Fourteenth International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Climate change is a global problem but it’s solutions are still restricted by national borders. Local and national policies often remain unbending and unresponsive to current climate realities. Nothing demonstrates this more than the issue of climate displacement and migration. Everyday across the world, thousands of people are displaced by climate shocks like floods and droughts and are increasingly threatened by slow-onset disasters like sea-level rise. Yet, when people flee for their safety and subsistence crossing national borders, most are denied refuge. Despite growing evidence showing that climate change is driving internal and cross-border displacement, presently neither national immigration laws nor International refugee laws specifically recognize or fully protect people who cross international boarders seeking refuge or asylum due to the effects of climate change. Those who make sometimes dangerous journeys to cross boarders are relegated to desolate borderlands or repatriated back to the disaster sites they fled. So why is it that borders remain so closed off to climate migration? And what does the future hold for the displaced in limbo between boarders and borderlands? Cross/interdisciplinary perspectives that consider the ecologies of human mobility, have something to say. Pulling from case studies on environmental history, archaeology and political ecology, this paper surveys the state of human mobility in the anthropocene - where we are and where we are heading. It contemplates the big history of the displaced in relationship to the rigidity of border sovereignty, and the role cross-disciplinary discourse plays in re-humanizing the international system.

Presenters

Christopher Graham
Research Fellow, Center for Peace, Democracy and Development , University of Massachusetts Boston, Massachusetts, United States