Call It What It Is: A Global Migration Shift From Climate, Not a Migrant or Refugee Crisis

It's crazy to call someone a refugee if they are fleeing because their life is in danger from war, and not if their life is in danger because of lack of affordable food because of drought caused by global warming, or those who land is flooded by rising waters.

http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/08/28/call-it-what-it-global-migration-shift-climate-not-migrant-or-refugee-crisis

by
Jeff Biggers
Aug. 28, 2015

Hundreds more died off the coast of Libya today, on the heels of 71 deaths of migrants trapped in the back of a truck near Vienna, Austria. At the same time, NASA officials just warned that rising global sea levels from climate change could affect coastal regions, including 150 million residents in Asia who lived "within a meter from the sea."

While news organizations and policymakers around the world wrestle with calling displaced persons "refugees" or "migrants"or "asylum-seekers," a far more dangerous precedence of denial over a looming global shift of populations largely from climate change is taking place.

There is not a migrant or refugee crisis. We're in the midst of a global migration shift. While its unrelenting realities of forced displacement, whether from war, persecution or economic despair originate from disparate causes, they all share a singular fact: The nascent stages of this historical migration shift require long-term planning, not short-term designation.

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Nearly 60 million people fled their homes in 2014, according to a recent UN report. Within a generation, according to estimates by numerous climate scientists and the international organizations dealing with migration, 150-200 million people could be displaced by the fallout of severe drought, flooding and extreme climate.

As the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences noted in a recent study, "the severity and duration of the recent Syrian drought," which has triggered some of the largest displacements of refugees across the Mediterranean, are a significant part of the roots of the Syrian civil war itself.

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A recent "10-Point Plan to Solve Europe's Refugee Crisis" proposed by German officials fails into the same well-meaning but illusory trap: It calls on European nations to "help genuine refugees," as if migration from environmentally ravaged and climate destabilized economies, including parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia, is somehow less "genuine."

This is not only wrong; it is delusive. We need to recognize we now live in an age of mass climate migration. Banter over building walls or policing seas or drawing classifications matters little.

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