The Reverse of Climate Migration: Should There Be a Right Not to Be Displaced amid Climate Change?

This transcript was generated using AI and may contain inaccuracies. If you notice an error, feel free to email [email protected].

CHAPTERS 

[00:03:28]: Rethinking international protection beyond the current refugee model 

[00:08:21]: Loss and damage and potential mechanisms for compensation 

[00:09:10]: Climate change alongside other drivers of displacement 

[00:13:55]: Balancing the right to remain with the need for mobility 

[00:17:34]: Proposals for a coordinated international platform on climate-related displacement 

[00:20:08]: Trends in international protection and implications for future responses 
 

TRANSCRIPT
[00:00:03.15]

There is no such thing as a climate refugee. A guest or I have said some version of that statement on basically every episode of this podcast so far. The international humanitarian protection system, which has a strict definition of who constitutes a refugee, does not provide protection to people leaving their home because of the impacts of climate change. But maybe we've been looking at the question all wrong. Instead of asking whether or not refugee law needs to change to accommodate climate displaced people, maybe we should start with a blank slate. What would it take to create a new legal system that's designed to prevent people from being displaced by climate change or other factors in the first place? This is Changing Climate, Changing Migration from the Migration Policy Institute. This podcast explores the new era of climate migration and how policies are adapting. My name is Julian Hattem. I'm your host and the editor of MPI's online magazine, the Migration Information Source. Check it out at migrationinformation.org. I'm speaking today with Alex Aleinikoff. Alex is a leading scholar in the area of international immigration and refugee law. He is the dean of the New School for Social Research, where he also is a university professor of immigration law and policy and the director of its Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility.

[00:01:29.09] 

And importantly, Alex was the UN Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees from 2010 to 2015. Alex, thank you so much for your time. I am very excited to be able to speak with you today.

[00:01:38.14] 

Happy to be here.

[00:01:39.23] 

You have called for a shift in how we think about the rights of people displaced by the impacts of climate change. Rather than asking whether or not people displaced for climate related reasons deserve protection as refugees, which is currently not an option for them under international and national frameworks, you've suggested that we should instead focus on ensuring there's some sort of right not to be displaced in the first place. Is that a fair characterization of your argument? And I guess what would that look like in practice?

[00:02:06.13] 

Yeah, that's close. So, I mean, look, I start with a broader perspective and climate that the majority of people displaced from their homes around the world these days don't fit within the Refugee Convention because they're either they haven't crossed an international border or they can't show persecution on one of the five grounds identified in the Convention. And the tendency has been to try to take other groups of displaced people and squeeze them into the Convention to show that people are persecuted on one of these X grounds. And that's been successful for some groups, but for many, many people it hasn't. And it doesn't work for the vast majority of people who forced from their homes because of climate. And so then there were proposals like, well, let's amend the Refugee Convention and come up with, or amend the definition of refugee or come up with a new convent dealing with climate movement and things. But still it was within the same framework as the Refugee Convention, which was a requirement of a fear of returning or harm if returning. It started with people outside their country of origin and asked whether or not they should be safe from being sent back to where they could be harmed.

[00:03:18.05] 

And it just struck me that that model which worked after World War II for refugees and for many, many groups and for millions of people around the world now outside their home countries, it wasn't going to work for climate displaced people because the vast majority will be staying within their home countries, they won't cross international border, and moreover, they couldn't show persecution if returned home. But they may be able to show that it's very hard to live in their home environment. So that sort of forced me to think that maybe we should be coming up with another paradigm altogether. And it struck me that the harm here is not so much being sent back to a place where you'll be harmed, but really being forced from your harm in the first place. And that was not on the table in the Refugee Convention because we were already dealing with people who've been forced into their home. And the question is, what should happen to them now with the climate situation we're facing? Tens of millions of people in their homes who want to stay in their homes. They're not being persecuted by their government, they're not pariahs in their home state, but they're unable to stay in their homes because of rising seas or drought or big storms or fires or mudslides or whatever the kinds of environmental events are that force them to leave.

[00:04:31.15] 

That allows us in the climate area, it's very different than a refugee area where it's hard for folks working to end displacement to really work effectively on the root causes. People involved in refugee protection have a very hard time stopping conflict in civil wars. But in the climate area, you really can begin to talk about helping people stay home and not having to flee. If you build stronger structures that can withstand storms or move people to safety a few yards back where the sea level rise otherwise won't. Won't occur, or help people with irrigation and drought areas, some people will have to move, will become uninhabitable. But for many people, through prevention and early warning and resilience and all these kinds of words, we hear really from the development side of international thinking more than the protection side. Sometimes we really can help people stay in their homes. And that then leads to the idea, well, maybe that's the goal here, is to help people stay home. How do you do that? You can talk about it in terms of kind of practical policies, like things I've just mentioned, things we can do on the ground for people.

