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climate refugees
Evacuation Must Start Now as Climate-Driven Rising Gulf Slowly Drowns New Orleans: Study
"Coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return," says new research.
May 04, 2026
A study published Monday warns that New Orleans must immediately begin planning and gradually implementing its permanent evacuation to avert a dangerously rushed exodus later, because it has passed a "point of no return" as climate-driven sea-level rise slowly swallows the storied city.
"With global temperatures poised to exceed the 1.5°C Paris Agreement threshold—a level that triggered substantial ice sheet collapse during the Last Interglacial—low-elevation coastal zones face sea-level commitments far beyond current planning horizons," says the study, which was published by the journal Nature Sustainability.
"With this geological frame of reference, we examine the impact of sea-level rise on what may be the most physically vulnerable coastal zone in the world using prehistoric and contemporary patterns of human mobility," the publication continues. "We highlight the positive aspects of the recently commenced out-migration in this region and argue that the fate of communities landwards of this coastal zone will be decided in the next few decades."
"While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,” the paper adds.
That's because rising waters are slowly eroding Louisiana's coast, including New Orleans, which “may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century," according to the study's authors.
“Louisiana is a canary in the coal mine. It is one of the rare places where we’re already clearly seeing climate-motivated depopulation combined with other social and economic factors,” said Yale School of the Environment professor and study co-author Brianna Castro.
The authors argued that by acknowledging the inevitability of New Orleans' underwater future, government and residents can avert a fraught rushed retreat by planning and executing a managed multigenerational relocation and set an example for other threatened coastal communities.
According to one widely cited study published a decade ago, around 13 million Americans living in coastal areas could be forced to relocate to higher ground by the end of the century due climate-driven sea-level rise, with the Gulf Coast and Florida expected lose the most livable land. Globally, hundreds of millions of people are expected to be displaced by 2100 due to rising seas.
After Hurricane Katrina—which inundated the city and killed nearly 1,000 people in the New Orleans metro area—billions of dollars were spent fortifying the city's levee system, which failed catastrophically during the 2005 storm. However, experts warn that in the long term, levees won't be able to stop the rising waters any longer.
That's why the study's authors said officials must begin the city's orderly depopulation as soon as possible.
"What kind of retreat do you want?" asked Castro. "Do you want to incentivize it and then people go naturally for jobs, housing, and lifestyle amenities—or do you want people to wait and then have to leave abruptly in crisis?”
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What Can We Do for the 250 Million and Counting Displaced by the Environmental Crisis?
We must demand a new comprehensive legal framework for climate refugees to safeguard vulnerable populations and protect those who may be at risk in the future.
Jan 17, 2026
The consequences of our planet's changing climate extend far beyond warming temperatures, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events. Human displacement as a result of the climate crisis is now one of the world's most pressing issues, as estimates predict that there could be more than 1 billion climate refugees by 2050.
The plight of these people is neglected and forgotten as they remain unprotected by the law and are excluded from international aid programs.
Climate refugees are forced to flee their homes as the environment degrades and climate-related disasters take hold. Climate change is now one of the leading causes of mass forced displacement.
Climate change is also increasing rates of poverty, instability, and violence—further drivers of migration.
Climate migrants remain in a murky legal space that neither recognizes nor protects them. In fact, the term is not recognized at all in international law.
Those on the front lines of climate change are often in countries that contributed the least to it. The vast majority of climate migration is internal, which puts an unsustainable strain on the already limited resources of these nations.
"When people are driven out because their local environment has become uninhabitable, it might look like a process of nature, something inevitable... Yet the deteriorating climate is very often the result of poor choices and destructive activity, of selfishness and neglect," said Pope Francis.
A Humanitarian Crisis
- In 2022, climate-related disasters accounted for more than half of new reported displacements.
- Almost 60% of existing refugees and IDPs live in countries that are among the most vulnerable to climate change.
- The demand for humanitarian assistance due to climate-related disasters is predicted to double by 2050.
- In 2023, the countries with the highest numbers of new internal displacements (IDPs) due to environmental disasters were China, Türkiye, the Philippines, Somalia, and Bangladesh.
- Three out of four refugees and displaced people are in countries experiencing both conflict and high risk of climate hazards.
- By 2030, water scarcity could displace 700 million people.
- Up to 75% of Bangladesh sits below sea level. Rising water levels have already affected 25.9 million people.
- Unpredictable rainfall patterns, desertification, and declining agricultural productivity undermine rural livelihoods and force migration to urban areas.
- Climate change perpetuates poverty. The World Bank estimates that without urgent action, an additional 32 -132 million people could be pushed into extreme poverty by 2030.
- Climate migration is not just an issue in developing countries. In 2022, 3.2 million people were either displaced or evacuated due to wildfires, floods, and hurricanes in the US.
- Within Europe, rising sea levels are expected to displace 1.6-5.3 million people by the end of the century.
Expansion of Legal Protections
(Photo by Ramazan B/CC BY 3.0)
Climate migrants remain in a murky legal space that neither recognizes nor protects them. In fact, the term is not recognized at all in international law.
The Refugee Convention, which entered into force in 1954, was established to protect those who had fled persecution from the atrocities of World War II. Its protections extend only to those who must leave their home countries due to war, violence, conflict, or any other kind of maltreatment. It also does not protect those who have been displaced in their own countries.
As the vast majority of climate refugees are not crossing borders nor fleeing violence, their status is outside of the convention's reach. These facts do not mean that these people are less in need of assistance or that their lives are not equally in danger, yet the law overlooks their plight.
Climate migration is a form of adaptation. We can build new pathways for safe and regular migration.
Refugee advocates are pushing for an expansion to the convention to include the rights of those forced to move due to environmental factors, but have met with significant political pushback. Critics argue it would lead to the weakening of protection for those experiencing serious persecution. The difficulty in proving the causal factors of climate migration is a further barrier.
The 1998 Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement help bridge the gap in protecting climate refugees; however, its nonbinding nature limits its practical effect and gives it no legal force. It also does not protect those who must cross borders.
The Global Compact for Migration was adopted in 2018. It was the first United Nations framework on international migration. For the first time, climate change was officially recognized as a driver of migration, but it still does not grant legal protection for climate refugees. Instead, the compact promotes safe, orderly pathways for migrants, including planned relocation, visa options, and humanitarian shelter.
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is both the process and the treaty that help countries mitigate the causes and consequences of the climate crisis. It was signed by 154 countries in 1992. Climate migrants aren't explicitly protected by the UNFCCC.
As it stands, although some countries have enacted domestic laws that provide temporary protection for climate refugees, the lack of recognition under the Refugee Convention means there is still no international, legally binding mechanism for them.
Countries are reluctant to sign up to yet another agreement, especially as it may make them responsible for climate migrants who arrive at their borders and promote larger migrant influxes to favored countries. There are many political obstacles which ultimately exacerbate the humanitarian needs of millions.
