Authors: Dr. Cristina-Ioana Dragomir, Queen Mary University of London SPIR Visiting Researcher, faculty New York University, Global Liberal Studies
Anushka Akhtar, 2021 Queen Mary University of London, graduate in BSc. Economics and Politics
Ryan Bhadlawala 2020 Queen Mary University of London, graduate in BA. School of Political and International Relations
Environmental crises, migration, and internal displacement
As Dina
Ionesco, the Head of the Migration, Environment and Climate Change (MECC)
Division at the UN Migration Agency (IOM), argued in 2019, “Climate migrants have been
invisible for many years on the migration and climate debates”. The nexus of migration,
environment, and climate change has long had an impact, but rarely formally
discussed. In the meantime, the number of environmental migrants has expanded
rapidly. The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) 2019 report showed that 16.1 mil people have been
displaced due to weather concerns, among which 764,000 people were displaced
following droughts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meanwhile, predicts that people
affected by climate disasters will reach 200 million by 2050.
While environmental changes can affect people through sudden
events, disasters linked with climate change mostly take place over long periods of time. Adverse effects on crop production, as well as soil,
water, air, and overall quality of life, eventually force people to flee
for lack of livelihood. Environmental mobility is often linked to poverty,
racism, xenophobia, and sexism, making it even more difficult to account for
one reason that determined migration. Thus, it is often impossible to assess
how much internal displacement is due to the changing environment.
As
millions are forcibly displaced both within their own country and
internationally, the Nansen Initiative emphasizes the need for “an inter-governmental process to address
the challenges of cross-border displacement.” Nevertheless,
to dat, the terms needed to address these issues, like “climate migrants” and
“climate refugees” are neither widely politically accepted, nor do they have
legal power. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), while
admitting that “people may have a valid claim for refugee status” – where climate change interacts with armed
conflict and violence – does not endorse the term
“climate refugee,” but argues in favor of using “persons displaced in the
context of disasters and climate change.” IOM also rejects the term “climate refugee”,
and argues in favor of “climate
migrant,” which emphasizes
the importance of developing regular migration pathways, which“can provide relevant protection for
climate migrants and facilitate migration strategies in response to
environmental factors.”(IOM, 2019).
Lacking a legal name
creates ripple effects on the ground. It is already common knowledge that to
address migration we need to address its root-causes, as well as create
conditions for people’s return. But lacking a name
and a legal framework for those who move because of environmental concerns,
creates gaps in categorizations, counting, policies and programming.
For example, while the 2011 census in India states that there are about 450 million internal migrants, the percentage of those
who move due to environmental concerns is unknown. As a result of this lack of legal
categorization, and because of the slow onset of climate crises, environmental
Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs)/ migrants/refugees, are often
miscategorized as labor/ economic migrants, and (mis)treated accordingly.
Those who move due to the slow-onset of climate disasters,
are difficult to identify, and many of their stories are rarely heard. One of
them was Raghu Chikkanerele:
My name is Raghu Chikkanerele. I am from Mysore district, Priyapatna Taluka in Karnataka. I am from a farmer family, but I had migrated to Bangalore city about 7-8 years back. The reason for migration was that farming didn’t offer much economic opportunities. As a child, when I used to go to the farm, I used to see only trees in our farms. But by the time I grew up, the trees had been completely destroyed. So somewhere inside me I had this awareness that our nature is getting destroyed, our environment is getting destroyed which also includes our lives. (Courtesy of Isha Foundation)
The story of Mr. Raghu highlights how environmental changes
have affected one’s livelihood. It also brings to view how difficult it is to
analytically and politically distinguish between intersecting causes of
migration. Also, brings to view how environmental degradation took place over
his lifetime, forcing him to move from rural to urban areas in search of
livelihood, transforming him into a so-called: “labor migrant.”
