franknews

Climate Change and Displacement

by Won Jang

June 13, 2019

Won Jang is a writer and researcher focusing on humanitarian affairs, UN sanctions and Korean politics. He worked on refugee issues for various organizations based in Egypt, Jordan and South Korea. He holds a Master of International Affairs degree from Columbia SIPA.

“…Gilgamesh sat with his chin on his knees till the sleep which flows over all mankind lapped over him. Then, at midnight, sleep left him; he got up and said to his friend, ‘Did you call me, or why did I wake? Did you touch me, or why am I terrified? Did not some god pass by, for my limbs are numb with fear? My friend, I saw a third dream and this dream was altogether frightful. The heavens roared and the earth roared again, daylight failed and darkness fell, lightnings flashed, fire blazed out, the clouds lowered, they rained down death. Then the brightness departed, the fire went out, and all was turned to ashes fallen about us. Let us go down from the mountain and talk this over, and consider what we should do.'”

-Epic of Gilgamesh-

Climate change and displacement, or climate change displacement, has become a buzz-phrase in the media as well as policy circles. According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, an average of 24 million people has been displaced by catastrophic weather disasters each year since 2008. Weather-related hazards caused 87.27% of all internal displacements associated with disasters globally from 2008 to 2018, whereas geophysical events such as earthquakes and tsunamis, which receive more attention, made up only 12.73%. The future looks even bleaker, as a World Bank report predicts that climate change could force 140 million people to move within their countries’ borders by 2050.

People are already being uprooted from their homes and forced to find better living conditions because of climate change. It is a reality that the world has to contend with. Then what do the numerous policy and legal frameworks say about the relationship between climate change and displacement, and how should they evolve to respond to the needs of millions who will be affected?

Do climate change refugees exist?

A cursory look at the UNHCR website is enough to find the agency’s position on the oft-cited term ‘climate change refugees’. It states in bold, black letters –

“The term “climate refugee” is often used in the media and other discussions. However, this phrase can cause confusion, as it does not exist in international law.”

As summarized by Professor James Hathaway, an internationally-renown scholar in international refugee law, to be recognized as a refugee one must fulfill six criteria, in accordance with the 1951 Refugee Convention. They are:

1. the person has to be outside his or her country;

2. due to a genuine risk;

3. of the infliction of serious harm;

4. resulting from a failure of state protection;

5. which risk is causally connected to a protected form of civil or political status; and

6. the person must be in need of and deserving of protection.

So far, no one has ever successfully claimed refugee status due to climate change displacement from a government or national court. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) who stay within their country do not qualify and even when a person or group of persons have crossed borders, the required nexus to civil or political status ('race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion' per the 1951 Refugee Convention does not include climate change. Furthermore, it is often tricky to prove genuine risk, serious harm and/or failure of state protection for claimants who say they are refugees because climate change makes their homes uninhabitable.

Ioane Teitiota from Kiribati fought an uphill legal battle in New Zealand for two years to become the world’s first climate change refugee. He claimed that the was entitled to be recognized as a refugee on the basis of changes to his environment in Kiribati caused by sea-level-rise associated with climate change. However, the Immigration and Protection Tribunal ruled that the claim to persecution must be linked to one of the five civil or political grounds stipulated in the Refugee Convention, and his did not. Subsequently, he took his case to the High Court, Court of Appeal and eventually the highest court in New Zealand, the Supreme Court, which dismissed Teitiota’s appeal and upheld the decisions of the lower courts. In September 2015 he was deported back to his home country with his wife and children.

Screen Shot 2019 06 12 at 1.17.36 PM

_{The Guardian}

As Professor Jane McAdam, a leading expert on climate change and forced migration, points out, between 2000 and 2015 there were more than 20 cases in Australia and New Zealand where people from Tuvalu and Kiribati argued that they should receive refugee protection from climate change impacts, but all failed. In 2014, New Zealand’s Immigration and Deportation Tribunal court ruled that Sigeo Alesana from Tuvalu and his family should be granted legal residency in New Zealand on humanitarian grounds, in which climate change impact in Tuvalu was one of the factors.