We must begin to address internal climate displacement in the most vulnerable countries. Tackling the issue at its root is imperative, and the nations historically responsible for the damage must be made to pay.
Climate migration is a form of adaptation. We can build new pathways for safe and regular migration.
The Loss and Damage Fund was established in 2022 at COP27 to address the financial needs of communities severely impacted by climate change. The money would support rehabilitation, recovery, and human mobility. While a brilliant initiative, as of late 2025, rich nations have delivered less than half of what they initially committed to the fund.
Climate Justice is Migrant Justice
Greta Thunberg and Luisa Neubauer participate in a Fridays for Future demonstration in Berlin on September 24, 2021. (Photo by Stefan Müller / CC BY 2.0)
The climate justice movement recognizes that climate change disproportionately affects marginalized and vulnerable communities. It demands that the Global North, which has massive historical accountability, should bear the burden of the solutions. The movement brings social justice, racial justice, human rights, and economic equality into the climate debate.
In July 2025, years of activism by a bold group of law students from the University of the South Pacific paid off. The Vanuatu ICJ Initiative spearheaded legal action that led to a historic advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The following was adopted unanimously by all 15 judges: Nations have a legal duty to combat the planetary crisis.
The ICJ has, for the first time, officially categorized the climate crisis as an "urgent and existential threat" and emphasized that "cooperation is not a matter of choice for states but a pressing need and a legal obligation." The ICJ opinion can now be used to demand more ambitious climate protection measures, to ensure compliance with the Paris Agreement, to implement national and international climate laws, and potentially to help protect climate migrants.
The initiative also highlighted the vulnerability of small island nations and demonstrated that collective action and legal accountability are essential tools on the journey to justice and sustainable development.
Any justice for climate-induced migration must be human-rights focused. Humanitarian visas, temporary protection, authorization to stay, and bilateral free movement agreements would all help to ease the suffering of those forced to leave their homes.
Invisible No Longer
(Photo by Ilias Bartoli/Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0)
"When we refugees are excluded, our voices are silenced, our experiences go unheard, and the reality of the climate situation in the Global South is blurred" says Ugandan climate justice activist Ayebare Denise.
Climate migrants have remained invisible in climate and migration debates for years. The International Organisation for Migration have been working hard to bring climatic and environmental factors into the spotlight. They are establishing a body of evidence that will definitively prove that climate change, both directly and indirectly, affects human mobility.
The UN Refugee Agency advocates for states' responsibilities and obligations to address the migration crisis caused by climate change. They view climate change as a threat multiplier and are working toward protection frameworks.
Countries must begin cooperating on this global issue and ensure the fair treatment of all refugees.
The debate over establishing a climate refugee status is ongoing, and while a legal definition would be helpful, it would be only a partial solution. The vast majority of climate migrants do not want to leave their homes, their livelihoods, or their communities. Admittedly, this is no easy feat, but we must fix the root of the problem—climate change itself.
Without urgent action, we are all at risk of becoming climate refugees.
While working to address immediate needs, climate discussions should continue to focus on preventive measures. Climate mitigation, adaptation, and a just energy transition are essential.
Countries must begin cooperating on this global issue and ensure the fair treatment of all refugees. We must demand a new comprehensive legal framework for climate refugees to safeguard vulnerable populations and protect those who may be at risk in the future.
Supporting climate refugees is our moral obligation.
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Nearly a Third of Tuvalu Residents Seek Climate Visas to Australia as Sea Engulfs Their Home
Scientists say the Pacific island nation will likely be uninhabitable by 2100.
Jun 26, 2025
With more than three weeks to go until the deadline for citizens of Tuvalu to apply for a limited number of visas as part of an agreement with Australia, nearly a third of people in the tiny Pacific island nation had registered by Thursday in hopes of emigrating from one of the world's most climate-vulnerable countries.
After a 2024 climate migration pact between the two nations, the Falepili Union, citizens of Tuvalu are eligible to apply for 280 Australian visas that will be given out each year.
Registration for the inaugural visas began last week, and within four days, 3,125 Tuvaluans had entered a lottery to win one. Tuvalu is home to about 10,643 people, according to 2022 census figures.
The Falepili Union was agreed to two years after leaders from Tuvalu proposed a fossil fuel nonproliferation treaty at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt, making it the second Pacific island nation to demand an international agreement to stop the extraction of the planet-heating fossil fuels that have made Tuvalu one of the world's most vulnerable countries to the climate emergency.
Scientists say Tuvalu, which includes nine low-lying islands and atolls, could be uninhabitable by the end of the century due to rising sea levels.
The islands also see an average of one tropical cyclone in their vicinity per year, with storms often hitting in quick succession and exposing homes and other structures to high winds and extreme rainfall. The nation's gross domestic product fell by more than 25% in 2015 due to Cyclone Pam, which temporarily displaced 45% of the population, contaminated drinking water, and killed livestock. Due to the impact on agriculture across several Pacific Islands, roughly 166,000 people needed immediate food aid in the aftermath of the storm.
Two of the country's coral atolls have mostly been lost to sea-level rise, making the islands more vulnerable to storms.
By 2100, sea levels are projected to rise by more than two feet and Tuvalu is expected to face flooding for nearly a third of every year.
A spokesperson for Australia's Foreign Affairs Department told The Guardian that the Falepili Union is "the first agreement of its kind anywhere in the world, providing a pathway for mobility with dignity as climate impacts worsen."
Tuvaluans who obtain Australian visas under the pact will be eligible for Medicare, disability insurance, family tax benefits, childcare subsidies, and other benefits.
Earlier this month, Tuvalu was included in a draft list of countries where the Trump administration was considering imposing travel bans, in an internal cable sent by U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The administration said Tuvalu's inclusion was a mistake.
The pact with Australia commits the Australian government to defending Tuvalu from military aggression and health pandemics as well as "natural disasters."
"For the first time," Tuvaluan Prime Minister Feleti Teo said when the agreement was signed, "there is a country that has committed legally to recognize the future statehood and sovereignty of Tuvalu despite the detrimental impact of climate change-induced sea-level rise."
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I Want My Taxes to Fund Climate Solutions, Not the Detention of My Neighbors
If we redirected just a fraction of the money we are wasting on ICE to transition our energy grid to clean energy, we could save billions of dollars in healthcare and disaster recovery costs every year.
Jun 15, 2025
The New Hampshire state and U.S. federal budgets are disasters for families, working people, and, frankly, anyone who isn’t independently wealthy.
President Donald Trump’s bill cuts Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and funding for infrastructure, public schools, and renewable energy—just to name a few. In New Hampshire, our state budget bills (HB1 and HB2) make similar cuts to healthcare, public schools, renewable energy, and housing. When we zoom in on what these bills do want to fund, however, the image is devastating: abundant funding for detention centers, border patrol, and immigration enforcement.
