Call for planning to deal with Pacific "climate refugees"

A conference in Sydney is to call on Australia to set up a program to provide sanctuary for so called "climate refugees" from the Pacific.

New Zealand already has a permanent program allowing Pacific Islanders access to their migration program.

Presenter:Geraldine Coutts
Speaker:Professor Jane McAdam, Law faculty, University of New South Wales.

MCADAM: Refugee law that isn't an easy fix because it requires people to be persecuted normally by a government or a group of people that the government can't protect them from, and has to be persecution because of your race, religion, nationality, political opinion or your membership of a particular social group. Now obviously while the impacts of climate change can be very, very harmful, that doesn't amount to what's understood as persecution in international law, much less so for those reasons that I've mentioned before.

COUTTS: Alright well what needs to be done now and who needs to do it to make sure that there is that climate change refugee, well firstly before we get to that, do we need a category for climate refugees?

MCADAM: Well an intuitive response would seem to be yes, but when we look at the empirical evidence it's actually a lot more complicated than that because climate change impacts on their own, by that I mean things like floods or cyclones, rising sea levels and those sort of things, on their own they are never likely to force displacement. What they will do though is compound underlying pressures that people are facing, for example in small island countries such as things like general environmental vulnerability, over crowding, population pressure, lack of employment opportunities, lack of drinking water, and those sorts of things such that together might those things may make life intolerable. Now the problem is it's a matter of law; how do you encapsulate that complex causality in a definition and moreover is it appropriate to wait until people are really forced out of their homes to claim protection, which is pretty much how refugee law works, or should we be thinking of more pre-emptive proactive solutions that enable people to move perhaps now, even though they can still live in their homes. It allows them a way out, it allows them time to plan, and it also is potentially more beneficial for the countries that they come to because those countries can also plan for their reception, for their resettlement, and there can be a slower transition period. And the irony of course is that if there is some sort of migration relief put in place, that actually may enable a smaller population to live in countries like Tuvalu and Kiribati for a lot longer than if such a migration program didn't exist.

COUTTS: Could it be streamlined though, New Zealand for instance has a permanent program allowing Pacific Islanders access to their migration program, wouldn't it be up to New Zealand just to assess as you would an asylum seeker and streamline it that way rather than creating a whole new category?

MCADAM: Yeah and I mean I'm against creating a particular category based on climate change for those causal reasons I mentioned before, but also the conceptual ones. I think when you're looking at countries like Tuvalu and Kiribati where it's fairly clear that over the next, again timeframes aren't so clear, but over the next ten, twenty, fifty years we know that storms we're seeing now are likely to be further compounded, and Tuvalu declared a state of emergency recently because they'd run out of fresh water. Now whether or not you have to then go individually that you're more at risk than somebody else in your community, I don't know if that's the right way about it, rather than saying we know these countries are at risk, that there are some people who would like to move now, there are certainly some people who don't want to move, and how about perhaps we'd increase the numbers that we'll take each year through the Pacific access category, that is the case in New Zealand. And in the case of Australia perhaps think about putting in place something similar. The Australian government's view though is that it has a non-discriminatory immigration policy, which means that it won't discriminate against nor will it create special categories for nationals of a particular country. And I think if we take a more regional approach that's something I think we do need to look at as one of the better resourced countries in the region, certainly one of the countries to which Pacific Islanders are looking as a potential saviour.

COUTTS: Now Professor McAdam the international climate conference in the Asia Pacific region is looking at how to help climate refugees. Is there consensus among the legal fraternity as to what the best approach would be?

MCADAM: Well I should firstly say the conference isn't only looking at legal scholarship on this, it's a very broad multi-disciplinary conference, and that's very important because no single discipline does have the answers here. And I think lawyers need to listen to geographers, to psychologists, to historians and everybody who's working in this field to really build up a more nuanced understanding of what is the problem being experienced on the ground, and how might international legal frameworks respond. Now there isn't, I mean there are certainly different camps here in terms of some people saying we need a new climate refugee treaty, others saying we need to think about multiple strategies. My view is that we do need to be thinking on different levels or different lawyers, the different kinds of responses, also might be an appropriate response in the Pacific may not be an appropriate response in Bangladesh for example. And we know that internationally people who are likely to move because of climate impacts on the whole will move within their own country. Now in the Pacific Islands people might move from outer islands to the main atoll initially, but then we will probably need to look at international movements subsequently. Whereas in a place like Bangladesh, people are likely to move within Bangladesh but very few are going to have the resources or capacity to move outside of that countries. And so again, talking about a new treaty is perhaps a misplaced argument in many contexts because people aren't going to cross international borders. And my argument would be in the Pacific region if you think just pragmatically of trying to get states to agree to a brand new international treaty, that takes a huge amount of political will and it's a very, very slow process and one that ends up with compromised positions. And given the numbers of people we're talking about in this region, I think a far more appropriate and certainly more doable response would be to look at perhaps a new form of migration/humanitarian type program. I mean if you simply look at the numbers, the combined population of Tuvalu and Kiribati is less than Australia's annual immigration intake.

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