However, Alesana is not a climate refugee per se, as the court considered other facts such as his strong ties to New Zealand and an elderly mother who needed medical care. Hence the tally for legal recognition of a climate refugee still stands at zero, as courts and judges are hesitant to “open the legal floodgates” and be the first to create a legal precedent. Meanwhile, climate change and legal experts have differing opinions on whether or not the definition of refugee in the Refugee Convention should be expanded to include involuntary cross-border movements induced by climate change.

Non-refugees and regional responses.

Dina Ionesco, the Head of the Migration, Environment and Climate Change (MECC) Division at the UN Migration Agency (IOM) recently wrote an article titled Let’s Talk About Climate Migrants, Not Climate Refugees. She says that reducing the issue of migration in the climate change to the status of “climate refugees” misses certain aspects of human mobility in climate change, and lays out 10 points to think about. In brief, they are:

Climate migration is mainly internal
Migration is not necessarily forced, especially for very slow onset processes migration is still a matter of choice.
Isolating environment/climatic reasons is difficult, in particular from humanitarian, political, social, conflict or economic ones.
Creating a special refugee status for climate change related reasons might unfortunately have the opposite effects of what is sought as a solution: it can lead to the exclusion of categories of people who are in need of protection.
Opening the 1951 Refugee Convention might weaken the refugee status which would be tragic given the state of our world where so many people are in need of protection because of persecution and ongoing conflicts.
Creating a new convention might be a terribly lengthy political process and countries might not have an appetite for it. Many responses can come from migration management and policy as highlighted already in the 2011 International Dialogue on Migration and the recently adopted Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.
Climate migration discussions should not lose their focus on preventive measures: the key objective of our generation is to invest in climate and environmental solutions for our planet so that people will not have to leave their homes in a forced way in the future.
IOM encourages the full use of all already existing bodies of laws and instruments, both hard and soft law in humanitarian, human rights and refugee law, instruments on internal displacement, disaster management, legal migration and others.
Human rights-based approaches are key for addressing climate migration: states of origin bear the primary responsibility for their citizens’ protection even if indeed their countries have not been the main contributors to global warming.
Regular migration pathways can provide relevant protection for climate migrants and facilitate migration strategies in response to environmental factors.

Whether or not one agrees with all of her points, they provide a useful breakdown of the basic facts around climate migration and a foundation for further discussion.

As Ionesco mentions, most climate migration is internal and thus by nature cannot be considered under the Refugee Convention. More ‘progressive’ regional documents have appeared since the Refugee Convention, namely the 1984 Cartagena Declaration on Refugees and the 2009 Kampala Convention by the African Union. The Cartagena Declaration uses a definition of refugees wider than the one found in the Refugee Convention – along with the elements from the Refugee Convention, it recommends the additional definition of “persons who have fled their country because their lives, safety or freedom have been threatened by generalized violence, foreign aggression, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or other circumstances which have seriously disturbed public order.” The Kampala Convention explicitly mentions climate change and that its state parties are to “take measures to protect and assist persons who have been internally displaced due to natural or human made disasters, including climate change.”.

Despite the soaring, well-meaning rhetoric contained in these documents, they have their inherent limitations. The Cartagena Declaration is a non-binding statement that Latin American countries are not obligated to follow, although parts of the declaration have been incorporated in 14 countries. The Kampala Convention is a legal treaty but applies to only IDPs in Africa. A more recent document from 2018, the Global Compact on Refugees restrains itself by saying: “While not in themselves causes of refugee movements, climate, environmental degradation and natural disasters increasingly interact with the drivers of refugee movements.” Its migration counterpart, the Global Compact on Migration calls upon states to develop adaptation and resilience strategies to the adverse effects of climate change.

But as both Compacts are quick to remind you in their very first paragraphs, none of their proclaimed commitments are legally binding.

What’s next?

So, the question remains – what can be done to mitigate and resolve climate change displacement There are a number of legal and policy proposals on the table, some being implemented to various extents while others are only being paid lip service to.