We’ve seen the videos and reports of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) encounters all over the country: Masked ICE agents grab people off the street, only for the government to admit later in court that they grabbed the wrong person. Legal immigrants kidnapped and sent to foreign countries, without due process or evidence of threat. International students persecuted for exercising their rights to free speech and protest. In Los Angeles, the military is being deployed against peaceful protestors who were trying to protect their neighbors from ICE raids.
Refusing refugees and detaining immigrants while fueling the climate crisis is a disgrace.
Our neighbors are disappearing around us, and our tax dollars are paying for their inhumane treatment. The Federal budget bill adds $160 billion to immigration enforcement operations. The current New Hampshire state budget for 2024-2025 allocated $1.4 million for the Northern Border Alliance to monitor the 58-mile border between New Hampshire and Canada, despite the fact that in October 2022 through December 2023, there were only 21 apprehensions by Border Patrol.
We’re seeing the devastating impacts of bloated budgets for ICE here and now. In recent months New Hampshire residents have had to watch their town’s police sign up one by one to partner with ICE to kidnap and terrorize their neighbors—including immigrants and refugees who are here legally, contributing to our communities after fleeing war zones or domestic violence. In New Hampshire, ICE operates in the Strafford County jail, where some of our neighbors are being held without due process. Government funding from ICE operations is set to expand the prison in Berlin, New Hampshire, where conditions are notoriously inhumane and immigrants are unlikely to be treated with dignity. Merrimack County and Hillsborough County have both requested to detain immigrants for ICE. My friends and I do not want this to be what our taxes pay for.
Instead, I’d rather have my tax money going to fund climate action: clean energy, resilient green housing, healthcare to care for people impacted by pollution and climate disasters like heatwaves. If we redirected just a fraction of the money we are wasting on ICE to transition our energy grid to clean energy, we could save billions of dollars in healthcare and disaster recovery costs every year. If we stopped spending money to imprison our immigrant neighbors, we could cover the costs of cleaning up the pollution at every fossil fuel facility in the country. If we stopped giving government handouts to billionaire fossil fuel CEOs, we could transition all the dirty fossil fuel facilities to clean energy and battery storage.
The United States contributes approximately 12% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions despite being only 4.2% of the world’s population. Those greenhouse gasses are fueling climate disasters around the world—creating climate refugees. People living along the coasts of countries around the world are being forced inland. People living in places more susceptible to drought or other climate fueled crises are making hard decisions to uproot their family and move someplace more resilient.
Refusing refugees and detaining immigrants while fueling the climate crisis is a disgrace. The United States is actively contributing to climate change by increasing our use of dirty fossil fuels, ignoring climate scientists, and eliminating environmental justice programs. By ignoring this issue we are costing our communities billions of dollars from storm cleanup and pollution impacts. The health costs of pollution and climate change alone cost more than $800 billion per year in medical bills and other downstream health costs—and that doesn’t include the billions of dollars it takes to clean up in a community after a hurricane or tornado. Yet when advocates for climate justice ask for more investments in clean, renewable energy, we are asked where that money will come from.
Our federal and state budgets have their priorities backwards. If we redirected our focus and tax dollars, we could solve an actual crisis that is hurting our economy and our health: climate change. It would be a much more useful avenue for our tax dollars than vilifying our neighbors who, by the way, also contribute taxes to the government.
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The Dystopia of the Border Security Expo Is Trump’s Response to the Climate Emergency
U.S. climate policy now boils down to this: Reducing fossil fuel extraction and consumption are far less important (if important at all) than the creation of a profitable border and immigration apparatus.
Jun 02, 2025
Believe it or not, I had a transcendent experience at this year’s Border Security Expo, the annual event that brings Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement together with private industry. I hesitate to describe it that way, though, because I was on the exhibition hall floor and instantly found myself in the very heart of the U.S. border-industrial complex. It was early April, and I was surrounded by the latest surveillance equipment—camera systems, drones, robodogs—from about 225 companies (a record number for such an event) displaying their wares at that Phoenix Convention Center. Many of the people there seemed all too excited that Donald Trump was once again president.
You might wonder how it’s even possible to have a mystical experience while visiting this country’s largest annual border surveillance fair, and I would agree, especially since my moment came just after Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem gave the keynote speech to a packed convention center ballroom. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn that Noem, who had infamously worn a $50,000 Rolex watch to a Salvadoran “terrorism” prison photo shoot just weeks before, received rousing ovation after ovation, as she claimed that the Trump administration had almost achieved “operational control” of the U.S.-Mexican border. (Only a little more to go, she insisted!) The same point had been made by “border czar” Thomas Homan earlier that day. Both asked the audience to give standing ovations to all border law enforcement officials in the room for, as Noem put it, enduring the “train wreck and poor leadership of Joe Biden leading this country.” And like those who preceded her, she used words like “invasion” abundantly, suggesting that an all-too-fragile United States was battling a siege of unknown proportions.
The late Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano had a name for just such an experience: an “upside-down world,” he called it. In such a world, we’re presented not with the facts but their very opposite. For the border-industrial complex, however, it’s just such an inverted world that sells their product.
For the United States—increasingly so in the age of Donald Trump—the only answer to the climate crisis and its mass displacement of people is yet more border enforcement.
Then it happened. I was walking down a corridor lined with drone companies, including one from India called ideaForge, whose medium-sized drone was “built like a bird” and “tested like a tank.” There were also sophisticated artificial intelligence camera systems mounted on masts atop armored ground drones, which might be considered the perfect combination of today’s modern border technology. There was also the company Fat Truck, whose vehicles had tires taller than my car. X-ray and biometric systems surrounded me, along with green-uniformed Border Patrol agents, sheriffs from border counties, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents checking the equipment. As always, you could practically smell the cash in the air. Of my 13 years covering the Border Security Expo, this was clearly the largest and most enthusiastic one ever.
I was walking through it all on one of those worn blue carpets found in convention centers and then, suddenly, I wasn’t walking there at all. Instead, I was in the Sierra Tarahumara in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, with a Rarámuri man named Mario Quiroz. I had been there with him the previous week, so it was indeed a memory, but so vivid it essentially overcame me. I could smell the forest near the Copper Canyon, one of the most beautiful places on the planet. I could see Quiroz showing me the drying yellowish trees cracking everywhere amid a mega-drought of staggering proportions. I could even catch a glimpse of the fractured Río Conchos, the Mexican river that, at the border, would become the Rio Grande. It was drying up and the trees along it were dying, while many local people were finding that they had little choice but to migrate elsewhere to make ends meet.
I had to sit down. When I did, I suddenly found myself back at the expo in that stale air-conditioned environment that only promises yet more surveillance towers and drones on that very border. Then came the realization that gave me pause: Although that devastated Sierra Tarahumara terrain and the Border Security Expo couldn’t be more different, they are, in fact, also intimately connected. After all, Sierra Tarahumara represents the all too palpable and devastating reality of climate change and the way it’s already beginning to displace people, while the Expo represented my country’s most prominent response to that displacement (and the Global North’s more generally). For the United States—increasingly so in the age of Donald Trump—the only answer to the climate crisis and its mass displacement of people is yet more border enforcement.
