Most importantly, the climate emergency is “without borders.” It will dramatically reshape life on earth, even impacting nations and individuals whose affluence will allow them to escape the deadliest effects.

Current Global Displacement

Global displacement is at record levels. The political and economic crisis in Venezuela is so severe that “Venezuelans displaced abroad” is now its own category describing 3.9 million people. Children disproportionately represent 42% of globally displaced people and only 30% of the world’s population. Nearly half of all 20.7 million refugees are children under the age of 18.

It’s clear that forced displacement drastically increased over the past decade, with no signs of slowing down. The climate crisis is also accelerating. Yet, “climate refugees” and “environmental migration” are largely absent from UNHCR’s conceptualization of forced displacement.

Environmental Migration

According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), environmental migrants are people forced to move due to sudden or progressive changes to their environment. However, “environmental migrant” and “climate refugee” are conceptual terms. There’s no legal definition or binding agreement to incorporate these migrants into international policy.

Who Counts?

Imagine one farmer forced to leave her country because of worsening drought. Another flees severe flooding. Both are relatively common natural disasters, yet one is prolonged while the other is sudden. Extreme weather events will become more frequent as the climate crisis progresses. Would both people count as environmental migrants? In a future rife with disasters, how will we differentiate what’s “natural” and what’s “extreme”?

Determining the root cause of migration has huge consequences for migrants’ rights and legal protections. War, persecution, or other violence forced many of today’s displaced people to move. Future conflicts over increasingly strained or scarce resources will further blur the distinction between “political” and “climatic.”

NPR reports that the climate crisis is most likely to cause internal displacement, forcing people to relocate within their home countries. If so, the ranks of Internally Displaced People (IDP) could balloon. Alternatively, the same people already experiencing displacement could be forced to move again and again.

The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) states:

The Defining Crisis Of Our Time

The UNHCR calls the climate emergency “the defining crisis of our time,” but there are few solutions in sight. In 2018, the UN General Assembly’s Global Compact on Refugees recognized the “reality of increasing displacement in the context of disasters, environmental degradation and climate change” while denying that these drivers are “root causes” of refugee movement. IOM’s Data Migration Portal confirms that it’s challenging to differentiate migration-triggering environmental factors from political, economic, or personal factors, because they’re so closely linked to one another:

In other words, it’s hard to come by quantitative data and qualitative data is considered insufficient.

Why We Need Climate Stories

CWB frequently works with communities experiencing climate-related crisis. In The Bahamas, Haitian migrant workers who had just survived Hurricane Dorian were at risk for deportation. Parts of Puerto Rico’s infrastructure remained abandoned or broken a year after Hurricane Maria—a year in which thousands of Puerto Ricans moved to the mainland United States. Indigenous Guaraní people in Brazil routinely defend their land against agribusiness tactics of clear-cutting—a practice that, when combined with rising global temperatures, may contribute to massive fires.

Is CWB – USA here to solve the climate crisis? No, of course not. However, CWB’s restorative-narrative approach recognizes the complexity of agency and self-determination within vulnerable communities. We regularly adjust our programming in response to stories from the field. Qualitative data drives our decision-making. Listening to environmental migrants can be a proactive force to change our collective fate, re-conceptualizing climate action from “aid offered to the powerless” to “action taken by the resilient.”

It’s important to remember that global crises of inequity continue, and worsen, amid the pandemic. Clowns Without Borders International wrote in its statement regarding the human rights catastrophe along EU borders:

“As COVID-19 sweeps the globe, all of us are in search of safety for ourselves and our loved ones. Meanwhile, on the borders of Europe, many people are also in desperate need of safety from war and persecution. How much more difficult is their plight now, in the face of the current global pandemic?”

This statement applies to migrant and refugee crises around the world, not just at the EU border. Displaced people often lack access to basic material resources, face discrimination, and are denied human rights, like clean water, health care, or the ability to travel. How is the COVID-19 pandemic affecting some of the most vulnerable people on the planet?