A new treaty specifically on climate change displacement seems unlikely as Ionesco and other experts say. The two Compacts on migration and refugees, the final versions of which were criticized for just creating more discussions and not enough action, were during the negotiation process subject to several disagreements by states who were unwilling to sign even a non-binding document. One can only imagine the level of acrimony and discord if ever the opportunity to negotiate an international treaty on climate change displacement arose. Expanding the definition of ‘refugee’ to include climate change displacement, while noble in its aspirations, would mean the same thing in the eyes of governments who don’t want to take on more obligations when it comes to refugees.

Simply put, the political will to use legal instruments to protect those affected by climate change simply does not exist among states.

Not to mention, many states do not even implement properly their Refugee Convention obligations, which they have signed on through ratification. Thus, the legal option must be ruled out for now.

More can be done by governments at the national policy level.

Cliched as it may sound, addressing the root causes of climate change is the most fundamental solution.

Implementing strategies that strengthen climate resilience, regulating greenhouse gas emissions by corporations, increasing the use of renewable sources of energy, using water resources more wisely and other policies can in the long-term contribute to mitigating climate change displacement. Academia can do its part by doing more multidisciplinary and rigorous research into the relationship between climate change and displacement. Governments can also take direct action to respond to climate change displacement that is ongoing. New Zealand’s plan to start an experimental visa for climate change-induced displaced persons was heralded as a positive step in this direction, but a spokesperson for Immigration New Zealand recently revealed that this idea had been more or less scrapped.

In the end, refugee policies, whether climate change-related or not, are primarily state-driven. Governments must step up to protect the rights, physical security and dignity of those displaced by climate change. They cannot afford to be simply reactive, as climate change is a phenomenon that already happening and is accelerating day by day. While not in the context of climate change displacement, throughout history there have been examples of countries that took a proactive attitude toward refugees such as when Canada received 7,000 Ugandan refugees in 1972 after Idi Amin forced them out. States and other actors such as international organizations and regional bodies need to take bold action to resolve one of the most pressing issues of our time and ensure that no one leaves their home, community or country because of climate change.

Reflections on Money

by Kianga Daverington

September 1, 2020

This essay, written by Kianga Daverington of Daverington PLLC , was originally published in January 2020. The piece as been condensed for clarity.

Money is not a physical object like a coin, a bar of gold or a dollar bill. Money is at its core, a technology. It is a human invention designed to solve a specific set of human problems. Consider money, perhaps, in a new way. Think of money as a system for capturing time.

Time is the one thing we each have that is absolutely finite. We are born, we die, and the dash in between is all the time we have.

Think of production. We can usually produce more of some good by adding people to a task (also known as “WORK”). But we are still constrained by time. Whatever we produce is still limited by the amount of humans that can be organized to go into that production. Each of us possesses a limited amount of time available to us individually, so we need to convince or coerce others to add their time to ours if we want to achieve more than we can alone.

Out of this imperative, nations are born.

The most important quality of any particular form of money is how well it preserves the value of time over time. Can you buy the same amount of stuff or more in the future than you can buy today? If yes, congratulations - your money is accumulating time for you and future generations while you relax on the beach. If it takes more and more of a unit of money to buy the same amount of time in the future, well then I’m sorry, but that unit of money is getting weaker and weaker. It’s losing value or said another way – it’s losing purchasing power. The longer you hold it, the less it buys.

In a way, by purchasing goods and services, you are purchasing time. Every product and every service requires time to make and time to deliver - your time and/or someone else’s. The price therefore reflects the collective value of all the time put in. Money is a way we exchange time and move it around from where it is valued less to where it is valued more.

This is where prosperity comes from. It comes out of how well a society, collectively and each person, spends its time. How much time is spent creating and making? How much time is spent consuming? If we make more than we consume, we have something left over called wealth. If we consume more than we make, we are left with debt. You can’t consume what you don’t have, unless someone extends credit. Where does this “credit” come from? Basically –it’s made up.

Too much credit or debt eventually collapses and everyone is mixed up in the collapse.

If we understand that a unit of money represents a unit of time, and we understand time is limited, then a unit in a system of money with unlimited supply cannot have any value. This is the problem we are facing today with the world’s money supply. The supply of money in the world is increasing exponentially as central banks create money by giving loans to national governments, which is where our money comes from.

Our entire world financial system is a powder keg of debt.

