Climate Refugees and 21st Century Migration

Representatives from numerous NGO's brainstormed solutions to the myriad problems confronting the world's more than 200 million international migrants.

Courtesy: colli239.fts.educ.msu.edu

(LAS CRUCES, N.M.) - Are people who move because of climate change and/or extreme weather events migrants or refugees? Do older methods of farming and home-building hold key answers to the environmental challenges of the 21st century? These were among the questions addressed by international delegates meeting this week for the 4th Global Forum on Migration and Development in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

As part of the forum, representatives of non-governmental organizations spent two days strategizing solutions to the myriad problems confronting the world's more than 200 million international migrants.

At a session on climate change and migration, delegates from Asia, Africa, Latin America and other parts of the world described how deforestation, extreme weather events, greenhouse gas emissions from the developed world, free trade, unequal development, and the erosion of public services all are combining to influence population movements in the 21st Century.

Oscar Gomez of Colombia's Esperanza Foundation framed the issue in terms of voluntary migration versus forced departure. The word migrant, Gomez said, implies a person who voluntarily moves, while refugee denotes an indiviudal who is forced to migrate.

With industrialized nations responsible for the vast majority of greenhouse gas emissions, new international norms must recognize the existence of the climate refugee from the disproportionately impacted less developed world, Gomez stressed.

Isabel Cruz, director of the Mexican Association of Social Sector Credit Unions, cited United Nations data that report approximately 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions come from industrialized agriculture, especially in the global north.

In an interview with Frontera NorteSur, Cruz said the emissions were linked to the production and use of pesticides, fertilizers and other inputs, as well as the burning of fuel used to transport food. Cruz backed a return to the family farming model of diversified cropping and local production/consumption as an answer to the climate change threat.

"Climate change can be reduced or stopped if there is a substitution in the production model from the transnational one to a family one," Cruz insisted. The administrator of a rural financial services network, Cruz said some communities in the Mexican countryside are organizing a resurgence of local food production while seeking to boost biodiversity as a way of shielding the worst effects of climate change, particularly in indigenous zones of the states of Puebla, Guerrero and Oaxaca.

According to Cruz, cooperatives in the Sierra Norte of Puebla have spent more than five years constructing a "green cover" on their land by sowing more 16 different plant species.

A representative of Mexican migrants residing in San Diego, California, likewise advocated the approrpiate use of natural resources. Manlio Correa of the Association of Michoacan Residents and Friends in San Diego/Andarani outlined proposals to construct "ecological homes" in the state of Michocan, while at the same time promoting the concept among Mexican immigrants in the US who still maintain or purchase homes in the old country.

Instead of high energy-consumming homes built with cement, Correa supported adobe and tabique as the ideal materials for new housing. "This is like a return to the homes of before," Correa said. In terms of energy, he added, such residences can be powered off-the-grid with renewable energy sources.

The session attended by Cruz and Correa produced about a dozen recommendations that will go to both the Global Forum and the United Nations. The recommendations included recognizing the right of people to stay on the land or move elsewhere, greater regulation of environmental despoilers, more evidence-based research, collective involvement of migrants in policy-development, community-building, strengthening public institutions, supporting ecological projects, assuring climate justice, upholding human rights perspectives, and clarifying the definition of environmental displacement and how it is resolved.

The purpose of the recommendations, session chair Rex Varona told Frontera NorteSur, is to make sure governments "do something" about them.

The Global Forum recommendations issued by civil society organizations gathered in Puerto Vallarta coincide in good measure with demands formulated days earlier at a Mexico City meeting of the Peoples' Global Assembly (PGA). Representing more than 100 international non-governmental organizations, the PGA is campaigning for a human rights approach to migration and development. On the issue of climate change, the PGA's 2010 statement declared: "Uneven economic development exacerbates the impacts of climate change, already forcing millions of people from their homes, along with corporate-driven environmental degradation, the loss of rural and urban livelihoods, and the inability of governments to address the effects of natural disasters."

According to the United Nations' International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), between $49 and $171 billion will be required every year until 2030 just to "adapt" to climate change across the globe. The IFAD predicts increasing pressures on global food supplies, which will need to double by 2050 in order to maintain pace with world population growth, according to the agency.

"Crop failures and livestock deaths are causing higher economic losses, contributing to higher food prices and undermining food security with ever-greater frequency, especially in parts of sub-Saharan Africa," the IFAD recently reported.

For Isabel Cruz, the climate change/migration dynamic boils down to power relationships in a world where a handful of large corporations increasingly control the global food production system. "It's a problem of democracy." Cruz said. "It always comes down to that."

Center for Latin American and Border Studies
New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico