The coming plight of climate refugees

By Cath News on June 7, 2010
© Cath News

The international tug-of-war over carbon emission thresholds and other instruments meant to limit the climate effects of greenhouse gases has generated a lot of talk - and some reluctant commitments.

But one pressing item related to climate change has so far escaped serious discussion among international policymakers: how to respond to potential waves of “climate refugees,” people forced from their homes because of climate change.

If even moderate effects from climate change occur as predicted, millions of people will be uprooted in the near future by rising sea levels, extreme weather events, droughts and water scarcity.

When it comes to climate-change migration “everybody jumps on the bandwagon and waves their own agenda,” said Professor Frank Biermann, an expert in global environmental governance, in a keynote presentation at a recent conference on the issue in Geneva, Switzerland.

The event was sponsored jointly by the World Council of Churches, Bread for the World and the Pacific Conference of Churches. Even environmentalists, Biermann said, are guilty of dramatizing the plight of Pacific islands likely to be submerged by the end of the century without proposing a practical response.

To them Tuvalu, a threatened Pacific island state, is just a canary in a coal mine, Biermann charged.

“In order to put the rights of these vulnerable populations on the agenda of the international community, we must build bridges between academia, civil society organizations, governments and churches working on the issue of climate change,” said Guillermo Kerber, a World Council of Churches program executive on climate change.