Toward a Justice Framework for Understanding and Responding to Climate Migration and Displacement

Climate injustices

A framing centered on climate migrants or refugees as wronged parties requires an understanding of the nature of climate injustices for which they are owed redress. The key starting point is to recognize that parties (usually defined as nation-states) have made unequal historical contributions to the climate crisis. ⁴ This creates a different sort of moral problem than if the environmental changes pressuring or forcing migration were nonanthropogenic (i.e., random natural disasters or acts of God) or if all parties were equally responsible for climate change. In the latter, hypothetical cases, just responses need only be concerned with how actors share the responsibilities of assisting migrants and to what degree they take on these duties in accordance with the capacity to take them on. However, in the real world where climate change is disproportionately driven by some actors, just solutions must also be concerned with duties resulting from the wrongs those actors have committed by driving climate change. With this in mind, migration pressures should be seen as impositions that high polluters are responsible for having placed on others and for which they owe redress. These impositions take several forms.

(A) Imposed risks to human rights. We can anticipate that several factors will affect the nature of environmental migration experiences and outcomes: the duration, speed, and severity of environmental change; the resources (financial, human, political, natural, etc.) available to communities and individuals for use in adaptation and migration; the safety of the route and mode of migration (i.e., migrants' ability to avoid passing through dangerous areas or rely on trafficking); the duration of the migration (permanent, temporary, seasonal); and the conditions at migration destinations (availability of shelter and employment; vulnerability to new environmental risks). Income, gender, ethnicity/indigeneity, able-bodiedness, and other potentially intersecting dimensions of identity can combine in complex ways with these factors to threaten migrants' access to sustenance, education, shelter, citizenship, employment or livelihood, property, and other basic human rights. Again, these complex interactions and effects that create risks to human rights are not without causal agents and instead arise from environmental change imposed by others.

(B) Imposed exposure to cultural loss or extinction. A wrong that is prominently raised by media and climate activists is the risk of extinction climate change presents to unique cultures and nations as lands become uninhabitable, particularly those of small-island low-lying states most vulnerable to sea-level rise such as the Marshall Islands, the Maldives, Tuvalu, and Kiribati. Fundamental human rights could conceivably be protected in the response to climate migration and displacement, but under contexts where cultural continuity or propagation is made difficult, thus distinguishing this injustice from the previous. To be sure, and as Being(s) Framed warns, viewing environmental migration with heavy emphasis on existential threats carries the risk of mischaracterizing people as lacking the agency to prevent the need to relocate or to preserve their cultures following relocation, so a justice frame should therefore avoid overestimating its likelihood or presenting it as a foregone conclusion. Nevertheless, wherever it occurs, relocation away from immovable cultural artifacts, ancestral burial grounds, sacred lands, and landmarks, etc., would constitute a loss and so a wrong imposed by heavy polluters.

(C) Imposed adaptation burdens. A related wrong, but one that does not risk downplaying agency, is that parties have had pressures to make adaptation decisions—including migration—imposed on them. Here, it is not that individuals or communities necessarily see their human rights violated, nor that their culture is somehow doomed, but that they have had the burden of preserving their well-being, human rights, or culture imposed upon them through no fault of their own. Edwards has applied the Impoverishment, Risks, and Relocation model to the case of climate-related relocation from the Carteret Islands, offering a sense of the burdens communities will take on as they find ways of addressing the following dangers potentially arising in the process of relocation: landlessness, joblessness, homelessness, social marginalization, food insecurity, loss of common lands and resources, increased health risks, and social disarticulation. ⁵

In addition to burdens or impositions from emissions, climate justice should also recognize how the political and economic context in which many people make climate migration decisions arose, which raises another wrong to be redressed: (D) Legacies of historical injustices that constrain climate adaptation. The nature of the wrong here is that the ability of some actors to adapt to climate change is low due to historical legacies of injustice, which would include those of colonial policy (economic underdevelopment, weak governance structures, arbitrary borders, poor infrastructure), Cold War politics (e.g., destabilizing and/or deposing democratically elected regimes, proxy wars, small arms proliferation), and neoliberal structural adjustment programs (defunding of the public sector, structurally disadvantageous trade agreements that lock in underdevelopment). ⁶ A justice framing would insist that these be included among wrongs to be redressed.