National currencies today are known as fiat money, a currency without intrinsic value that has been given its power to be used as money by a government that says it is money by regulation. Wikipedia says, “Fiat money does not have use value, and has value only because a government maintains its value, or because parties engaging in exchange agree on its value.” Well said, Wiki.

A government’s job of maintaining the value of its national money boils down to a confidence game. On what basis do the people who use that government’s money believe it has value?

What happens to the money and those who hold it when the foundation of that belief begins to crumble?

The Four Courses of the Apocalypse

by Joyce E. Chaplin

May 3, 2020

Joyce E. Chaplin (PhD and MA Johns Hopkins, BA Northwestern) is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. You can find her on Twitter here.

In our state of emergency, most Americans want to taste deliverance when they eat. Their wish is important. Humans mask their bare need to eat with culture: customs about when food can be taken, manners for how to consume it, equipment to prepare and serve it correctly, and shibboleths to restrict what can be eaten in the first place. Stockpiling, ordering take-out, gardening, pickling, cooking, baking—by expressing food preferences in a pandemic, US citizens demonstrate what they hope for and fear. What follows is a four-course menu based on popular quarantine options, all of them revealing that Americans hanker after normality. But what is normal? Life before COVID-19 had serious problems. #AloneTogether is a hopeful tag for social distancing. When we’re all, by definition, stress eating in various states of aloneness, are we also sustaining a United States that must, now and in the future, somehow hang together?

4 G 30 10A

We’ll start our meal with sourdough. On Twitter, ongoing convo about bubbly mothers is not about extroverted female parents. Mothers (or starters) are thick, fermented cultures of lactobacilli that, instead of baker’s yeast, leaven sourdough. Carefully cultivated, in jar or crock or Tupperware, starters look like loose, frothy dough. You measure some out for a bake, then tenderly feed the remainder some flour and water. True sourdough is vegan and is one of the world’s oldest foods, with each lactobacillus strain native to a specific place on Earth.

Sourdough is undeniably American. It was the sturdy fare of many a young man (or woman) who followed the call to go west, to wherever the urban supply line of brewer’s yeast gave out, whenever baking powder wasn’t yet commercially available. In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books, sourdough biscuits are the daily bread. Gold miners ate those biscuits, too, also sourdough flapjacks, fixed from treasured starters. Boudin Bakery claims (credibly) to be the longest continuously operating business in San Francisco. It was founded in 1849, when a Frenchman opened a commercial bakery, using a Forty-Niner’s sourdough mother, which the company says it’s tended ever since. (Bite into Boudin and you’re chewing on something roughly 170 years old.) Onward the bubbly mothers went, to the Klondike, site of the next gold rush. The “Sourdoughs,” as Alaska miners were called, are commemorated in Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush (1925). This is the movie in which the Little Tramp and his cabin mate, snowbound together (sound familiar?), get so hungry that Chaplin’s character boils and dines on his boot, and then his roomie seeks to dine on him.

Alas, it’s this vignette, with one starved Sourdough hallucinating that the other is a tasty chicken and chasing him with an axe, that I cannot forget amid the pleasant twittering about rustic boules. What do people think they’re doing when they bake bread at home, one loaf at a time, or even two by two, as if handily adapting ancient divine advice for surviving an impending disaster? Historically, people didn’t do that. Baking whole loaves of bread consumes lots of fuel. The ancient Near East, ancestral land of small-grains like wheat and bread baked from them, lost most of its trees in ancient times—Lebanon and Egypt once had forests of cedar and pine. As timber dwindled, firing an oven got expensive. Quick-cooking flatbreads were what people made at home. In the tree-depleted old world, commercial bakers had to figure the cost of fuel into baking multiple loaves of bread in a large oven. For a fee, a baker might make room for household loaves, or even other cooking, for people who couldn’t afford much fuel. One way or another, it could take a village to bake a loaf of bread. In North America, however, settlers found plentiful wood—great for baking—until they cleared the woodlands nearest the settlements. At that point, they needed a Monsieur Boudin to bake them something other than quick pancakes.

I don’t think most of social media’s sourdough bakers know that their re-enactment of American pioneer autonomy defies a bigger history in which daily bread evoked connection to others, if not dependence on them.

