(GMT+4)
The climate crisis threatens sustainable development and the livelihoods of people in many ways, including through an increased frequency and severity of extreme weather events like drought or heavy rainfall or advancing slow onset processes like sea level rise. They are leading to water scarcity, decreased crop yield, as well as health and sanitation challenges, putting affected communities under pressure. As a result, climate impacts are gaining importance as driver of displacement and forced migration. While the importance of addressing human mobility in the context of the climate crisis (HMCCC) is increasingly being recognised, also in international climate and migration policy (e.g. UN-climate negotiations, UN-Pacts on Migration and Refugees), there is neither a legal status, nor a framework adequately responding to the challenges and needs of those who are forced to move.
This gap often results in affected persons having little choice but to move, or being trapped, with limited or no options to regularise their status when moving across borders. This leads to persons entering and staying in host countries without legal status and, as a result, considerably restricted rights and opportunities. While some may cross borders in search of safety and stability, most persons will be displaced internally within the borders of their own countries; leaving vulnerable populations experiencing exclusion, homelessness, poverty, and food insecurity.
If people were adequately supported in dealing with losses & damages, some climate-displaced persons might be able to return once conditions in their places of origin have returned to normal. Others – including those whose homes or communities have been rendered uninhabitable, or who have lost their livelihoods – will require alternative long-term solutions. These outcomes constitute a new challenge for local, national, and international actors.
Together with civil society from the Global South, the German NGO alliances Klima-Allianz Deutschland and VENRO, and the German Foreign Ministry, we will discuss the growing risk and protection gap and the challenges to address HMCCC, the opportunities the UN climate negotiations, incl. the Loss and Damage Fund, may provide and the needs to close the protection gap by international law.