Distinguishing climate justice from other migrant framings

There are policy prescriptions under some of the other four framings that might appear at first glance to take justice into consideration, but a true climate justice framing would see in a slightly different light. For one, and as noted above, climate justice is concerned with human rights in the context of environmental migration or displacement. Some of the more prominent policy solutions under frame 1 (environmental migrants as victims) look to protect human rights. ⁷ However, a justice framing draws attention to a potential shortcoming to rights protection approaches: they can easily be designed without demanding duties of those primarily responsible for causing the crisis that created the need for rights protection in the first place. It has long been anticipated that rich states would resist recognizing and redressing their responsibility for contributing to climate change and migration, and rights protection responses likely take this into consideration by avoiding talk of reparation. ⁸ However, a justice framing would insist that this situation calls for contestation rather than accommodation.

Being(s) Framed does note that frame 1 can include suggestions about compensating migrants for losses and this comes closer to the sense of climate justice I have in mind. However, it is wary of them, noting that one of the uses frame 1 has served is to advance a compensation approach loosely relying on a victim/perpetrator dichotomy familiar from tort law. This dichotomy tends to create an impression that external humanitarian, legal, and even financial assistance is required, which deemphasizes migrants' agency and capacity for in situ adaptation. ⁹ This is a valid critique to be sure, but a justice frame could seek to ensure that compensation approaches would not trigger the victim/perpetrator dichotomy. It would avoid talking about victims whom the north should help, but instead use terms and imagery that evoke wronged or owed parties. Doing so would recast the relationship with the north so that the latter is not understood as a savior. Those parties most responsible for climate change and failing to contribute to realizing migration policy should be recast as withholders, parties who are negligent or in dereliction of duties, instead of parties who may help or disburse assistance to others out of some sense of goodwill.

Similarly, a justice framing would embrace frame 4's concern with the agency of those facing migration pressures. Certainly, it would be unjust to construct response policies (1) without the democratic participation of the very communities whose decisions about migration are most affected by climate change or (2) under the assumption that those communities cannot influence the trends that will lead to climate change's most acute effects. However, the problem here is similar to the problem in frame 1: acknowledging agency and subjectivity is a necessary, but incomplete, part of climate justice. This is because climate justice would insist that people should not be put in a position of having to adapt without fully receiving what is owed to them. Seeing the matter in these terms casts in a different light those (primarily) self-financed measures such as Kiribati's purchase of land in Fiji to move its population to or the Carteret Islands-based NGO Tulele Peisa's program to relocate people to Bougainville. ¹⁰ Measures under which wronged parties must pay to adapt to a situation they did not cause may very well assert agency, but would not be characterized by climate justice.

Raising the profile of climate justice

There are some proposed responses to climate migration that fall within the frame I am proposing. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), for example, argues that Canada should repay its climate debt by creating a new immigration status category of climate migrants, taking in its fair share of them, and increasing financial support for the climate migration that will take place in the global South. Penz, to take another example, has suggested an innovative compensation arrangement modeled on workplace social insurance schemes, with each state made to pay premiums on the basis of their responsibility for greenhouse gas emissions. The payouts could be put toward climate adaptation, including migration assistance for both migrants themselves and their communities. ¹¹

However, proposals like these have apparently not been prominent or numerous enough to register in the typology of Being(s) Framed. Raising the prominence of a justice framework will require more proposals along these lines that give clear roles to states in establishing policies or legitimizing and funding institutional arrangements in recognition of the debt they owe to people displaced by climate change for the injustices described above, a matter that deserves its own article. Rather than take that on here, I conclude this section by briefly highlighting a parallel effort that will need to occur for just solutions to become feasible in the present political context. Duties of climate justice will need to extend beyond state policymakers to the actors who have the ability to influence those policymakers: civil society, in particular the northern climate justice movement.

A justice approach would mobilize civil society in the north in several ways. Its main contribution would be to pressure northern states to adopt policies such as those of Penz and the CCPA that recognize climate debts owed to people impelled or forced to migrate due to climate change. If taking in migrants and refugees is to become part of climate reparations, the climate justice movement will also need to contest the xenophobic nativism of the kind that has increased alongside the refugee crisis in Europe sparked by the Syrian civil war (which some have linked to climate change ¹² ) and in the United States, which became especially pronounced with the 2016 Presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Similarly, the movement will need to challenge policies or practices subjecting migrants to aggressive deportation or treating them (as in frame 2) as security threats; the brutal conditions in Australia's Nauru and Manus Island migrant detention camps suggest how Northern states might respond to large influxes of climate migrants from the South attempting to cross borders using paralegal channels. ¹³ Finally, the prospect of the moral wrongs that can occur as part of climate impelled migration must continue to alert civil society to the need to press governments to pursue much more aggressive emission reduction goals and policies. The presence of migrant justice organization, No One is Illegal, at recent climate marches shows an already existing recognition of linkages between migrant issues and climate justice among civil society actors that ought to continue to be built upon.