Review of John R. Wennersten and Denise Robbins's Rising Tides: Climate Refugees in the Twenty-First Century

Human-driven climate change is ushering in an era of both environmental and political uncertainty. The litany of deleterious impacts includes more frequent and severe heat waves and droughts, intensifying storms, rising sea levels, and increasing water deficits and food insecurity. The international climate justice movement, however, is bringing needed attention to the inequity inherent in these impacts. The world's most vulnerable populations, who have often contributed the least to global warming, are likely to suffer the most from its negative consequences.

In Rising Tides: Climate Refugees in the Twenty-First Century, John Wennersten and Denise Robbins address how various planetary alterations are fueling the under-reported humanitarian crisis of climate refugees—people impelled to move from their homes, communities, and, in many cases, countries because of environmental deterioration. Climate migrants and refugees have not been widely recognized as such, in part because their dislocations tend to be propelled by an intersection of factors, not all of which are solely environmental. Wennersten and Robbins seek to increase awareness and understanding of this dire situation and to underscore the world's “moral duty to protect those who are forced to flee, whether by war, famine, or climate change” (p. ix). As they astutely observe, “economics, politics, culture, and climate intertwine like some sociological double helix. What refugees have in common … is that they are suffering, and often they are impoverished by the environmental degradation of their homeland” (p. 10). By compounding the effects of violence, war, hunger, and disease, climate change acts as a threat multiplier, one that exacerbates imposed migrations.

Rising Tides offers a useful primer on climate refugees. Wennersten and Robbins adopt an international perspective, illuminating how the negative repercussions of global warming have played out around the world, and how they are apt to play out in the future, especially in locations where adaptation ultimately demands relocation. Their clear-eyed account sets up such fundamental questions as: “How will people be relocated and settled? Is it possible to offer environmental refugees temporary asylum? Will these refugees have any collective rights in the new areas they inhabit? And … who will pay the costs of all the affected countries during the process of resettlement?” (p. 41).

Communities exposed to the gradual destruction accompanying sea-level rise and coastal erosion face two potential threats: the possibility that displacement will become unavoidable and the likelihood that they will be unable to bear the financial costs of transplantation. Few countries have enacted laws and policies capable of tackling the traumatic consequences of global environmental change. In the United States, for example, the Federal Emergency Management Agency “does not make funds available until a state of emergency is declared” (p. 80). The incremental degradation associated with climate change rarely meets this criterion, however, which makes obtaining federal assistance extremely difficult. International environmental (and refugee) laws are similarly insufficient to address the needs of climate migrants, whose numbers may soon climb into the millions. Since World War II, refugees have gained critical rights, yet the political and legal definitions of ‘refugee’ are typically linked to persecution, not threats from global warming. Revising international law in the wake of intensifying global environmental change thus stands as a priority for social justice advocates.

Because climate change is a gradual process, it has failed to capture the proportional political response necessary for effective mitigation and adaptation. By drawing attention to the oft-neglected connections between refugees and global warming, Wennersten and Robbins issue a call for more prompt and necessary action. Their book joins the growing body of literature emphasizing the moral and social dimensions of climate change.