[00:05:42.21] 

But maybe it needs a different kind of intellectual or conceptual structure to get that moving. And that's why I suggest thinking about a right not to be displaced, a right not to be forced from one's home, which would then allow people to say, something wrong is being done to me, and the international community owes me a remedy. Let me say one more thing about this. In the refugee world, we really don't talk about the accountability of people groups, nations that have forced people to flee. Focus, as I've said, is people that are outside their country of origin. And we think about how can we help them, how can we give them tents and medicine and education while they're getting. And then how can we find a solution to their permanent solution to their refugee hood, if I can put it that way. We don't think about the accountability of the folks who sent them across the border. But in the climate area, we are talking generally, when we talk about climate change, about the harms done to people elsewhere in the world by mainly developed global north states harming primarily people in other parts of the world.

[00:06:52.12] 

That's where most of the harm falls. Even though they were not responsible in some way, they contributed very little to the cause of the possible displacement. The notion of climate justice is a powerful notion, that those states and groups and corporations and others who have contributed to climate change in a way that have imposed dramatic harms on people should be asked to help in the remedy, should be held accountable. They should be part of the remedy, part of maybe a program of reparations paying for people's damages. And that gets worked into this right to not be displaced. If you have a right not to be displaced, then you have a remedy. The remedy is not just if you're displaced, you get to go home safely, but you should be able to hold accountable the people who have forced you to be displaced, and that would be the states elsewhere and the corporations and the groups elsewhere that have contributed to climate change. So this move to a right to displacement has a lot of aspects to it. I think that it significantly advances over what can be accomplished through the traditional refugee paradigm.

[00:07:58.05] 

And this overlaps, it sounds like, with a lot of what people in the climate universe discuss as loss and damages, the notion, exactly as you described, that people who have suffered losses and damages as a result of result of climate change, who are disproportionately not of the societies that contributed to global climate change, deserve some reparations is a word that has been used, or some sort of remunerative support for that.

[00:08:23.06] 

Right. And loss and damages is how climate justice comes in the discussions. You know, most of the states involved in these international negotiations don't want to talk about climate justice because it would impose huge costs on the states that have caused the problem. And the United States and others are unwilling to take that burden on fully. But they've done this through this creation of this loss and damage fund. The question is, can that fund really be created in a robust way? And secondly, will it be available for people who have been displaced? If that's the harm that's identified, will it be available to them or to help build programs to make it so people won't have to be displaced?

[00:09:01.05] 

I'm curious to what extent climate change is a unique factor here. I mean, you started off by saying this is not just a climate-relatedate displacement, right? This is not just a right against displacement for clilimate-related reasons, but it seems like the most practical application or the most the obvious context is climate change. Is it fair to say that like is, has climate change been kind of a trigger to this broader rethinking? I mean, how? I could imagine also a universe in which there is a right not to be displaced for food security, which, you know, or food insecurity which could be reconciled to other means or endemic gang violence, I don't know. Yeah. To what extent? How does this work in non climate-related settings? I guess and...

[00:09:49.10] 

Well, yeah, for me, it has been the opening up of the broader interrogation of the prevailing paradigm here so that we really have put everything into the refugee model of someone already outside their country and do they fear being returned? But once you say no, no, the harm here is forced displacement itself is the displacement, then it goes way beyond climate change, as you say, to the other kinds of situations you've identified. So it really opens up a rethinking of our entire concept of international protection.

[00:10:21.23] 

And would you say that this has been a structural limitation since the beginning of the post World War II international humanitarian protection regime? Or has this gap or kind of oversight been increasingly obvious in the last number of years? And if so, how? I mean, has it simply been climate change is an issue now when it wasn't so much 50, 60, 70 years ago?

[00:10:44.01] 

I think largely that's it. I mean, sometimes the Convention gets a bad rap for not having figured everything out. The time was written. It was written in a very particular historical context. After World War II, there were still a million people outside their countries of origin. And the international community wanted a system, a procedure, a. An agreement among states to one, to either get those people home or protect them against being returned where they couldn't be safe. And then, secondly, thinking about the future, there'd be other groups in the future who would be forced from their homes, as there had been in the run up to World War II, who shouldn't be asked to go back. It was unsafe to go back if they'd been persecuted. So the Convention did a lot of work, and as I said, it saved the lives of millions of people around the world throughout its existence. But we've become more attuned to these other forms of displacement, which seem equally harmful and equally worthy of international concern, even within the refugee definition itself. For example, now understandings that women and LGBTQ groups and others are meritorious of protection, even if they weren't originally in the front of the minds of the people who drafted the Convention or may have been mainly thinking about religious groups or persecuted political groups.