“Unwanted Starving Immigrants”
Consider the 2003 Pentagon-commissioned report entitled An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security. It stated, “The United States and Australia are likely to build defensive fortresses around their countries because they have the resources and reserves to achieve self-sufficiency.” It also predicted that “borders will be strengthened around the country to hold back unwanted starving immigrants from the Caribbean islands (an especially severe problem), Mexico, and South America.” Twenty-two years later, that prophecy—if the Border Security Expo is any indication—is coming true.
In 2007, Leon Fuerth, former national security adviser to Vice President Al Gore, wrote that “border problems” will overwhelm American capabilities “beyond the possibility of control, except by drastic measures and perhaps not even then.” His thoughts were a response to a request from the House of Representatives for scientists and military practitioners to offer serious projections connecting climate change and national security. The result would be the book Climatic Cataclysm: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change. Since, according to its editor Kurt Campbell, it would take 30 years for a major military platform to go from the “drawing board to the battlefield,” that volume was, indeed, a book of preparation for a bordered future that only now is beginning to truly envelop us.
One booth for the company QinteQ displayed a ground robot resembling a multilegged insect. I wondered how this could help with the Chihuahuan drought. A vendor told me it could be used for bomb disposal.
In March, I stood on a hill in the town of Sisoguichi in Chihuahua, Mexico with the local priest, Héctor Fernando Martínez, who told me people there wouldn’t be planting corn, beans, and squash at all this year because of the drought. They feared it would never again rain. And it was true that the drought in Chihuahua was the worst I had ever seen, affecting not only the mountains but also the valleys where drying lakes and reservoirs had left farmers without water for the 2025 agricultural cycle.
“What do people do instead?” I asked the priest. “Migrate,” he told me. Many people already migrate for half the year to supplement their incomes, picking apples near Cuauhtémoc or chiles near Camargo. Others end up in the city of Ciudad Juárez, working in maquiladoras (factories) to produce goods for Walmart, Target, and warplane manufacturers, among other places. Some, of course, also try to cross into the United States, only to encounter the same technology and weaponry that was before my eyes that day at the Border Security Expo.
Those displacements, anticipated in assessments from the early 2000s, are already happening in an ever more unnerving fashion. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Center reports that each year now about 22.4 million people are forcibly displaced by “weather-related hazards.” And projections for future migration are startling. The World Bank estimates that, by 2050, 216 million people could be on the move globally, while another report speculates that the number could even hit 1.2 billion. Multiple factors influence people’s decisions to migrate, of course, but climate change is rapidly becoming a (if not the) most prominent one.
Despite the Trump administration’s efforts to banish climate change from all government documents and discourse and quite literally wipe it out as a subject of any interest at all, the DHS’s 2025 Homeland Threat Assessment describes what’s going on in Chihuahua and elsewhere all too well: “Natural disasters or extreme weather events abroad that disrupt local economies or result in food insecurity have the potential to exacerbate migration flows to the United States.” The 2021 DHS Climate Action Plan stated that the department would “conduct integrated, scalable, agile, and synchronized steady-state operations… to secure the Southern Border and Approaches.” It turns out that the “operational control” Kristi Noem mentioned at the Border Security Expo includes preparations for potential climate-induced mass migration. That hellish dystopic world (envisioned in movies like Mad Max) is coming to you directly from Trump’s Department of Homeland Security along the U.S.-Mexican border.
The Border-Industrial Complex in Action
As I continued through that expo hall, I recalled walking in drought-stricken Chihuahua and thought about what’s now happening on our border to face the human nightmare of climate change in an all-too-military fashion. Ominously enough, the company Akima, which operates the ICE detention center in Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, was a prime sponsor of the Expo and I saw its name prominently displayed. Its website indicates that it is “now hiring to support ICE efforts,” effectively framing the mass deportations promised by Trump as a good opportunity for volunteers.
One booth for the company QinteQ displayed a ground robot resembling a multilegged insect. I wondered how this could help with the Chihuahuan drought. A vendor told me it could be used for bomb disposal. When I gave him a look of disbelief, he mentioned that he’d heard of a couple of cases of bombs found at the border. At another company, UI Path, an enthusiastic vendor claimed their software was focused on administrative “efficiency” and, he assured me, was well “aligned with DOGE” (Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency), allowing Border Patrol agents to not have to handle the “tedious tasks,” so that they could “go out in the field.” I then asked about their success with the Border Patrol and he replied, “They already have our program. They are already using it.”
When I approached the Matthews Environmental Solutions booth, the vendors weren’t there. But behind a lone green chair, a large placard stated that the company was one of the “global leaders in waste incineration,” with over 5,000 installations worldwide. A photo of a large metal waste incinerator caught my eye, somewhat morbidly, because the website also said that the company offered “cremation systems.” Though they weren’t selling that service at the Border Security Expo, there was certainly a macabre symbolism to such an expo where human ashes could be converted into profit and suffering into revenue.
When it comes to this country, whatever Donald Trump may want to believe, no border wall can actually stop climate change itself.
Forecasters at the global management consulting firm IMARC Group cheerily project an even more robust global homeland security market to come. “The growing number and severity of natural disasters and public health emergencies,” they write, “is offering a favorable homeland security market outlook.” By IMARC’s calculations, the industry will grow from $635.90 billion this year to $997.82 billion by 2033, a nearly 5% growth rate. The company Market and Markets, however, predicts a far quicker ascent, estimating that the market will reach $905 billion by next year. The consensus, in short, is that, in the age of climate change, homeland security will soon be on the verge of becoming a trillion-dollar industry—and just imagine what future Border Security Expos will be like then!
Certainly, the Trump administration, eager to toss out anything related to climate change funding while also working hard to increase the production of fossil fuels, has ambitious plans to contribute to that very reality. Since January, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE have already put out about $2.5 billion in contracts. It’s still early, but that number is actually lower than Joe Biden’s pace a year ago; his spending reached $9 billion at the end of fiscal year 2024. Despite constant accusations from Trump and others that Joe Biden maintained “open borders,” he finished his term as the top contractor of any president when it came to border and immigration enforcement and so set a high bar for Trump.
In 2025, Trump is operating with a CBP and ICE budget of $29.4 billion, slightly lower than Biden’s 2024 one, but historically high (approximately $10 billion more than when he started his first term as president in 2017). The change, however, will come next year, as the administration is asking for $175 billion for the Department of Homeland Security, an increase of $43.8 billion “to fully implement the president’s mass removal campaign, finish construction of the border wall on the Southwest border, procure advanced border security technology, modernize the fleet and facilities of the Coast Guard, and enhance Secret Service protective operations.”