Exposing Weaknesses

According to the UNHCR, over eighty percent of the world’s refugees and almost all internally displaced people (IDP) are hosted in low- or middle-income countries where resources are scarce. If it wasn’t already clear, this pandemic reveals our global community to be as healthy as the sickest person among us and as safe as the most vulnerable. Refugees and migrants often live in crowded conditions where social distancing is impossible, and medical facilities are ill-equipped. The UNHCR has rushed to provide emergency medical equipment and expertise, but it’s a bandaid for a larger wound.

Prevention and Inclusion

The majority of refugees are hosted in countries with weak or inadequate health systems. Stopping the spread of COVID-19 is imperative, and it becomes even more so when few treatment options exist. The UNHCR is using a multisectoral response, which coordinates access to water, sanitation and hygiene, housing, medical care, and more, to support refugee communities and refugee-hosting nations. The agency is also working to stockpile supplies, identify outbreak response teams, and monitor misinformation.

Displaced people experience discrimination and xenophobia, and may even be denied a nationality. Now, fear, a sense of helplessness, and media rhetoric may impact pubic opinion about who “deserves” access to medical care. A coordinated COVID-19 response will not leave anyone behind, no matter their legal status or nationality. A highly contagious disease can only be controlled if everyone is included in prevention and education, and everyone has access to equitable treatment.

Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, write:

“Panic and discrimination never solved a crisis. Political leaders must take the lead, earning trust through transparent and timely information, working together for the common good, and empowering people to participate in protecting health.

Ceding space to rumour, fear mongering and hysteria will not only hamper the response but may have broader implications for human rights, the functioning of accountable, democratic institutions.”

Unity

Whether a someone is confined to a camp or fully integrated into a new community—or something in between—refugees and displaced people are vital members of society. They are teachers, farmers, care-givers, artists, engineers and more, and they are working tirelessly to subdue the COVID-19 pandemic:

• The UNHCR has maintained a list of positive stories, highlighting the ways displaced people and their supporters have come together during this crisis.
• Refugees in the medical field are pushing through fear to serve their home and neighbors.
• Even when resources are scarce, members of refugee camps find ways to care for one another.

The UNHCR released 2018’s total number of forcibly displaced people and the results were sobering and staggering: at least 70.8 million people displaced. Out of that total number, 41.3 million are IDPs or Internally Displaced People.

Internally displaced people are those who flee violence, conflict, natural disaster or human rights violations, like other displaced people. But IDPs remain within their national boundaries, often beyond the reach of aid or other resources. CWB – USA frequently performs for IDPs, whether they are affected by political conflict, natural disaster, or both.

Indigenous people, who have survived centuries of colonialism, are particularly vulnerable. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People states that indigenous people may not be relocated without their free, prior, and informed consent. However, the UNHCR definition of IDPs does not automatically include indigenous people, most of whom have been actively displaced off of their ancestral lands.

For many indigenous people, connection to land is more than a matter of livelihood—it holds essential cultural and spiritual meaning, as well. The struggle toward indigenous self-determination is a struggle against internal displacement perpetuated by colonialism. It’s also a struggle on the front lines of the climate crisis.

Two and a half billion people rely on indigenous or communally-held lands for their livelihood, amounting to approximately 50 percent of land on earth. Yet these people legally own only one-fifth of communal and/or indigenous land. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change weighed in, with a report supporting land-tenure security for indigenous and commonly-held lands because they are a significant carbon sink, less likely to be deforested, and more.

In August, 2019, internal displacement and indigenous self-determination took center stage in Brazil and Mexico. The Zapatista community in Chiapas announced a major expansion of their autonomous territories. CWB – USA has a long and warm history with the Zapatistas, starting in the mid-1990s when the communities were engaged in armed struggle against the Mexican government. Simultaneously, the world looked on in horror as parts of the Amazon rainforest burned. Fires have increased 83 percent since last year, and are likely started by farmers and ranchers looking to clear land. Though the fires will certainly cause an unimaginable loss of rainforest biodiversity, they also destroy the homes of indigenous communities dedicated to defending and cultivating their land.

CWB looks forward to working with the resilient Guaraní people and learning more about their ongoing fight for self-determination.