Casenote and Comment: Looking Inward: Domestic policy for climate change refugees in the United States and beyond

Carey DeGenaro

Climate change is predicted to have adverse impacts especially on Pacific small island states whose inhabitants are currently living with the imminent threat of sea level rise. This is the reality for the Marshall Islands where many of the residents have chosen to move to neighboring Hawaii or California in the United States as freshwater is becoming scarce and a decline in fish stocks make it difficult to maintain a sustainable livelihood. Climate change will also affect non-island nations like Mexico, where low crop yields induced by severe drought force farmers to relocate. Another example is the indigenous and First Nations Canadian population that, due to a decline and thinning sea ice, face problems of unsafe ice which in turn reduces their access to various marine food sources. As such, climate change creates a serious threat to human health and the survival of some of the most vulnerable populations, whose futures lie in relocation and resettlement. The United States, as many other developed countries, lacks a clear definition and recognition of the term ‘climate change refugees’ in the political agenda. Consequently, leaving the migrants from the Marshall Islands, Canada and Mexico with an ‘undocumented status’, meaning that they don’t have the same legal protection as an American citizen or other kinds of refugees and migrants. The author highlights the various problems that the concept of ‘climate refugees’ causes and the uncertainty it brings to the refugee policy of the host country.

Image credit: Mike Beauregard (CC BY 2.0). Flickr.com

Chanelle Andrén is a volunteer UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition and writes the weekly round up of new research on climate change, migration and displacement. Her background is in International Human Rights Law with specialisation in ‘Just Transitions’.