On top of that on May 22, the House of Representatives passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that, among other things, would infuse $160 billion more in funding into the CBP and ICE budgets over the next four and a half years. As Adam Isaacson from the Washington Office on Latin America stated, “We have never seen anything come close to the level of border hardening and massive deportation enforcement resources foreseen in this bill” that will now go to a vote in the Senate. This may explain the industry’s optimism; they sense a potential bonanza to come.
Despite Trump’s deep urge to erase global warming from consideration, climate displacement and border protection—two dynamics trending distinctly upward—are on a collision course. The United States, the world’s largest historic carbon emitter, had already been spending 11 times more on border and immigration enforcement than on climate finance and, under President Trump, those proportions are set to become even more stunningly abysmal. U.S. climate policy now boils down to this: Reducing fossil fuel extraction and consumption are far less important (if important at all) than the creation of a profitable border and immigration apparatus. In fact, the dystopia of the Border Security Expo I saw that day is the U.S. response to the drought in Chihuahua and so much else involving the overheating of this planet. And yet, when it comes to this country, whatever Donald Trump may want to believe, no border wall can actually stop climate change itself.
As I listened to Kristi Noem and Thomas Homan discuss what they considered to be a besieged country, I thought of Galeano’s provocative analysis of that inverted world where the oppressor becomes the oppressed and the oppressed the oppressor. That world now includes fires, floods, increasingly devastating storms, and encroaching seas, all to be met with high-tech cameras, biometrics, robotic dogs, and formidable walls.
I still can’t shake my vision of those yellowish hues on the dying trees in the Sierra Tarahumara. I walked with Quiroz down that canyon to the Río Conchos River and out onto its bed of dried stones that crunched like bones underfoot. Quiroz told me he came to that then-flowing river every day as a kid to tend to his family’s goats. I asked how he felt about it now that it looked like a bunch of disconnected puddles stretching before us to the horizon. “Tristeza,” he told me.
Walking the halls of the expo, I felt the weight of that word: sadness. Sadness, indeed, in this thoroughly upside-down borderworld of ours.
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Why Don't Lefty Media Emphasize Capitalism's Greatest Crime—the Climate Crisis?
The cause and effect linking industry to extinction ought to be the greatest horror story ever told. Our hands should be sweating as we shakily turn the pages.
Jan 02, 2025
If climate overheating is the biggest threat to life on Earth, one might expect that progressive platforms would be all over this issue. Of all the great crimes of capitalism—war, imperial conquest, siphoning pocket change from workers into bloated coffers of corporate wealth, shaking down ordinary people for a false promise of healthcare, buying up housing with private equity to spike rents, etc.—the baking of the biosphere stands out as an act of unprecedented, monstrous proportions.
Corporate greed, in its bureaucratic, industrial ability to divorce sentiment from institutional momentum, has entered a realm unique in the half billion year evolutionary history of multicellular life. Corporate humanity, armed with technology, has the ability to fast-track mass extinction. The oligarchs of our species have gained admittance to a dimension formerly restricted to geological processes. If implosion of the biosphere had always been a consequence of rare acts of volcanism—the caprice of plate tectonics unfolding across eons—we now can completely obliterate living systems on a dime.
Climate overheating is an epic story, and we have yet to figure out how to tell it.
Progressive media, thus, has every reason to be utterly riveted and obsessed with the climate—climate extinction is worse than war, worse than racism, worse than colonial expansion, worse than arbitrary police power, worse than union busting, worse than any corporate crimes short of nuclear war. Indeed, climate destruction might be thought of as the pure tincture of capitalism, the compressed essence of all forms of injustice. Climate, however, requires that people grasp a different order of magnitude to seriously address its lethal certainty. While police brutality, war, housing shortages, human rights abuses, and racism can possibly be addressed with reform, there is no wiggle room for climate's destructive trajectory. No series of incremental policy adjustments can placate Mother Nature and her planned revenge.
Climate remediation demands revolutionary change—there is no path forward to, as Jeremy Corbin words it, "turn the Titanic around," under our current political and economic systems. Climate overheating, unlike all the smaller threats plaguing our (and all other) species, requires an almost unimaginable shift in our institutions and ways of thinking—the transitions that might give the planet a hint of optimism have to take place globally within an international community hopelessly addicted to nationalism. A recent piece by Mark Wilson posted at the World Socialist Website (WSWS) encapsulates the gargantuan task—Wilson, referencing the suit by impoverished countries to access climate reparations via The World Court, states:
Whatever the verdict of this case, the major capitalist powers responsible for the climate crisis will continue to base their policies not on science, human rights, or environmental protection. Instead, the ruling elites and big business will make their calculations based on profit and on enriching themselves.
What is required by the working class globally is instead a break from the institutions that defend the capitalist system as it plunges the world into ecological devastation. The conscious political fight to abolish capitalism is the necessary strategic task to which all workers and young people must orient, as the only path to safeguard Earth and its living inhabitants.
As a regular reader of the WSWS, I generally find perspectives that are more pointedly directed toward revolution than incrementalism, but oddly, one has to look hard at WSWS offerings to find climate related analysis. I had to scroll through at least 30 pieces to find the above quote. That is not to begrudge the focus on international labor struggles, worker's rights, Gaza, and Marxist cultural perspectives, but the paucity of climate related reporting is not so much a failure of WSWS as it is a universal problem characteristic of progressive platforms in general.
A quick personal and anecdotal survey of five different online, leftist platforms reveals that fewer than 10% of pieces deal with climate, and only a tiny handful go into detail regarding the more nuanced debates around climate overheating mitigation. For example, the exploration of Degrowth—ubiquitous on niche environmental sites like Resilience—almost never receives detailed unpacking on more general online sites that promote leftist journalism. Unfortunately, we have a poorly informed public with a below threshold investment in civil disobedience, and little familiarity with the prevailing positions—largely emerging from academia—regarding the strategies that will be urgent and essential to transition from a political culture of runaway ecocide. Many have complained that the climate movement does not resonate with poor and working people. The massive mobilization needed to confront the sixth extinction depends on a well-informed public armed with the requisite narrative tools.
The problems confronting climate activism may be uniquely psychological. We don't see the same sort of immediate nexus that binds perpetrators and victims in the manner that a bloodied Gazan child can be traced to a conscious act of colonial expansion. The sort of violence manifest in the gratuitous burning of fossil fuels rather evades the scope of public understanding. We simply don't see the Central American refugee as a victim of corporate designs in the same way that we recognize a murdered Gazan child as a target of Israeli and U.S. military intent. Yet that connection is real and urgently needed to be framed for those who struggle to grasp the storyline. The cause and effect linking industry to extinction ought to be the greatest horror story ever told. Our hands should be sweating as we shakily turn the pages.
The murder of George Floyd pulled at our collective heartstrings. Tens of millions of people cringed at the specific, personal, intimate revelation of police violence. We oddly respond emotionally to a single act of injustice, yet numbly fail to resonate with the onrushing death of billions. Perhaps it is our job as writers to make climate crimes personal and immediate. Climate overheating is an epic story, and we have yet to figure out how to tell it. The enormous bridge linking the planet's greatest global catastrophe to the private suffering of real people may be nearly impossible for writers to span.
At the very least we can picture the suffering of Roger Hallam—sentenced to five years in prison for climate civil disobedience. Perhaps we can also appreciate that John Mark Rozendaal has been threatened with a seven-year sentence for playing a Bach Cello Suite outside of Citibank in NYC as part of the Summer of Heat protest. A man holding an umbrella above the cellist also risked Draconian retribution. Civil disobedience has often been energized by collective outrage toward state violence directed against those who stand up for human rights—think of Rosa Parks who became the iconic symbol of the civil rights movement.
All of the things that make journalism vivid and anxiously relevant ought to drive the climate narrative. The corporate world and their political puppets want nothing more than to see readers on leftist platforms bored with climate coverage.
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Immigration Justice Must Be a Climate Fight, Too
We need to work together to forge a bold vision to protect displaced people in a climate-disrupted world.
Nov 19, 2024
Donald Trump’s return to the White House poses an existential threat to the climate movement’s goal of a livable future. In the face of this magnitude and multitude of threats, it is imperative that we resist the impulse to retreat into our niche issue silos and limit our vision. If we hope to preserve a stable climate, we must prevail in the fight of our lives against authoritarianism. And to do that, climate movement leaders must commit to an unprecedented level of solidarity with the communities targeted by Trump, in particular immigrants and refugees.
For a number of years now, we have taken part in, and led, conversations between immigrant and climate leaders aligning our movements for this moment. To meet it, the U.S. Climate Movement must grapple with the connections between climate disruption, migration, and rising authoritarianism; commit to the fight against mass detention and deportation of migrants; and help build a narrative and vision of climate resilience that includes protections for displaced people.
Trump’s electoral victory comes in the midst of a global wave of authoritarian politics stretching across Western democracies. These movements share a worldview of scarcity in a chaotic, disrupted world, and their politics are defined by brutal scapegoating of migrants and displaced people. Wherever they win power these authoritarians are climate disasters, expanding the fossil fuel economy, and delaying action. The threat of eco-fascism lurks in authoritarian ideology like the great replacement theory and has motivated terrible acts of individual violence. The authoritarian movements gaining political power by demonizing migrants and refugees are firmly aligned with fossil fuel billionaires and their interests. Climate and immigrant rights movements succeed or fail together; our political fortunes are inextricably bound.
Climate advocates can deploy the legal and political tactics that blocked tar sands pipelines and new coal-fired power plants to challenge the construction of the vast network of detention centers, camps, and militarized sites essential for the administration’s agenda.
As climate-disruption accelerates it creates the conditions these authoritarian movements thrive on. More frequent and severe domestic disasters, like back-to-back hurricanes Helene and Milton, feed the psychological sense of scarcity of disruption. Globally, increasing climate impacts intensify factors like persecution, conflict, and economic desperation, driving internal displacement and forcing some to cross borders to seek safety. Authoritarians like Trump prey on these conditions, falsely blaming asylum seekers for stealing FEMA funds from hurricane survivors in a calculated attempt to pit the victims of the climate crisis against vulnerable immigrants instead of billionaires.
One reason these manipulative tactics have been so effective is that they go unchallenged. On both sides of the Atlantic, climate and other progressive organizations have seen defense of immigrants and refugees as a political third rail, remained silent in the face of growing attacks, and ceded the narrative to the worst political actors. In advance of June’s European elections where parties advancing anti-immigrant ideology made significant gains, advocates were advised to avoid “being distracted” by engaging with anti-immigrant rhetoric and focus on mobilizing voters with a message of climate action. American climate groups took a similar approach in the recent election, with similar results. As climate disasters continue to rise, so will the fear-mongering, finger-pointing, and manipulation. We cannot afford to let it go unchallenged.
With the incoming administration’s imminent threat of mass detention and deportation, the first step for climate organizations must be to actively and materially join the defense of immigrant communities. This means participating in the political resistance to the program, including mass marches and strikes, but also directing chapters and members to join ICE raid rapid-response networks, immigration court accompaniment projects, mutual aid efforts, and the like. These actions will go a long way in building needed trust with immigrant rights leaders, who can be wary of the environmental movement’s checkered past and recent silence on this issue.
Climate and environmental organizations also bring a critical skillset to the table—their experience stopping the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure. Climate advocates can deploy the legal and political tactics that blocked tar sands pipelines and new coal-fired power plants to challenge the construction of the vast network of detention centers, camps, and militarized sites essential for the administration’s agenda. Groups like the Prison Ecology Project and the Campaign to Fight Toxic Prisons have experimented with using these strategies to challenge the construction of new jails, with some success. If the climate movement applied the same grassroots, legal, and inside political coordination that brought down the Keystone XL pipeline, we could challenge every new building, airstrip, and cage linked to mass deportation. In this fight every delay will be valuable in preventing measures of suffering and cruelty.
Second, climate organizations need to launch a massive program of popular education to help their members and leaders understand the connections between climate and migrant justice and reject authoritarianism. It’s time for a movement-wide reckoning around climate and migration similar to those around racial justice and Indigenous rights that have already transformed the movement’s language, analysis, and agenda. Pre-election polling shows alarming support for the concept of mass deportation and the militarized internment of undocumented people—including among Democrats. Our conversations about climate and migration with a wide swath of environmental leaders and activists showed us that these sentiments are more pervasive in the climate movement than many would like to admit. Luckily research shows support for deportation programs collapses when respondents better understand the details of who is targeted, pointing to an opening for popular education.
Part of this project will need to be confronting the damaging narratives the movement has used, which too often cast increased migration as a threat comparable to storms, fires, and heatwaves. Some research shows that these kinds of stories, often highlighting unreliable numerical predictions of mass climate displacement, actually increase anti-immigrant sentiment, even among highly motivated climate activists. Both of our organizations have worked to shift these narratives in recent years, and see elevating the complex stories of displaced people in our communities as the key.
Lastly, we need to work together to forge a bold vision to protect displaced people in a climate-disrupted world. For too long the climate movement, and the progressive movement writ large, have ceded this issue to those who offer guns, walls, and cages as their solution. In the absence of an alternative, these have become the only solutions in our discourse. Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned on one of the most restrictive border bills in the modern age, while President Joe Biden’s climate negotiators fought the creation of tools for global climate reparations, like the United Nations Loss and Damage Fund.
The authoritarian narrative paints climate disruption as a competition for survival, and tries to pit vulnerable people against each other. But this is a lie, crafted to protect the fossil fuel billionaires. The truth is that the climate crisis can only be solved through cooperation and interdependence. It profoundly illustrates how our fates are bound together, and demands an expansive vision of safety and resilience. The climate and migrant justice movements need to bring a new urgency to calls for global investments to protect vulnerable people’s ability to stay in their community and thrive, and safe and orderly pathways for them to leave if and when necessary, as a counter to the militarized borders currently on offer.
