities that high emitting states incur through their contributions to climate change might not necessarily be to accommodate or host people displaced by the impacts of climate change directly. Right. So we know that much climate related movement is internal or regional, and it typically wouldn't make sense for high emitting states to become kind of operationally involved in protecting people in those kinds of contexts. But another way it might matter is in terms of sharing the costs of discharging our kind of first order duties to people who are displaced locally. Perhaps so in the book I argue that high emitting states, when they sort of continue with business as usual, what they're doing is they're increasing the risks of displacement abroad. So by emitting significant amounts of greenhouse gasses, they're reaping the benefits of energy intensive economies, but they're letting the costs fall on the shoulders of those who are most vulnerable to climate impacts. So economists call this a kind of externality.

[00:02:59.23] 

I just call it unfair. I think that's the language that most people use. And so we can think, if you like, of redistributing the costs of who's actually protecting people displaced in the context of climate change as a way of remedying this unfairness or internalizing an externality to use this economic language. So that's, I think. Right, yeah. Where I see it as being central.

[00:03:24.07] 

And you know, we're talking, I say the word climate migration or people affected by climate change and moving as if it's one thing, when really it's. There are lots of different kinds of climate migration or climate mobility, climate related movement, I guess, is, are those dynamics, are those questions the same? If we're talking about kind of large scale planned community relocation instances versus more frantic displacement for people, you know, fleeing from a hurricane versus someone who, you know, might be migrating to find a new job in part because the impacts of climate change have made their own job no longer tenable and versus, you know, international migration versus internal, I guess this, you know, disentangle some of those threads for me, if you could. I guess. What, what are the similarities there? What are the differences?

[00:04:07.04] 

Yeah, sure. I mean, that's, I think, absolutely central. I mean, so when we look at empirical work on, on climate change and migration and displacement, we see a huge kind of heterogeneity in the way that these phenomena are linked. So one of the sort of main distinctions we might draw, you just pointed out, is between I guess, what we might call sort of anticipatory forms of climate related movement. So perhaps proactive relocation processes or as you suggested, people moving as a result of labor market pressures to do with climate change. Whereas other cases might be sort of reactive cases like displacement in the aftermath of extreme weather events and so on. And yeah, I mean, the moral questions I think that these kinds of cases raise are very different. Right. So when we're thinking about planned relocation processes, I think one thing that I think is really central is that people are able to exercise meaningful control over the relocation process and to make collective judgments about their priorities for relocation that reflect their values and ways of living. You know, we know from, for example, the history of development projects, Right. That these kinds of relocation processes often end up making vulnerable people worse off because technical experts fail to incorporate the perspectives of community members.

[00:05:23.16] 

And so in this kind of case, I think it's really important to make sure that we don't make the same kind of mistakes. But those kinds of questions don't really arise or arise perhaps only in very different ways in more reactive cases of displacement where there isn't a sort of process of planning and anticipating displacement in the same way. Right. So in the aftermath of an extreme weather event, the thing that might be most critical might be ensuring that people are able to find a background, a sort of. Yeah. Able to enter a more stable social environment relatively quickly. So we don't sort of. So in practice, I think, I think that would mean things like, you know, investing in disaster risk reduction or investing in resilient infrastructure and also disaster risk and recovery processes. But that looks quite different, I think, to the kind of planning that you might have in relocation planning cases or something like that. So anticipatory and reactive. That's one distinction. Another you mentioned is international and internal and that's also kind of critical. The moral questions here get very broad and depend, I think, a lot on the capability place at hand.

[00:06:32.07] 

I want to, I want to drill down a bit more on that international versus internal distinction dynamic because it seems like, I mean, it seems like you're saying that the answer is not. Well, wealthy countries that tend to be high emitting have a moral obligation to accept as many quote unquote climate migrants as possible. And especially since most quote unquote climate related migration, climate mobility, like most mobility in general, tends to be internal. I guess what is the role there of what is the responsibility on high emitting countries like the US, like the UK, like those in the EU, to, to accommodate that when it's, you know, it's a movement that's happening within another country far away. How, you know, what is the large, what is the big countries or what is the big economy, the high greenhouse gas emitting countries responsibility in that kind of instance.