Environmental degradation and water
challenges
Raghu’s situation is not exceptional. It is the story of
millions who are lost in namelessness. It is a story difficult to grasp in
studies of mobility. The recent (2019) droughts in South India affected large rivers in Tamil Nadu, like Cauvery which
flows over Tamil Nadu and Karnataka ultimately descending into the Eastern
Ghats. This raised international attention on looming climate disasters,
enabling more complex conversations on environmental concerns.
“It’s very painful to see our place
like this. How glorious it was before! Now it’s very painful to see Cauvery
like this. At that time, it was raining, crops were growing, and people were
eating. Now there are no crops, so people are working as laborers.” “When there
was abundant water in Cauvery, we had three harvests, gradually it reduced to
two harvests. Lately, we are struggling to make one harvest. Some 20 years
later, there won’t be water in Cauvery at all. It will become fully dry. There
won’t be any water to drink at all”- shared
farmers in South India (Isha Outreach, 2021)
Recent climate changes in the Cauvery Basin in South India
have created disastrous effects on both the environment and communities,
leading to over 11,000 annual suicides by debt-ridden farmers, as well as massive
internal displacement from southern states of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu to Mumbai and Delhi.
But these climate induced migrations are largely misrecognized; those who are
forced to leave their places because of environmental disasters, are typically
labeled as “labor migrants,” and thrown into the larger unaccounted Indian mobile
population. Faced with low wages and lack of permanent job security, they
become particularly vulnerable to uncertainty and shocks in the urban labor
system. Furthermore, their lack of urban networks and opportunities diminish their resilience and
adaptability to natural disasters and extreme climate conditions. This often
results in a precarious process,
which places migrants in a state
of extreme vulnerability, making them more susceptible to highly exploitative
work conditions, health risks, and marginalization and the risks of climate change. Their lack of categorization as
climate IDPs or refugees, makes them invisible in policies, programs,
subsidies, and schemes that could support them.
Policy and civil society context
Lacking institutional support, often people took matters
into their own-hands and tried to address the root-cases of their migration by
engaging with the land:
“My name is Diwakar. I am from a
farmer’s family. My father had to migrate to Bangalore to work. I then got
married and started my life there. In this Coronavirus pandemic instead of
roaming in Bangalore, I just decided to migrate back to my native place
‘Kurubara Halli’, Karnataka to do something in agriculture with my father.
(…) As I have an interest in this field I came and planted Chilli. Recently,
I got to know about the Cauvery Calling project and I planted around 200 to 250
saplings. (…) I seized this opportunity to develop and invest in my farm and
the trees will be like an additional security net in these unpredictable times.
(…) This part of the district is very dry and we have almost no shade. By
growing plants and trees the atmosphere will become cool, and we are hoping we
will get rain as well. I urge each and every village to come and take saplings
and create green earth and should help nature and our next generation.” (Diwakar, 2020; courtesy ofIsha Foundation)
Believing that their engagement with the land would address
environmental and economic concerns, people like Diwakar engage in agroforestry
as a long-term investment. These individual endeavors have also been
complemented by actions at the civil society level. Thus, large scale
agroforestry programs have been a part of the
decades-long effort to reinvigorate India’s soil, forests, environment and
economic development. The 2014 National Agroforestry Policy sets up a National Agroforestry
Mission to “achieve
sustainability in agriculture while optimizing its productivity and mitigating
climate change impact” (Indian Ministry of Agriculture, 6 February 2014). Similar programs have been launched in the states of Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka
(and more)
aiming for the plantation of over a hundred million saplings, hoping to generate income,
address the environmental crisis, and economic constraints.