Frankly, American sourdough smells like settler-colonialism, a fragrance of biscuits and flapjacks rising above the log cabins and mining camps that steadily eroded Indigenous land rights while cutting down trees on those lands.

It’s a myth that pioneering individuals or families settled the West—the federal government did that, through policies that favored the spread of white population. The ability to own and maintain a freestanding household (with an oven) is still a legacy of US racial and class privileges.

Maybe, at this point, you’d like a drink with your meal? Lots of other people are having one, or three. The marketing research firm Nielsen found that, compared to a year ago, March 2020 showed a 75 perecent increase in spirits sold, a 66 percent increase in wine sales, 42 percent for beer, and a spike of 243 percent in online alcohol sales generally. (March 2020 cannabis sales also soared in states where it’s legal to buy.)

That’s self-medicating to the point of disaster. An editorial in the Boston Globe pleaded for a ban on alcohol sales during the emergency shutdown, pointing out booze’s role in rising rates of domestic abuse. Under quarantine, vulnerable individuals are miserably close to abusers and distanced from helpers. The nuclear family was supposed to have been cleansed of the worst residues of ancient patriarchal rights. We’re now engaged in a painful test of how much of that work was done. Post-quarantine rates of divorce, (re)marriage, and births will reveal collective confidence, or not, in the American nuclear family, temporarily returned, as it has been, to a state of snowbound homesteading.

Take cheer, for the moment, in our second course, crab rangoon. Aggregate Uber Eats data about early-April deliveries identified this as the nation’s third most popular dish, trailing french fries and pad thai. What is it? Bits of crab (or imitation crab) and seasonings are blended into cream cheese. Dollops of the tangy mass are wrapped in wonton pastry, then deep fried. The crisp bundles are typically served with a sweet dipping sauce. If you think this sounds like bar food, you’re right. Crab Rangoon seems to have been invented at Trader Vic’s, the post-World-War II tiki bar that also claims to have invented the mai tai. Crab rangoon has no connection to Yangon in Myanmar. The fried parcels belong to the chop-suey canon of Chinese-American foods, the knowingly false concoctions that mingle something authentically Asian (like wonton pastry) with some kind of Americana (“Philadelphia” cream cheese), often featuring an expensive treat, like crab.

Is this cultural appropriation? Maybe. Though it was Chinese immigrants themselves who shrewdly sold chop suey to white customers to ensure their grandchildren would never have to work in restaurants. Are crab rangoons culinary abominations? Well, what isn’t? It’s not as if ballpark beer and hotdogs greatly resemble the lager and wurst homesick German immigrants tried to recreate in the United States. Let’s give chop suey and crab rangoon the benefit of the doubt, regarding them as gateway dishes for the timid Euro-American palate. Without those dubious chimeras, would pad thai have become the second most ordered thing on Uber Eats in 2020?

The Uber data proves another of crab rangoon’s essential qualities: it’s not home-cooking; food service workers make it. When it arrives with its jewel-tone dipping sauce, it’s proof that you didn’t have to cook. Even if you buy frozen crab rangoon, somebody else got it ready for you to heat up. For this second course in our pandemic dinner, it still takes a village. One commentator on the Uber Eats data wondered (with studied innocence) what chicken tikka masala and “crag [sic] Rangoon” could possibly be? Sadly, some Americans don’t enjoy any Asian cuisine. (Perhaps they also call COVID-19 the “kung flu.”) The “crag” for crab was probably just a typo, b and g are neighbors on the keyboard, after all. But that mistake conceals the dish’s inherent sociability. No one orders crab rangoon from a distant crag where they can’t get a phone signal. Just remember: if you order anything, add a tip. Everyone in food service is tired, underpaid, and risking infection.

I hope you’re not full, because here comes the main course and it’s Spam. This is neither home-made nor ordered from a restaurant. Each can of Spam yields a dense, pink, rounded-edge oblong that can be sliced or diced, then baked, fried, or microwaved. It predates the microwave, invented in 1937 by the Hormel Company to sell pork shoulder during the Great Depresssion. “Spam” vaguely promised shoppers some nice spiced ham. Spam hit the big-time during World War II, when the US government bought it in bulk to feed servicemen. It remains popular on Pacific islands, including Hawai’i, that have had large US military bases.

