A Way Forward? Climate Change, Immigration, and International Law

A Way Forward? Climate Change, Immigration, and International Law

“Climate refugees” will be the new face of immigration. Why isn’t international law prepared? This story is Part II of a two-part series on climate change, immigration and international law. By Genevieve Zingg, editor of RightsViews and an M.A. student in Human Rights Studies at Columbia University A potential solution to the looming issue of climate migration has recently been put forward by a commission of academic and policy experts who spent the last two years developing the Model International Mobility Convention. The proposed framework establishes the minimum rights afforded to all people who cross state borders, with special rights afforded to forced migrants, refugees, migrant victims of trafficking and migrants stranded in crisis situations. A Way Forward? Advancing the International Mobility Convention The Mobility Convention broadens the scope of international protection by recognizing what it terms “forced migrants.” Climate migrants lacking legal grounds for asylum under the 1951 Convention would qualify for protection under the forced migrant definition it advances. “We were looking...
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When the Wave Comes: Climate Change, Immigration, and International Law

When the Wave Comes: Climate Change, Immigration, and International Law

“Climate refugees” will be the new face of immigration. Why isn’t international law prepared? This story is Part I of a two-part series on climate change, immigration and international law. By Genevieve Zingg, editor of RightsViews and an M.A. student in Human Rights Studies at Columbia University “Climate refugees”— broadly defined as people displaced across borders because of the sudden or long-term effects of climate change—are not a future phenomenon. Climate migration is already happening in a growing number of countries around the world: the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates that the impact and threat of climate-related hazards displaced an average of 21.5 million people annually between 2008 and 2015. In 2016 alone, climate and weather-related disasters displaced some 23.5 million people. Floods, droughts and storms are the primary causes of climate-related displacement. In the coming decades, severe droughts are expected to plague northern Mexico, with some studies predicting up to 6.7 million people migrating to the U.S. by 2080 as a result. High-intensity...
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Chitwan National Park & the Displacement of Tharu Peoples

Chitwan National Park & the Displacement of Tharu Peoples

By Erica Bower, student at Columbia College ____________________________________________________________________________ The following Photo Essay is an excerpt from a post I wrote on my blog while studying abroad through Cornell Nepal Study Program (CNSP) in the spring of 2013.  Our stay in Chitwan National Park was truly a once in a life time experience—a scene straight from the discovery channel. However, as incredible as this experience was from the perspective of a tourist, as a student of Human Rights and environmentally-induced displacement, Chitwan has an incredibly dark side. In many ways, the case of Chitwan is the inverse of most instances of the environment-displacement under study in Nepal given that efforts for environmental protection, rather than environmental degradation, have caused massive displacement. The brutal reality is that in order to create such a pristine National Park, the Nepali government has forcibly removed all of the Indigenous communities in the district. The Tharu peoples have lived in the Chitwan region for hundreds of years, and have a rich cultural history...
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