WASHINGTON, DC — The worsening effects of climate change are increasingly forcing people to move. While most climate displacement to date has been internal, as more people begin to cross borders, policymakers in destination countries will face the difficult task of managing borders and migration while being sensitive to arriving migrants’ emergency assistance and international protection needs. With climate displacement largely outside the scope of an international protection system devised after World War II, a new Migration Policy Institute (MPI) issue brief suggests policymakers should tap a wider set of tools to respond effectively to environmentally induced cross-border movements. The brief, Displacement and International Protection in a Warming World, investigates the role of the international protection system as well as other policy responses that could provide alternatives to irregular migration and relieve pressure on asylum systems while ensuring safe climate mobility. It assesses four climate-related mobility scenarios that pose different protection concerns and therefore require different policy responses: Refugees who move in the context of climate change, cross-border disaster displacement, long-term uninhabitability and movement indirectly triggered by climate change. Analysts Samuel Davidoff-Gore and Lawrence Huang makes the case for a diversified toolbox of responses that countries can use to address climate displacement in different contexts, including: - Facilitating safe, orderly entry for climate- and disaster-displaced individuals by streamlining entry procedures, expediting visa processing and issuing humanitarian visas.
- Providing flexible forms of legal status, including temporary ones, as many displaced individuals do not qualify for asylum.
- Strengthening access to existing work, study or family reunification pathways, as well as creating bespoke climate mobility or disaster displacement visa pathways now, before they become a necessity.
Even as they explore other policy options, policymakers should also ensure that climate-displaced people who qualify for international protection are able to obtain it. Yet, the authors acknowledge: “Ultimately, most forms of climate mobility may not pose international protection concerns, and there is a real risk that calls to broaden the refugee protection regime to cover climate-related drivers of movement could backfire and instead shrink the protection space. There is thus a need for more clear-eyed pragmatism in the policy discourse on climate displacement that acknowledges that different scenarios of climate displacement will require different, sometimes narrower, policy responses.” This brief is the third in a series of four briefs being published in a research series on climate migration supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. The first two focus on factors that trigger anxiety or support for climate migrants and the role of immigrant workers to aid in the green transition. The final publication, being issued next week, will address the links between climate migration and development. To read the international protection brief, visit: www.migrationpolicy.org/research/displacement-protection-warming-world. Check out MPI’s highly rated podcast, Changing Climate, Changing Migration, for smart discussions on the nexus between climate change and migration. To access all of MPI’s work on climate change, visit: www.migrationpolicy.org/topics/climate-change. |