Like other
Indian rivers, the Cauvery river mentioned above, has lost over 40% of groundwater in the last
70 years and 87% of the basin’s original tree cover, causing drought. As a result, the Cauvery Calling project was launched by Isha Outreach to scale up their two
decades of grassroot work supporting reforestation efforts in India’s degraded areas, to raise awareness
about the country’s drying rivers and to limit disasters and displacement linked with environmental
change. The twelve-year
project aims to support farmers like Diwakar
and Raghu in the Cauvery basin to plant 2.42 billion trees in their
farmlands. Its goals
are to improve soil health by replenishing
organic content, reviving the river and groundwater level by increasing water
retention by an estimated 40%, and increasing farmers’ income by 300-800% in 5
to 7 years. This project is headed by Isha Foundation, an organization
whose leader Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev is well-known for “marrying” spiritual and environmental endeavors:
“Cauvery basin amounts to about
83,000 square kilometers. We want to convert 1/3 of the Cauvery into
Agroforestry. If you do this, the 40% depletion that’s happened in the river
waters will come back; the river will flow once again, farmers will be rich and
well to do. (…) I want to officiate the marriage of
economy and ecology. Only then we will produce something significant. Ecology
is not against the economic well-being of the people. Economy and ecology have
to go hand in hand” (Sadhguru, 2020)
Since 1998, the foundation reported that over 5.2 million saplings
have been planted, by approximately 107,000 farmers, integrating Cauvery Calling in larger global projects with convergent environmental and economic aims: “If the farmers have an investment in the land, they will not leave
their investment” mentioned Sadhguru (personal interview, Dr.
Dragomir, 2020) referring to the
investment in trees on their land as ways of curbing displacement and ensuring sustainability.
The project mobilized people on the ground, but to create a
viable sustainable path, efforts such as those of Cauvery Calling need to be
furthered at the political, economic and scientific levels. Planting trees is
not a one-size-fits-all solution, but it is nevertheless an important step in addressing
both environmental concerns and human rights. And it creates the possibility of
bringing together different actors across society locally, nationally and internationally. As the UNCCD Executive Secretary,
Ibrahim Thiaw said in September 2020,
reforestation brings back opportunities, jobs, and reasons to stay for
millions, and “Cauvery Calling could be a large scale project that helps
improve the living conditions of most vulnerable populations while
rehabilitating the land sustaining all of us.”
Civil society initiatives, such as Cauvery Calling could
mitigate the consequences of environmental degradation. The grassroot approach
is effective in spreading awareness and mobilizing the public. Institutions
like Isha Outreach successfully build trust and rapport with local farming
communities, which enables a strong alliance at the ground level. However, such
organizations cannot bear the responsibility of replenishing the environment
alone. Their endeavors need to be bolstered by top-down support from
international organizations, government policies, and capital investment to
mitigate pollution. Moreover, if our goal is to address root-causes of forced
migration due to environmental concerns, these programs need to be empowered by legislative tools
that clearly define those affected by climate disasters.
A path forward: in need of a name
Programs such as Cauvery Calling, Trillion Trees, and even The 2014 National Agroforestry Policy do not address migration and internal displacement
directly. Their work has a larger scope, and while they might tangentially help
environmentally affected migrants, they rarely directly touch their lives. This
situation is due to the mis-recognition at the political level of those
displaced by environmental crises. Their migration stories are often lost in
the background, and rarely linked to environmental crises.
The terms “climate refugee,” “climate IDP,” and “climate
migrant” are imperfect by far. They remind us of a long legacy of oppression
and colonization, intertwined with religious legacy and with an international
hierarchy of power, that together (re)establish the “savior” role of the (typically) Western countries. While the
lexicon of migration needs to come under serious scrutiny and reimagination,
accepting these as operational concepts and legal terms, would help address and
mitigate the human cost of the climate crisis.
As long as we do not have legally recognized categorization
of climate migrants, refugees, IDPs, for those affected by climate disasters,
people like Mr. Raghu and Mr. Diwakar will fall through the cracks of policies,
forgotten by policy makers, unacknowledged by international programs, and left
to make ends meet with the help of civil society. It is thus imperative to
create a complex lexicon that includes environmental IDPs, refugees and
migrants, one that is accepted and implemented holistically, which will enable
focus on those who move because of climate change.
Special thanks for Isha
Foundation for their interviews on the ground, and to Dr. Rowan Lubbock for
making our work better.
