Researchers have suggested developing norms to identify people who migrate from their homes to other countries owing to climate change. In the absence of an international law to address the issue, they suggest defining who an environmental migrant is.
A faculty in Department of Humanities and Social Sciences from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Sudhir C. Rajan and Sujatha Byravan, an independent researcher, have come up with a definition for an environmental migrant. Such a person is forced to leave home for reasons of climate or other environmental change. The researchers designate them as climate exiles.
With no coherent institutional and legal framework currently at the international and national level to protect the rights of climate exiles, there is an urgent requirement to come up with a law to protect them, the researchers say.
Vulnerable zones based on scientific evidence include low-level states; countries with low-level delta regions; areas facing desertification or flooding; hill slopes subject to erosion.
The researchers say the prevailing international laws are inadequate to protect persons forcibly displaced and suggest that asylum seekers from vulnerable zones be absorbed in host countries in proportion to their greenhouse gas emissions.
The researchers have proposed a normative framework to address such migration in their article “Cross border migration on a warming planet: a policy framework’ in peer-reviewed journal Wires Climate Change.“
Mr. Rajan cited the large-scale migration of coastal residents of Bangladesh to Dhaka due to monsoon flooding and cyclones caused by rising sea levels. Dhaka now had a large number of slums. According to him for over a decade, millions of people have been forcibly displaced from some of the poorest countries due to climate change. “If their countries are no longer viable homes through no fault of their own, then the international community has a moral responsibility to provide refuge,” he said.
Ms. Byravan said there was a need to ensure that people from countries that have emitted very little greenhouse gases are not left fending for themselves. To argue their point they cite a report by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre that in 2020, as many as 40.5 million people were newly displaced and 30 million among them were forcibly displaced due to weather-related disasters.
