By 2050, as many as one in every seven people in Bangladesh will have been forced to leave their homes because of climate change, says a new report by the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF). The report highlights how urgent it is that the EU takes steps to mitigate against climate change.
Every year since 2008, an average of 614,000 Bangladeshi people have been forced from their homes as a result of floods and storms. Climate change is destroying livelihoods, infrastructure and communities, forcing people from their homes, towns and even countries. Bangladesh is particularly vulnerable to the impacts. Although similarly devastating effects are currently being felt around the world.
Bangladesh has suffered some of the fastest recorded sea level rises in the world, and this is the major cause of climate change displacement, the report finds. The country may lose around 11% of its land by 2050 to sea level rise, affecting an estimated 15 million people.
Riverbank erosion driven by increasingly erratic rainfall under climate change is another driving factor in displacement – up to half of those living in Bangladesh’s urban slums may have fled their rural homes as a result. Steve Trent, EJF’s Executive Director, said:
We must act now to prevent this becoming a full-scale humanitarian crisis. The EU in particular has the opportunity to show real leadership, by investing heavily in climate mitigation and creating an international, binding agreement on legal recognition and protection for climate refugees.
Since 2008, weather-related hazards have displaced an average of 21.7 million people each year: equivalent to 41 people every single minute. This does not include the people forced to flee their homes as a consequence of slow-onset environmental degradation, such as droughts or sea level rise.
EJF is calling for protection for climate refugees, along with highlighting the absolute priority of ending our carbon addiction, immediately reducing greenhouse gas emissions and meeting our shared international commitment under the Paris Agreement to ensure that temperature rise is kept below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
EJF Recommendations
- Governments must ensure that the development of legal protections and actions are migrant-centred, human-rights based and gender-responsive within a system of global migration governance.
- A UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and Climate Change should be established to consolidate and guide international action on climate-induced displacement.
- There should be clarification on the obligations of states to persons displaced by climate change within new legal definitions. Definitions of climate-induced migration are urgently needed to ensure a rights-based approach and give clarity to the legal status of ‘climate refugees’; these must be developed without delay.
- An international, binding agreement on legal recognition, protection and assistance for climate refugees should be put in place. National governments should also collaborate to develop and implement an innovative funding mechanism for this instrument, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, supporting the needs of countries that are most vulnerable to climate change and least able to adapt to its effects. EJF is calling on the European Commission, Parliament and Member States to lead in this regard, designing and implementing such an agreement to coordinate a regional approach by the EU Member States.
- The EU should initiate the creation of a highprofile inter-agency taskforce to coordinate the work of the multiple bodies in the Commission, such as Environment, Climate Action, Migration and Humanitarian Affairs, as well as the High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, in order to drive a more effective, integrated approach into wider international responses to climate change.
- All countries must rapidly and fully implement the global climate change agreement established in Paris in December 2015, and to support efforts to raise their emission reduction pledges over time and keep the global temperature level below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
- Greater support should be available for adaptation and assistance in ‘frontline’ countries – states should work together and share innovation, technology transfer, expertise and localised capacity building. The overall goal must be to help prevent humanitarian crises, rather than to react to them.
- All stakeholders should be included in all deliberations and future negotiations, with special reference to local communities and the most vulnerable and disenfranchised on our planet. It is essential that marginalised communities are given a voice.
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