[00:07:23.19] 

Yeah, I mean, so, so one thing I guess is this, this point about sort of sharing the costs fairly. I way you might think about this as well is, I think, I mean, so it's certainly true that most migration relating to climate change is internal rather than international. But it's also true, right, that we can encourage international migration to a greater and lesser extent as a result of, in the context of climate change. So there's been some suggestions, for example, that high. One thing that high income states should do is to encourage labor migration from regions that are vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. So we know from some work in the social sciences that at least in some contexts labor migration both internally and internationally can function as a kind of mechanism of adaptation to climate change. And so there's Been some reports for the World bank, the Asia Development Bank and the UK government that suggests one thing that high income states could do is to encourage labor migration from areas that are vulnerable to climate impacts, perhaps on like a seasonal basis or even on a long term basis. So my view on this is, for what it's worth, is that this strategy needs to be considered really carefully.

[00:08:39.05] 

Right? So if we're not careful, I think we risk forcing people to leave their homes by making immigration the only option here. So in the book I kind of argue that labor migration policy might have a place in responding to climate impacts, but that it's kind of one tool amongst many and that if it's going to be used, needs to be used alongside other options that give people a real choice to stay where they are if they want to do so. And it also needs to be conducted on kind of fair terms rather than the sort of exploitative terms that we often see in labor migration policy.

[00:09:19.18] 

That's a good and a key point because there's a lot of discussion increasingly about, you know, not just climate mobility, but climate immobility, whether it's quote unquote, trapped populations who might want to leave a place but cannot. But also, as you mentioned, a lot of people who don't want to leave their home because it's their home.

[00:09:36.15] 

Right.

[00:09:36.23] 

And the dynamic of you don't want to force people to leave their home, you know, but you also don't want to leave them to die and you know, worst case scenario, existential crisis, right? How do you, how do you navigate that if, you know, if the option is like if the sea, if you're, let's imagine a small island developing state, low lying, the sea levels are rising, there's an existential threat there. Leaving seems like the good option. People don't want to leave. What are the moral obligations for the globe?

[00:10:06.12] 

Yeah, I mean, so this is a, this is a really difficult question, I think. I mean, as you point out, the problem here is, right, that we don't want to force people to move if they don't want to, but we also don't want to encourage people to stay in risky situations, right? So sometimes we can invest in local adaptation to help people stay where they are, so coastal defenses, this kind of thing. But there are also limits to this, right? And those can be both kind of physical limits and softer kind of financial limits, right. Where it might be technically possible to keep people where they are, but would require a huge amount of money and in the long term probably wouldn't be sustainable. So at the moment, in a lot of contexts, I think the ways that these decisions are made reflect and entrench some existing kind of injustices. So in the US for example, decisions about whether to fund local adaptation or whether to relocate or engage in what's sometimes called managed retreat in coastal areas, they're often made on the basis of cost benefit calculations that use property values as a central input.

[00:11:09.14] 

Right. So what this means is that people whose property is highly valuable, so the luxury beachfront property owner might be protected through local adaptation that allows them to stay where they are. Whereas somebody else who lives in an area with low property values, perhaps because of things like historic processes of residential segregation or forced displacement of indigenous peoples, they have to relocate because their property is less valuable. So one thing I think we can say is that we should certainly try to disconnect the decision making process for these kinds of tricky cases from things like market value of properties. Of course, that doesn't solve the problem. Right. There's still going to be cases where we have to make difficult judgments about protecting in place versus encouraging relocation. And I do think that in some cases, perhaps where it's sort of technically infeasible or the costs would be really far too high compared to the benefit that people would get out of being able to remain in place, then it can be justified to decide to forego investing in kind of local adaptation and instead direct investment towards relocation. That's a really hard choice to make, I think, because it does leave people in a situation where they're effectively forced to relocate, even if nobody's knocking at their door and telling them that they have to leave.

[00:12:27.11] 

Right. Taking away the option of remaining where you are, I think. But I think this is a kind of tragic circumstance. Right. I don't know. I don't see a way that we can get around this problem. It's a really basic tension.