[00:11:59.17] 

So even within the Convention, it's grown over time. But outside the Convention, we've noticed other reasons why millions of people are being forced from their homes. They're in a place where they. The place they move to really can't adequately take care of them. And we say, well, maybe the international community should help out. What I'm suggesting is that that in the climate area is not just an act of charity, that we're going to help people move, but actually it's an entitlement. If you have a right not to be displaced, you're entitled to a remedy, and that gives it a lot more. A lot more force. But I must say, look, I've been thinking about these issues for a long, long time, and it's only recently occurred to me that we ought to be reconceptualizing this now, that maybe I may be slow on the uptake here, but. But, you know, most of the attention has been gone to making the Refugee Convention work for more groups until we've reached a point now where, I don't know, in, you know, the sense of the scientific revolutions, you know, you know, the paradigm doesn't work anymore. It's been shown to be to fail in so many places that you really need to move to a new concept altogether.

[00:13:03.19] 

I'm trying to disentangle a couple of different strands here, so if you'll forgive me for a second. On the one hand, generally speaking, most people do not migrate, most people do not want to become international migrants, even if there are terrible disasters or economic crises going on around them. Most people want to stay in their homes. But at the same time, it's clear that there are some people for whom migration, even just for a very short period, is probably in their best interest. And yet they cannot do so because it's expensive, because there are legal barriers, various other restrictions. I'm referring here to the concept of so called trapped populations. Involuntary immobility is how it's sometimes described. How can we reconcile this tension between enabling people to stay in place if they so choose, but also enabling them to leave if they so desire? Or and perhaps another way to say it is, is there a concern that a right not to be displaced could be misused or be misinterpreted as a barrier to movement in some way?

[00:14:03.12] 

Sure, it could be misused by states who want to adopt containment policies. So if you're right not to be displaced so you stay home, you just have to fight against that. But it has to. I think you're exactly right. You know, in the climate area, it may well be that the involuntarily immobile folks, the people who will, can't move, maybe the most harm altogether. They don't have the resources to move, the ability to move. And there may be tens of millions of people in that situation who just suffer at home and we've got to give them a way out at the same time. So right to displaced does not mean you shouldn't be forced from your home, but neither should be you be forced to stay in a home that becomes uninhabitable. That has to be the other side of the coin.

[00:14:46.11] 

Are there, are there kind of nascent germs of what some version of this right, this idea might look like in practice? Or is this kind of, would this be a brand new thing that.

[00:14:55.14] 

No, I think, no, no. I think we see it in, you know, in the guiding principles on internal displacement and the Kampala Convention. There are, there are hints about a right not to be displaced, that states shouldn't force people from their homes. You have a right, you know, it's, you have a right, it's not stated quite this boldly, but a right not to be internally displaced. There's a recognition that that's there. So you can draw from the materials, you know, and there are rights in human rights law, you know, for groups not to be, you know, ethnic norms against ethnic cleansing there you can point in a range of different areas of international law where groups should not be forced to move from their homes. So you can, and there's been a book and a couple of articles written really in the last 10 years, this goes back a while that have hinted at these kinds of connections that could generate this kind of right now whether this is a right that's ever enforced in court or recognized in international law, I'm not sure. But it becomes a political argument and one can make a claim about justice.

[00:16:10.14] 

That doesn't necessarily mean you're going to win a case at the ICJ, the International Court of Justice, but rather you're going to win an argument among states that this really is a, you know, a state of affairs, that that notions of justice require remediation for.

[00:16:27.21] 

I guess I'm also curious, kind of operationally and programmatically you have in the past also called for some type of multi stakeholder platform to bring together national international efforts, focus on climate related migration and displacement. I mean, why is that needed? What would that look like? And is how is that meaningfully different from things like the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or kind of these other big climate change forums?

[00:16:53.20] 

Yeah, so the IPCC is obviously it's a set of experts telling you what the, you know, or the COP processes, I guess, or the, the Paris Accords has a set of, of non binding agreements. There's no operational arm for that. There are lots of projects, there's funding around the world, millions and millions of dollars that go towards adaptation, resilience, other kinds of programs to try to help people deal with the effects of climate change. The money is inadequate, but there are fits and starts moving in that direction. What I proposed, and this is working with Susan Martin is as you said, a multi stakeholder group that really would be an action oriented international association, not a new UN agency, but something that might look like UNAIDS or might look like the platform on disaster displacement. There are other analogies in the international world where you'd get together states, NGOs, international organizations, maybe some private sector folks as well as who would identify, you know, a range of interventions and support interventions around the world where maybe states would be coming up with plans for their state and request funds and support, technical support and financial support to do what they need to do to help out.

