THE CLIMATE REFUGEE

The climate refugee is an enormously controversial and disruptive figure, in both the political and theoretical landscapes. I have attended conferences where international legal scholars sigh and leave the room if anyone even mentions them, muttering that ‘there is no such thing’. At the political level the numbers of people displaced by climate events now and in the future are so large that it is recognised as one of the major challenges facing the international community, but there is little agreement about how to respond to it. Proposals include reform of the 1951 Refugee Convention to cover climate-displaced people, or that there should be a distinct legal category of the climate refugee separate from the Convention. Others have argued that both of these moves would be a mistake because nation states will not accept new legal obligations, especially if the predictions of how many people would qualify for them are right, and that the way forward is through ‘soft law’ strategies which rely on the good will of those states. I discuss these debates in some detail in this chapter.

But the main aim here is to show how the issue of climate displacement disrupts the theoretical landscape, as it raises the boundary problem in a very vivid way. The question is whether international protection should be extended to include those displaced by climate change related events. However, if we do this, we draw a limit which leaves people outside the scope of that protection who seem to be in much the same position as those who would receive it. If we say that those displaced across international borders because of climate change related events should be protected, we are excluding those displaced because of the same events who do not cross an international border. And if we say protection here is limited to those displaced by disasters that are clearly related to climate change, we are saying that those displaced by disasters that are not clearly related to climate change are not protected, when they are in exactly the same condition. Climate displacement, then, is an urgent issue that needs to be addressed in normative Political Theory, but addressing it illustrates the need to take a different approach to the ethics of forced displacement.