[00:12:41.20] 

I think I want to change gears a tiny bit here to talk about some of the definitional problems, I guess. I guess one of the themes on this podcast is that climate change affects and compels and prevents migration and a lot of complicated and subtle ways. And rarely is that obvious. You know, one person's quote unquote, climate migrant is another's quote unquote labor migrant is another's family migrant, whatever. I guess. How do you acknowledge this kind of ambiguity and try and respond to, you know, these issues and these challenges, while also acknowledging that, you know, only very rarely is there a clearly defined, identifiable, quote unquote climate migrant?

[00:13:23.06] 

Yeah, I mean, So I think this is really important. So when I started working on this, I found it really striking, the disconnect between the social scientific work that was being done on climate change and displacement and the very small literature on this in philosophy, where people talked about climate refugees and climate migrants in very easy kind of casual terms, as if they were sort of readily identifiable people. And so a lot of the early proposals in political philosophy for things like a kind of a climate refugee treaty that would give special legal status to people displaced by the impacts of climate change, who we kind of imagined would be moving internationally. But of course, when we look at the empirical work on this, this is really not the story that is told by work in the social sciences. And I think this has really important moral implications. Right. So for one thing, it creates a really serious hurdle for these proposals for things like a climate refugee treaty. Right. Like, it means in practice that it would be very difficult for anyone to build, any decision maker to ever be able to tell who should count.

[00:14:27.03] 

Right. Who should have this legal status, have access to the rights associated with this legal status.

[00:14:33.13] 

I mean, just. I say this every podcast, basically, but, like, to clarify, there is no such thing as a climate refugee because it's not included in the UN definition, blah, blah, blah. And under no international or national standard or law is that their refugee status for climate displaced people. For partly precisely these reasons. Right. And it seems like you are. You oppose any. There have been some efforts at, like, either expanding the, you know, UN refugee treaty or creating some new treaty, climate refugee treaty. It seems like you are opposed to that in part because of these definitional questions about who counts and who does not count.

[00:15:09.07] 

Yeah. Or at least I think they're a really serious worry. Right. Like, so when it, when it comes to the Refugee Convention, I mean, my view tends to be that the Refugee Convention has a kind of an overly narrow focus, but that's not specifically because of climate change. Right. That's just because I think that the existing focus on persecution is overly narrow. Still, I don't know if it would be advisable to encourage a renegotiation of that convention. Right. Like, a lot of refugee and migration scholars suggest that if we were to reopen the convention to negotiation, we'd get a lot less than we have right now. Right. So, yeah, I don't know if that's the best. The best move. I think, in more general terms, I think what I'd say about climate change and displacement is that rather than trying to identify particular people who are displaced by the impacts of climate change, our focus should really be on identifying the needs of displaced people, whether or not they're displaced by the impacts of climate change. So climate change, I think might make a difference to this, this kind of second order question I mentioned before about responsibility and who should bear the costs, but I don't think it really makes a difference to this first order question of what people are owed.

[00:16:22.08] 

Right. So if somebody's facing relocation because of rising sea levels or because of, I don't know, they're in the shadow of an active volcano. Right. It doesn't really seem to make a moral difference, I don't think, to the kinds of claims that they have to engage in a kind of procedurally fair relocation process that protects their basic interests. Similarly, when it comes to people displaced by extreme weather events. Right. So do we know that this extreme weather event was caused by climate change? How much was its impacts kind of mediated through social institutions? So how much blame should we lay on climate change versus something else? I kind of think this doesn't really matter when it comes to what these people are owed. This might matter further down the line when it comes to redistributing the costs of protecting these people. But at least when it comes to these first order questions of what we should actually do to protect the basic rights of displaced people, I don't think it makes a significant difference.

[00:17:20.23] 

But so let's keep going on that point because I think this is a very interesting line of thought. So does it make a difference whether it's hurricane, sea level rise, volcano? I mean, what if it's a war or the legacy of colonialism, or what if it's an extractive industry or 500 years of being at the wrong end of, you know, geopolitical and historical and sociocultural pressures? Like, does that make a difference? And I guess how, how do you respond to concerns that, you know, quote, unquote, climate migrants are getting something special compared to everyone else? And then on the other hand, is not the logical endpoint of what you're calling for or was not the logical endpoint of your questions ultimately just a, a case for open borders? I guess, in some regards. I mean. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, let's follow this to, you know, the logical endpoint.

