#CIVIL STRIFE SERIES#

Migration has now become the reality for nearly one billion people. In the decades since the end of WWII, these rules have proved insufficient to capture the needs and motives of desperate people on the move [ These rules have been used to establish the legitimacy of an individual’s claim to be a refugee. The international legal regime created in the years after World War II, when at least 50 million refugees were stranded in Europe and uncounted millions rendered homeless in Africa and Asia, established rules and regulations relating to definitions and options for people who had left one country for any reason and desired entry into another. Population movements, both voluntary and involuntary, have been of interest to those in power and especially so in the last 400 years, coinciding with the period of great explorations, wars of extensive scale, accelerated population growth, and increased control of political borders. People have always been on the move in search of a better life and often simply for survival. Migration must be anticipated as a certainty, and thereby planned for and supported. Migration is now recognized not only as a consequence of instability but as an adaptation strategy to the changing climate. The proposal for a dedicated UN agency and a new Convention has largely come from academia and NGOs.

#CIVIL STRIFE SERIES#

Key stakeholders are in favor of using existing instruments to support a series of local, regional, and international arrangements to protect environmental migrants, most of whom will not cross international borders. We find that the post–World War II regime designed to receive European migrants has failed to address population movement in the latter half of the twentieth century fueled by economic want, globalization, opening (and then closing) borders, civil strife, and war. Worst-case scenario models that assume business-as-usual approaches to climate change predict that nearly one-third of the global population will live in extremely hot (uninhabitable) climates, currently found in less than 1% of the earth’s surface mainly in the Sahara.

It is now accepted that the changing climate will be a threat multiplier, will exacerbate the need or decision to migrate, and will disproportionately affect large already vulnerable sections of humanity. Recent FindingsĬlimate change is expected to displace vast populations from rural to urban areas, and when life in the urban centers becomes untenable, many will continue their onward migration elsewhere (Wennersten and Robbins 2017 Rigaud et al.

Growing evidence that changing environmental and climate conditions are triggers for displacement, whether voluntary or forced, adds a powerful argument for profound anticipatory engagement. In this article, we examine the intersection of human migration and climate change.

Civil strife