Taking this path will require real commitment, resources, and dedication. But our opponents want us divided because the world we deserve can only be won together.
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'Groundbreaking' Report Calls for Protecting Rights of Climate Refugees
"ICAAD's report incorporates lived-experience testimony and in-depth cross-disciplinary research to propose an innovative and, most importantly, practicable legal standard for the right to life with dignity," an advocate said.
Jul 03, 2024
A human rights group on Wednesday released what it called "a gift to the international legal and climate action communities" to support their efforts to protect people around the world displaced by the fossil fuel-driven planetary emergency.
The "groundbreaking" policy brief from the International Center for Advocates Against Discrimination (ICAAD) was crafted to fill a "void in international human rights law" using the insights of Indigenous and climate frontline communities, attorneys, climate modeling experts, social scientists, researchers, and data analysts.
Already, the climate emergency is displacing people within and beyond their home countries. According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, over 117.3 million people were forcibly displaced at the end of 2023 for a range of reasons. The report comes as Hurricane Beryl is leaving a trail of destruction through the Caribbean.
The Institute for Economics & Peace has estimated that by 2050, ecological disasters and armed conflict could forcibly displace about 1.2 billion people, about 10% of the global population. Given such warnings, ICAAD's report urges countries to "adopt inclusive, evidence-based legal frameworks" for climate refugees that center on "the right to life with dignity" (RTLWD).
The brief builds on a January 7, 2020 decision from the United Nations Human Rights Committee. As the document details:
Ioane Teitiota and his family sought to remain in New Zealand after migrating from Kiribati. Though the claimant identified how environmental degradation and its downstream impacts would violate his family's right to life with dignity, the majority of the committee did not find that returning the claimant to Kiribati would violate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), citing a lack of individualized and imminent harm. Nevertheless, the committee did provide a significant opening by recognizing that environmental degradation could be so severe as to violate Article 6, right to life (with dignity), and Article 7, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (CIDT). This policy brief's analysis centers on Article 6, right to life with dignity, by first looking at the origin of the term "dignity" in legal contexts and how it should be applied today when considering climate-induced displacement.
After examining the etymology of "dignity," its use in international human rights law, and meanings in non-European philosophies and cultures, ICAAD proposed a legal standard for determining whether a climate-displaced person's RTLWD has been violated.
Under the group's standard, the right has been violated if they are deprived of, or are at risk of being deprived of:
- Life or access to basic necessities of life, including but not limited to potable water, food, or shelter;
- Security from serious illness or injury, whether physical or psychological; or
- Something that is fundamental to the identity, conscience, or the exercise of human rights of the applicant and of a particular social group to which the applicant belongs, including but not limited to the ability to engage in cultural practices vital to the particular social group.
ICAAD also offered an evidentiary standard for tribunals charged with considering a displaced person's application: "An applicant is entitled to protection and nonrefoulement if there is a reasonable chance that the applicant will suffer, in the applicant's lifetime, a violation of their right to life with dignity."
"In cases where multiple similarly situated applicants with familial or community ties apply for protection, some of whom satisfy this reasonable chance standard and some of whom do not, complementary protection should be extended to a nonqualifying applicant if denying protection to the nonqualifying applicant would violate any applicant's RTLWD," the group emphasized.
The new brief points out that "the proposed legal standard could also be adopted in national immigration policies, bilateral immigration policies, and internal relocation policies," highlighting that "in May 2019, a group of eight Torres Strait Islander people submitted a complaint against the Australian Government to the U.N. Human Rights Committee, alleging that Australia's failure to protect them from climate impacts was a violation of their rights under the ICCPR."
In a Wednesday statement, Yumna Kamel, co-founder and executive director of Earth Refuge, welcomed that "ICAAD's report incorporates lived-experience testimony and in-depth cross-disciplinary research to propose an innovative and, most importantly, practicable legal standard for the right to life with dignity for climate-displaced persons."
In addition to recommending legal and evidentiary standards, she noted, the brief "goes so far as to provide a guide to incorporating scientific modeling into future cases."
"The legal standard and overall thesis proposed is one that Earth Refuge would readily support and indeed seek to apply in pursuance of the rights of climate-displaced people," Kamel said. "It provides the practical, conscientious answers to the questions that those working in this field, and those experiencing these travesties, have been asking for years."
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International Court Holds Climate Hearings in Brazil After Deadly Floods
"We need leaders to invest in the recovery of agriculture, in education, and in environmental plans and public policies with adequate resources and personnel," said a 17-year-old from Peru.
May 27, 2024
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights on Monday continued hearings in Brazil for a requested advisory opinion on countries' obligations related to the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency.
After Chile and Colombia sought an advisory opinion from the IACtHR, hearings began in Barbados last month and kicked off in Brazil last week, as climate and humanitarian experts sounded the alarm about recent extreme flooding in the South American nation that killed at least 169 people and displaced hundreds of thousands.
The people of El Bosque, the first Mexican community to be officially recognized by authorities as climate-displaced, are among the groups demanding climate justice before the court, with support from Greenpeace Mexico, Nuestro Futuro Mexico, and Conexiones Climáticas.
"Countless claims by communities around the world who have suffered too long from harms imposed on them by colonialist, extractivist business practices, are a testimony to how the fossil fuel and agribusiness industries are impairing the full exercise of all of our human rights and also how the states are failing to guarantee these basic but fundamental rights," said Greenpeace Mexico climate campaigner Pablo Ramirez in a statement Monday.
According to Greenpeace, "In written observations filed before the IACtHR... the El Bosque community asks the court to establish that states have an obligation to develop climate adaptation policies which effectively address internal displacement due to climate impacts."
Others are calling on the IACtHR to "listen to and learn from children and adolescents about how we are living through the climate crisis and its impact on our rights," as Camila, a 14-year-old from El Salvador, put it. She testified before the court on Friday.
"Climate change is affecting our right to health in many ways, for example, causing deaths and illnesses from extreme heatwaves, storms, and floods, toxic air pollution, droughts, food shortages, the spread of diseases like cholera and dengue fever, and serious infections from increased animal diseases that are transmitted to people," Camila said. "All this, in turn, generates poverty and displacement."
Joselim, a 17-year-old from Peru who also provided testimony, emphasized that "looking after Mother Earth is urgent because time is against us. Children, adolescents, young adults, and humanity in general should enjoy a healthy, clean, dignified, and safe environment. This requires change to rebuild a conscious society, in which children and adolescents are active participants."
"We should take care of the Earth we live on and preserve humanity. My call to action for authorities is to respect our Mother Earth, preserve it, and take care of it," she continued. "We need leaders to invest in the recovery of agriculture, in education, and in environmental plans and public policies with adequate resources and personnel. We need them to promote recycling, using renewable energy, and adopting agricultural production techniques that are friendlier to nature so that more children and adolescents can enjoy a healthy, clean, and safe environment."