Spam is newly coveted because it’s shelf stable, a prepper protein the Greatest Generation bequeathed to us. It joins several related revivals. Backyard gardening and home canning are also on the rise, just as victory gardens and adaptation to food rationing supported war efforts in the early twentieth century. It must be said, however, that today’s prepping also descends from the bleaker survivalism of the Cold War. In the 1950s and 1960s, Spam-stocked bomb shelters were not so much parts of a collective program to defeat the enemy as they were ways to outsurvive one’s neighbors. Nicely browned, Spam has a crisp keep-calm-and-carry on quality. But also a Dr. Strangelove sizzle.

Spam sales are part of pandemic enthusiasm for animal products, even those produced from factory farms—even though we should know better. Spam is a branded product. People have heard of it even if they’ve never eaten it. It’s the antithesis of farm-to-table, also of vegetarianism or veganism. It’s not just processed food, but highly processed—and cruelly so. Spam is extracted from hogs, a highly sentient and social species. They are bred in metal cages with concrete floors and slaughtered on an industrial scale. Producing protein this way is inhumane and environmentally unsustainable. And yet meat is a high priority for many Americans. On April 28^th, President Trump signed an executive order to declare meat processing plants “critical infrastructure.” He is indifferent to the hogs, and to the meat-industry workers who now cannot practice social distancing. Who cares about them? Recent analysis of the most-Googled recipes in each US state showed that iterations of hamburger or ground beef were the top choice in twelve states, chicken in five, pork in three more—twenty of our fifty states seek animal flesh. But whatever industrial meat’s current merits as comfort-food, we cannot plan to subsist on it in the decades to come.

Time for dessert? Maybe you’re trying to avoid “the COVID 15,” the fifteen extra pounds stress-eating is packing around some self quarantiners. How about a healthy orange? Fruit isn’t a bad choice. Even grapes or apples, which are little more than bags of fructose and water, with trace vitamins, are better than actual candy.

But, first, give thanks to the people who pick your fruit and to the natural world that makes all food possible. Agricultural piece workers have unenviable jobs that poorly match the attractive pyramids of bounty in the produce section. This isn’t one of those (vanishingly rare) problems that the pandemic has made better. Most US farm workers are undocumented migrants, to whom many labor regulations never apply. They are now, in the pandemic, categorized as “essential workers,” out of concern to maintain the food supply. But this means the workers can’t stay home, either to recuperate if they’re sick or avoid people they know are infected—and those two factors feed on each other, even out in the fresh air of a field of antioxidant-rich strawberries. If we want to continue to enjoy berries or oranges, we’ll need to reconsider the compromised labor conditions for agricultural workers in an increasingly exclusionist United States.

Also, whether we want to think about it right now or not, climate change is threatening most crops, including those, like citrus, that are Goldilocks-picky about their temperature and rainfall.

Now, back to those antioxidants. Many fruits (and vegetables) have super-nutritional qualities. These are critical for maintaining health. Your body will disintegrate from scurvy if you cease to ingest Vitamin C; the known range of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and micro-nutrients have similar prophylactic functions. Together, they boost the immune system’s defense against infections, including COVID-19.

But fruit alone doesn’t ward off contagious diseases. We also need immunizations, which shield individuals from horrors like smallpox while giving populations the herd immunity that prevents outbreaks of measles, whooping cough, and the like. Anti-vaxxers, the people who think inoculating children creates autism, preach instead the efficacy of diet. In parallel, right-wing survivalists are peddling pandemic decoctions of colloidal silver. Silver has antibacterial properties; these have no effect on viruses like COVID-19, however. Nor will an orange a day truly keep the doctor away. If anti-vaxxing survives the pandemic, can anything kill it? More to the point, if civic intelligence about science could also be described in terms of herd immunity, at what point might we be collectively doomed by the ignorance of a minority?

I offer a fortune cookie at meal’s end. And the fortune reads:

Eat wisely—#AloneTogether is forever.

frank news is dedicated to storytelling across all mediums. A space for debate, discussion, and connection between experts and a curious readership. Topics are presented monthly with content delivered daily.

Founders

Newsletter

Issues

Categories