The idea of refugees is based on persecution of a group where this persecution is based on religion, race, ethnicity and basically your tribe as the wrong characteristics to live where the elite rule. This has gone on throughout history.
But climate change doesn't really discriminate on this basis yet potentially is a form of persecution on a group of people in some location that renders that location mostly unfit for human habitation.
How real is this?
More real than you think.
An initial way to think about this is put yourself in the position of a parent who has to send little children off to school and your local area is increasingly subject to extreme and life threating weather events such as catastrophic tornadoes or floods (like the Hurricane Harvey event of 2017). After there have been enough of these events that you have subject your children to, perhaps you want to relocate. A snapshot of the highly differential nature of the frequency of these events on a state by state basis is shown below.
So, for instance, perhaps parents located in Kentucky and Tennessee have had enough and want to relocate to a gray state - a safer state. Look our Oregon, here they come, what are you gonna do? Build a wall?
So changing climate might cause a large scale relocation of people because they can no longer function in their now changed environment. Many examples of the climate change stimulus for such migration are shown below.
But the main issue here is whether or not climate change refugees can, in fact, be granted refugee status:
So the issue becomes - Can one be persecuted by changing an unfavorable weather patterns?
The general conception of persecutation is that it comes in the form of a personal threat:
A threat to ones persone because of who she/he is
A threat of safety becasue of one's inclusion in a specific group.
Well those forms of persecution and direct and personal. Climate change is not that and therefore we need to introduce the concept of Impersonal Persecution.
An environmental disaster indiscriminately threatens a
specific group - those who live within the vicinity of the disaster
Therfore, does an "Act of God" translate in persecution, this time by a non-state actor?
Note the term "cumulative grouns" in the previous definition
So from the international convention of refugees, currently
climate change refugees have not status as refugees. But
such refugees are starting to exist
And some predict
a dire refugee future. And, as the Situation in Germany has shown the world, if the sheer number of refugees is too large, then serious backlash will occur. Where the fuck are they
supposed to go, Mars?
A better term for this new kind of refugess might be
Envrironmentally Displaced Persons (EDPs).
This is an umbrella term that better and more accurately describes the situation of climate change migrants.
The EDP label encompasses a larger vareity of circumstances like pollution induced displacement and disaster issues. The "red floods" in Hungary provides a good example of this:
However, much more development of this concept is needed to properly disaggregate the permanent EDPs (like your country, Kiribati, Maldives, Bangladesh) is now completely underwater from temporary displacement cause by a local disaster from which the local area can recover. But this area is going to be come increasingly prominent in the future. Do you give a shit about this, because these guys don't:
