COPENHAGEN (AlertNet) - For years people have migrated as a way to adapt to environmental change, but climate change threatens to dramatically boost the scale of human movement.
It could potentially force tens of millions of people from their homes at a time when restrictions on movement across international borders are growing.
This should be a major cause for concern, particularly when scientific estimates of sea level rises suggest that Bangladesh alone may need to find new homes for 10 to 15 million people by the end of the century, experts say.
"More and more people are forced to flee and there is less and less freedom of movement for people," said Antonio Guterres, head of the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, during a panel discussion at the Copenhagen climate talks. "This is totally unsustainable from a political perspective and totally unacceptable from the moral perspective."
Climate change, he said, is fuelling most of the other problems that drive people from their homes: conflict, natural disasters, shortages of food and water and a lack of economic opportunity.
Increasingly it is "the most important trigger of forced displacement," he said. "Climate change is very much at the centre of the different trends forcing people to move."
Shifts in the world's climate also are increasingly erasing the distinctions between migrants and refugees, most notably when people face slow onset disasters like drought, coastal erosion and gradually declining access to water and food, Guterres said.
In such cases, "it's difficult to know what the main motivation" for moving is, he said.
That has important implications for national and international policies governing migration because, among other things, treaties protecting refugees currently do not extend to people displaced by environmental crisis.
RISK OF STATELESSNESS
Protections will need to be expanded and re-thought, Guterres said, particularly in regard to people - including the residents of low-lying atolls - who may become stateless if their countries become uninhabitable as a result of sea level rise.
Storms, floods and other weather-related disasters have overtaken conflict as the major displacer of people, according to a 2009 study by the Norwegian Refugee Council. And slow-onset weather crises like drought - which wasn't included in the study - likely will create even more severe problems, scientists say.
Somalia, which once had a drought approximately every 10 years, now has "almost constant" drought, noted Rolf Vestvik, director of advocacy for the refugee council.
Most of those displaced by climate-related problems stay as near to their former homes as possible and do not cross international borders, said Walter Kalin, a Swiss lawyer and U.N. representative for the human rights of internally displaced persons.
But as the resources of already poor and vulnerable nations are overwhelmed by a growing stream of migrants, at least some displaced people will inevitably cross borders, usually to neighbouring nations. Easing that process will require efforts to improve regional cooperation, revamp the image of migrants generally, and protect the rights of their new neighbours as well, experts said.
"One in every seven people in the world has some kind of migratory status," said William Lacy Swing, head of the International Organization for Migrants. Contrary to popular perception, the vast majority of migrants are legal, and they send home $300 billion a year in remittances, a sum the size of SwitzerlandÂ?s economy, he said.
Getting accurate information about migrants out is key "so people don't take popular political positions (against migration) that are a disaster in humanitarian terms," he said.
The best ways to help stem climate-related migration, analysts said, are to put in place effective adaptation measures in the most vulnerable countries to help keep people at home, and to cut carbon emissions to slow climate change as much as possible.
Unless that's done, "displacement will reach huge dimensions and overwhelm natural disaster management systems," Kalin warned.
Nations and agencies also must work to minimise forced migration as much as possible, Swing said, either by giving people help to remain where they are or by easing the way for voluntary migration.
Much remains to be done to prepare for a growing tide of human movement, Swing said.
Governments find it easy to focus on immediate crises, but harder to address slow moving ones like climate change. That means "we are a ways away from having a consensus on doing something together" to address climate-related migration, he said.
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