BARCELONA (AlertNet) - Seferino Cortes has lived his life at the foot of Illimani, one of BoliviaÂ?s tallest snow-capped peaks, tending cattle, fruit trees and fields of maize, beans and potatoes.
But in a few decades he and his family expect to have to abandon their land and move on. Illimani's glaciers, which provide his community's water, are shrinking fast as winter snowfall plummets, and are now expected to vanish within 40 years.
"We live from Illimani," said the soft-spoken 45-year-old farmer, who attended international negotiations in Barcelona aimed at creating a new global climate change pact.
"Without it, with what water will we irrigate our fields, wash ourselves and our clothes, water our animals?" he said. "If there is no water, we will have to leave our place. We will be forced to abandon our community, our culture and custom."
As the effects of climate change take hold around the world, countries, research institutions and international agencies are debating how to handle what is expected to become a trickle and perhaps eventually a flood of climate migrants.
A few nations are including migration as part of their national plans of adaptation to climate change. For many others, it remains a politically perilous subject.
"Would you allow a country that has been displaced to raise its flag and play its national anthem (in a new home nation)?" asked a Bangladesh negotiator, in a session on Wednesday on climate migration. He said Bangladesh was planning for migration "but not willingly, not happily."
Heavily populated, low-lying and storm-vulnerable Bangladesh is widely expected to be one of the nations most likely to produce climate migrants in the decades ahead, but a World Bank study on how the bank might support national adaptation efforts around the world found that Ghana, Ethiopia and probably Vietnam, to name just a few, are also likely to produce climate migrants.
The bank is trying to figure out "how to support migration as an adaptation strategy rather than viewing migration as a failure of adaptation," said Robin Mearns, of the World Bank's social development department. The reality is that migration "may not be peopleÂ?s first choice but it may need to factor in."
UP TO A BILLION MAY HAVE TO MOVE
There are no good estimates of how many people may be forced to abandon their homes permanently as a result of climate change, but early forecasts put the number at anywhere from 25 million to a billion. What is clear is that most are likely to be in southern developing nations. Today, almost two thirds of international migration happens from one developing nation to another, according to a U.N. Development Programme report released this year.
The driving forces of climate migration, experts say, are likely to include storms and other extreme weather, slow-onset problems like environmental degradation and sea level rise, and increases in violence and armed conflict as people fight over a shrinking base of resources. There could even be displacement because of construction and projects designed to fight climate change.
Among the particularly vulnerable will be people living in poverty, in over-populated areas, in border regions and in situations where they have little access to political decision making, said Jean-Francois Durieux, deputy director of operational services for the U.N. High Commission on Refugees.
The Dadaab refugee camps in northern Kenya, which have hosted Somali refugees for a decade and a half, he said, are a prime example of a place likely to produce climate migrants. The camps, set on an inhospitably hot flood plain, have been overrun by two major floods in a little over a decade and also regularly suffer droughts.
Climate refugees face mixed protection in international law. International rules on internally displaced people - those who migrate within their own nation - gives those forced to move because of "natural or human-made disaster" protections and official status as internal refugees, experts said.
But those who cross borders to escape climate-related problems would not today be classified as refugees under existing conventions, which give status only to those being persecuted because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group, said Vikram Kolmannskog, a climate migration researcher with the Norwegian Refugee Council.
"A lot of people will be protected, but a lot will not be," he said. He noted that under most existing laws, countries could not forcibly move their own people within national borders, even for their own good. "Only under very strict criteria can you forcibly move people," he said. "It has to be a measure of last resort."
PLANNING AHEAD
One of the best ways to deal with the threat of climate migrants, experts suggested, was for nations to begin planning to expand towns in the least-threatened areas of their countries, and to ramp up industry there, while training the most vulnerable in new job skills, in preparation for wholesale population shifts.
Looking at how large-scale relocation has worked in areas where dams and other big development projects have been built may provide guidance on dealing with climate migration, Durieux said.
Making changes to social support networks also will be key, Mearns said. He noted that ethnic minorities in Vietnam, who are slowly moving to cities like Hanoi, often have trouble accessing benefits in their new homes because benefit rights are linked to their former place of residence.
Introducing a unified social security system that would allow benefits to be collected anywhere is "the kind of policy response that could make a great response in helping facilitate migration as an adaptation strategy," he said.
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