[00:18:05.15] 

Right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't think it's a case for open borders, or at least I haven't tried to work the argument that far. I don't know.

[00:18:13.14] 

I'm not going to put you on the spot here.

[00:18:14.24] 

Yeah. But I do think, I mean, so one interesting point that you raised is that, you know, climate change isn't the only thing which is, let's say, causally implicated in some indirect way in patterns of migration and displacement. There are other things like, let's say uneven development processes or war, civil conflict, things like this, where we might think, okay, well, there are other actors who are at fault here in some way, so belligerence in wars of aggression or something. We might think in the same way that high emitters incur special responsibilities, so too do they extractive industries like mining. So multinational firms involved in displacement of people in order to build minds. Right. So they seem to incur responsibilities for this kind. I think what's different in these cases is that in these cases it can, it's often a lot more direct, the link between the kind of action that is at least the proximate cause of displacement and, yeah, the outcome. So in some cases, like in the case of extractive industries like mining, I think we can try at least in a more straightforward way to hold these companies kind of liable in a kind of more legalistic sense in a way that I think is very complicated in the case of climate change, when it comes to attributing responsibility for climate change, there's a lot of kind of causal complexities both in the chain of events, from emissions to climate impacts, but also from climate impacts to displacements.

[00:19:49.14] 

And so, yeah, I do think that climate change is in some way special here and that they're kind of responsibility at stake is a lot more diffuse than in some other kinds of contexts. But I do think one extension of my view on responsibility is that where there are agents who are kind of responsible, then they should be held responsible to bear the costs associated with the displacement that they're causing. That might have more radical implications than just the case of climate change as a kind of general moral principle. But I think I'm comfortable with those implications.

[00:20:23.20] 

Yeah, I mean, I mean, you know, I think of like war, conflict. Right. I mean, does that, I mean, is, you know, in the United States, if, you know, if the United States goes to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and there is large scale displacement as a result, is the logical endpoint then that the US has an obligation towards those displaced people?

[00:20:41.22] 

Yeah, I mean, so I think.

[00:20:43.20] 

Or, you know, other. Not to put the US in particular, but like. Yeah, in general, that kind of.

[00:20:47.24] 

Sure. Yeah. No, I mean, I think so. I mean, I guess there are some, there are some, there are some debates in just, just war theory, a branch of philosophy about, in principle, in the context of a just war, if you were doing this, you know. Yeah. So I guess there's some kind of hypothetical scenario that we could concoct where maybe it could be, all things considered, permissible to engage in military actions that end up foreseeably causing displacement or something. I don't think that the case. I don't think any wars that we see around us in the world today are like that. Those kinds of cases that just war theorists worry about. So in these kinds of cases, I do think that, say, the US would incur special responsibilities to the people whose displacement it's involved in causally as a result of its military adventurism. But one thing I would say is that as in the case of climate change, that doesn't have to be a responsibility to host people, it can be a responsibility to bear the costs. Right. So when it comes to where people should be hosted or where people should be able to move, let's say, to claim asylum abroad.

[00:21:50.18] 

Right. There are different criteria that we might appeal to. Things like, I don't know, shared language, the kind of opportunities to live in ways that reflects one's kind of cultural or religious commitments in different countries and so on, which I think are going to be primary here. Yeah. It might not be that the US is always the best place for somebody displaced by the US's actions. Right. But that's not to say that the US should be let off the hook in these kinds of cases. Right. So one way of redistributing responsibility here, I suppose, would be to do things like to get the US to do something like finance protection elsewhere. And protection elsewhere is sometimes, I guess, used as a bit of a euphemism for sort of keeping refugees outside of our borders. But I don't think in principle at least, that it has to be. There could be protection in the uk, right? Like or Germany or something like that.

[00:22:45.17] 

Yeah, you were just kind of getting at it. But I kind of want to keep going on like bringing, let's, you know, bring this conversation kind of increasingly down to earth.

[00:22:53.12] 

Right.