Victoria Ward, regional director for Save the Children in Latin America and the Caribbean, noted the devastating floods in Brazil and also urged the court to take seriously the comments from the two teenage girls and other young people.
"Climate change is mostly affecting those who are least responsible for the damage—children. Those children already facing hunger and conflict, poverty and discrimination, are suffering most of all," Ward said. "Across Latin America and the Caribbean, we have recently seen unprecedented heatwaves and droughts that have forced schools to close, and caused long-lasting damage to crop and agriculture that is sending food prices skyrocketing and pushing families into poverty."
"Children are demanding change," she said. "Their powerful experiences and solutions will only make the fight against climate change stronger. And we know that the only way adults can truly protect children's rights is by including children in making decisions that affect them. That's why it's fantastic to see Joselim and Camila using this platform to speak out about how the climate crisis is eroding the rights of children across the region. Let's hope they are listened to."
The Center for International Environmental Law (CIEL) has joined with other groups to submit multiple amicus briefs to the court, and on Monday had a senior attorney testify about the need "to ensure the protection of those who defend human rights and the planet."
Summarizing Luisa Gómez's comments, CIEL said she stressed that the court "has a historic opportunity to clarify the rights to information, participation, and justice, and in doing so, change the future of the world's deadliest region for environmental advocacy."
The hearings in Brazil are set to run through Wednesday. Campaigners hope the IACtHR will issue an opinion that builds on recent decisions from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).
As Common Dreams reported last week, the ITLOS issued an advisory opinion that greenhouse gas emissions are marine pollution under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and parties to the treaty "have the specific obligation to adopt laws and regulations to prevent, reduce, and control" them.
That followed an April ruling from the ECHR in favor of KlimaSeniorinnen, or Senior Women for Climate Protection. The court
found that the Swiss government has violated the human rights of its older citizens by refusing to abide by scientists' warnings and swiftly phase out fossil fuels.
Pointing to those cases on Monday, Greenpeace envisioned an IACtHR opinion that will "further strengthen states and business enterprises' obligations to take the necessary measures to reduce, prevent, and control greenhouse gas emissions, in line with best available science and international law obligations."
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Beyond Bullets: Bringing Climate Justice to the Asylum Process
There is a growing movement of displaced people who are sharing our stories of climate and displacement and calling for recognition of climate change in asylum and refugee policies.
Apr 22, 2024
I was born in a small village in the heart of Afghanistan, but most of my childhood was spent as a refugee in Quetta, Pakistan. My family returned to Afghanistan in the early 2000s after the American invasion. Both in Pakistan and Afghanistan, I grew up amid the chaos of conflict, and the sounds of bullets and bomb blasts were a part of my daily life.
However, the conflict that loomed the largest for my family was between people and nature. Like many from our village, leaving became inevitable for my family as our homeland was transformed by drought into a barren wasteland again and again. As resources dwindled, we were forced to chase water, which became increasingly scarce and expensive. Like so many others, my family became nomadic, changing homes, cities, provinces, and countries in search of water to survive. Afghanistan is one of the world’s most vulnerable places to climate change, and as I write this, the country is undergoing the worst drought in decades.
A decade later, in 2017, I applied for asylum in the United States. When I attempted to include this narrative of my community’s plight from drought and natural disasters in my application, my lawyer strongly advised against it. Instead, I was encouraged to focus solely on the impacts of war and my triple minority identity as a Hazara-Shia-Afghan woman. It didn’t make sense to try to separate the religious and political persecution I faced from the reality that my ancestral village, once verdant and flourishing, had been reduced to dust by decades of unyielding drought. My attorney seemed fixated on presenting me as a “Western-educated Hazara-Shia-Afghan woman” fleeing persecution and ignoring any mention of the environmental devastation that compelled my family to flee our homeland numerous times.
Amid these struggles with armed conflict, corruption, and dictatorship, there lurks another adversary: global warming, the silent killer.
Unfortunately, my attorney’s stance proved valid. There are currently no systems or protections in place for individuals displaced by climate impacts under U.S. or international law. My asylum application was approved with a selective narrative devoid of the true underlying causes of my displacement.
As I became an immigrant rights advocate, first at the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition and now as the director of We Are All America, I connected with fellow asylum seekers with the same thread of environmental injustice woven throughout their stories. I met people who, like me, saw their vulnerabilities multiplied by the climate crisis and faced much more intricate, intersectional challenges than our current asylum pathways recognize.
Paul, an asylum seeker from Congo, is one such example. He and his family of farmers initially fled due to war, but when floods and heavy rain destroyed their new home in Kenya, they were forced to seek refuge elsewhere. After experiencing this double displacement, Paul sought resettlement in Canada because he knew the U.S. didn’t have a protected asylum pathway that aligned with his experience.
Amid these struggles with armed conflict, corruption, and dictatorship, there lurks another adversary: global warming, the silent killer. Despite its profound impact, our stories about it are often left untold, overshadowed by tales of violence and persecution. According to the United Nations Refugee Agency, climate is now the leading cause of global displacement, surpassing conflict. Our limited asylum policies shape the very stories of our displacement, masking the extent to which climate change is interwoven with other root causes and warping climate-displaced people’s perceptions of what makes a valid reason to move to safety
However, there is a growing movement of displaced people, like Paul and myself, who are sharing our stories of climate and displacement and calling for recognition of climate change in asylum and refugee policies. Some asylum seekers and their lawyers are beginning to include climate impacts as a central part of their cases, and attempting to set precedents that would require immigration judges to consider them. In the past few years, the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies started tracking asylum cases with prominent climate impacts and already has an extensive number in their database, including some promising successes.
There’s a lot the Biden administration could do to support these efforts. In one of his first executive orders, President Joe Biden created an inter-agency task force on climate and migration. However, three years on, the task force has produced little tangible action. Meanwhile, advocates have offered a number of immediate actions for the administration to take, from prioritizing the resettlement of climate-impacted refugees to training USCIS officials to consider climate impacts as a supporting factor in asylum claims.
Of course, the need to update the United States’ outdated refugee and asylum policies is at the heart of this issue. Last year We Are All America’s sister project, the Climate Justice Collaborative, led a broad coalition of immigrant, refugee, and climate justice organizations that supported the reintroduction of Sen. Edward Markey’s (D-Mass.) Climate Displaced Persons Act (CDPA). The CDPA would create a new visa program parallel to refugee resettlement, specifically for people facing forced displacement due to climate impacts. It would also create a global climate resilience strategy to help vulnerable countries, like mine, adapt to climate change. This is the kind of bold policy change we need to bring our country into the modern age and build a life-sustaining future in the face of the climate crisis and its intersectional impacts on our society.
Climate displacement is not a far-off problem for future generations. It is happening now and has been happening for decades. Our voices have just been silenced, and our experiences have been buried by those deemed valid by our antiquated asylum policies. We deserve the same empathy and support as those fleeing bullets. It’s time for policy to reflect that.
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