The concept of 'environmental refugees’, or 'climate refugees’, has been progressively abandoned, as having no legal basis. I want to argue that there are good reasons to use the term.
The difficulty of isolating environmental factors from other drivers of migration still exists but no-one now seems to deny their importance as a driving force of displacement. The concept of 'environmental migration’ is now a common feature in migration studies, and the number of research projects, workshops and conferences on this topic has vastly expanded in recent years.
Some geologists advocate the use of the term 'Anthropocene’ to signal a new geological era, the Age of Humans, where we have become the major force of transformation of the Earth. This is a formidable political statement. And it is also a statement for the social sciences: that the world – the social and political organisation of the Earth – can no longer be thought of separately from the Earth. Both the world and the Earth need to be conceived of as one global system; geopolitics is no longer about power over territories, about land and sea, but about the Earth as a whole. Geopolitics is transformed into the politics of the Earth.
But there’s another way to see this. We also need to be aware of the de-politicisation of subjects that this can imply. Even if humans have indeed replaced natural drivers of changes as the principal agents of changes on this planet, most humans are actually the victims of these changes, and not their agents.
Migration as a commodity
As the concept of 'environmental migration’ gained currency, migration was less perceived as a decision of last resort that people take when they have exhausted all possible options for adaptation in their place of origin. Many scholars, including myself, had insisted that this depiction of migrants did not match reality, and that migration was often a resource used by migrants to deal with environmental changes. We insisted that migrants should not be perceived as resourceless victims, paying the price of climate change, but rather as resourceful agents of their own adaptation. We argued that migration could indeed prove to be a powerful adaptation strategy whereby migrants could diversify their incomes, alleviate environmental pressures in the region of origin, send remittances, or simply put themselves and their families out of harm’s way. And this view was soon embraced by many institutions and organisations. It even made its way into the international negotiations on climate change. In 2010, the Cancun Adaptation Framework spoke of “measures to enhance understanding, coordination and cooperation with regard to climate change induced displacement, migration and planned relocation (…)”.
For the complete article ,please see Forced Migration Review.