[00:22:53.19] 

You know, as a non philosopher, I want to make sure that we're kind of focusing on, or like we're kind of informing real world impacts. We know from research by some of my colleagues and many others that, you know, you can't simply like shame people into offering new protection systems or other, you know, immigration pathways sometimes, even when, when it is obviously in a country's economic self interests to create new, new legal immigration pathways, new labor migration pathways, they do not. Lots of these efforts can kind of backfire. And. Yeah, so I guess what do we do with, with these ideas, with these moral quandaries and these responsibilities? How is there evidence that like these can be translated into policies or action? And what, what do we do? So what. I guess it's kind of my question.

[00:23:43.10] 

Yeah, I mean, yeah, this is, this is a great question and a very difficult question to propose a person. Yeah. I mean, so, you know, in a kind of ideal world, right, we might think that governments would act rationally and reasonably on the basis of the kind of moral reasons that apply to them. But obviously we don't live in that world. And in many parts of the world today, there is significant hostility to migrants, which I think often intersects with existing racial and ethnic prejudices. I certainly don't have a kind of full answer to solve that problem, but I think I can say something about how I see it playing out in the context of climate change. So one thing I think that we see in the context of climate change is a huge number of kind of fear based narratives around climate displacement. So in the popular imagination, I think that the image that people have of climate displacement is of huge numbers of people moving from south to north and we have newspaper headlines talking about waves and floods of people. And this is inaccurate given what we know about climate displacement from the social sciences.

[00:24:56.03] 

But I also think that it kind of serves a particular ideological function that we ought to contest, which is a function of kind of whipping up fear and scapegoating migrants as threats. And then those who are able to incite fear in this way are able to present themselves as having a solution to that threat, which is often something like restrictive border controls. So I think one first step, if you like, to getting us in a position where we can lobby for the kinds of policies that at least I think can be morally justified is to contest these kinds of forces, that, these kinds of social forces that lead to hostility towards immigrants and asylum seekers and refugees. So I can only really point, point to some kind of sources of hope, I think, which is some kind of examples, I guess, of, of activist organizations like for example, Alarm Phone in the Mediterranean, which is this, this, I'm sure you know, this, this group who engage in search and rescue operations at sea and, or things like the kind of sanctuary city movement in the US I think, which involves limiting cooperation of public services with Immigration and Customs and Enforcement.

[00:26:20.09] 

These on their own are obviously not going to prevent backlash against immigration or to stop any kind of resentment. But I do think that they're a kind of important point of orientation for a politics that seems to kind of build coalitions amongst host populations and migrants, both migrants affected by climate change and migrants more broadly. And they serve to kind of direct people's attention to, towards the real sources of people's grievances, things like declining power of labor and the economy. Right. Which is often, you know, when you have immigrant workers or, sorry, immigrants pitted against workers, right. That's, that should be the real target or things like the rentier economy that we're now living in. So when you have grievances around house prices, right. I think that's where we should be directing our energy. So that's, that's, that's to say that there's a kind of very important political first step, I think, to be made if, if we're going to get ourselves in a position where we can achieve something like a kind of just response to climate displacement.

[00:27:27.19] 

We're basically out of time. So we should probably wrap things up there. But yeah, this was super interesting. I confess I do not spend a whole lot of time thinking about moral philosophy, political philosophy, but I'm glad I did today. So Jamie, thanks so much for coming on. I appreciate it.

[00:27:42.00] 

Thanks. Thanks so much for having me. It's been really fun. I'm glad to chat.

[00:27:44.23] 

Jamie Draper is an assistant professor at the Ethics Institute at Utrecht University's Department on Philosophy and Religious Studies. He's author of the new book Climate Displacement, which discusses and confronts a lot of the issues we talked about today. He's also the editor of Political Philosophy of Internal Displacements, which you should also check out. Thanks for listening to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. If you liked what you heard today, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss an episode. We're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all the other major podcast platforms, and please leave us a review which helps other people find us too. All of our previous episodes are online at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. If you're looking for something to read, make sure to check out the special collection of climate related articles from the Migration Information Source, which is MPI's online magazine that's online at migrationinformation.org. Make sure to subscribe to the Source's newsletter too, which offers absolutely free analysis and data about wide ranging migration trends in countries around the world. Daniella Espacio produced this episode of the podcast. Assistance came from Lisa Dixon and Michelle Mittelstadt. Our theme music is Touch by Patrick Patrikios. I'm Julian Hattem. I'll see you next time.