[00:18:17.16] 

But I think there needs to be a concerted, there needs to be a Place in the international community where climate, the effects of climate change on migration are thought about from prevention to solution, all the way through. How do you help people stay home? How do you help them if they're moving, if they've been forced to move, how do you take care of them? And how do you get them to safety, long term safety? Right now that's divided up into a lot of different pieces and different organizations. And the argument that Susan Martin and I make is it would be best to be in one place where it could be considered holistically and then supportive of local and regional efforts.

[00:18:59.14] 

We're kind of coming towards the end of our time, but I want to take a step back. I mean, I think it's fair to say that you're considered something of an elder statesman of refugee immigration law. You've been working in this field for more than what, 40 years, I think. Right. Which I believe is slightly more than half of the lifetime of the kind of post World War II International Protection System. You've had a front row seat to a lot of it over during several periods of taxation, post, you know, USSR breakup, kind of the recent uptick in international displacement worldwide. When you look back over the course of your career and onto the future, how optimistic are you about new proposals like, like the one that you're giving now and just generally the willingness and flexibility of the international system to accommodate changes in how they arise to increase and safeguard people's rights? Looking forward, I mean, are you optimistic, are you hopeful that the system is strong and resilient and flexible enough? Or, or has there been of a bit, been a bit of a stasis in a discouraging way?

[00:20:08.15] 

Well, more than stasis, really, about moving backwards. We're in a very tough time in terms of refugee protection and protection for displaced people around the world. The people are tightening their borders and throwing up barriers and pushing asylum seekers away. We see this across the Global North. There is a fair amount of movement still among Global south states where borders have largely remained open. But then inadequate financial support to those kinds of movements and the refugee system itself is broken. And so when you talk about now adding a whole new concept of helping people forced by, by climate change, which is hundreds of millions of people, you know, why on earth would someone propose doing that on top of a system that already is not doing its job in terms of protecting the people it was established to protect? I'm not hopeful or unhopeful. I'm just, It's. No, what I mean is that this just requires continued human action and advocacy. And I hope that by putting this in terms of a right to displacement, it opens up new ways of thinking about this that might get people interested in terms of advocacy. And as I say, it injects the notion of justice and accountability into the forced displacement area, which has not been there.

[00:21:33.14] 

We don't hold, as I've said, we don't hold people accountable if they've forced others to flee. We talk about helping accounts. In an odd way, what the Refugee Convention does is it lets refugees enforce rights against the states that rescued them, not against the states that forced them out. And once you push back to a right not to be displaced, you're beginning to talk about remedies against the people who are forcing you out. And then it becomes a political fight, like every other fight for a international conventions. And it's going to be a long, tough fight. But I'm trying to provide a conceptual reconceptualization that can assist in a political movement.

[00:22:18.13] 

We should probably wrap things up there, but that's a nice way to close. This was super interesting. Alex, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure.

[00:22:27.14] 

My pleasure. Take care.

[00:22:29.08] 

Alex Aleinikoff is the Executive Dean of the New School for Social Research in New York. He's also a university professor at the New School and since 2017 has been the Director of its Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility. He's a non resident fellow here at MPI as well as a former UN Deputy High Commissioner for Refugees. And he is the co editor of the brand new book "New Narratives on the Peopling of America: Immigration, Race, and Dispossession", which is available now. Wherever you get your books, thanks as always for tuning in to Changing Climate, Changing Migration. Stay on top of all of our new episodes by subscribing to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever it is you get your podcasts. And if you liked what you heard, please leave us a review that makes it easier for other listeners to find us too. Check out our archives online at migrationpolicy.org/podcasts. If you're looking for a place to start, I suggest our Climate Migration 101 explainer, which runs through some major questions about how climate change is impacting migration. Or you might be interested in my episode with legal scholar Alma Francis, who imagined what new legal protections for climate displaced individuals might look like.

[00:23:40.11] 

Or listen to a discussion about the notion of loss and damage with Adelle Thomas. The Migration Information Source magazine also has a special collection of articles about what climate change means for migration. You can find those online at migrationpolicy.org/climate. Daniella Espacio produced this episode of the podcast with editorial oversight from Michelle Mittelstadt and programming assistance from Lisa Dixon. Our theme music is Touch by Patrick Patrikios. My name is Julian Hattem. Thank you again for listening.