22
‘CLIMATE REFUGEES’: THE EXPECTED CLIMATE CHANGE MIGRATION Featured Faculty: Vinod Thomas Visiting Professor, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy
The earth’s temperature is increasing at a rate faster than scientists previously predicted. Global warming has reached one degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels for the first time, while the 10 warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998, nine of which were after 2005.
“
I share the same concern, we all should. We need to make changes and not small ones like switching to a cloth bag or doing away with plastic. We need to leave behind carbon-intensive fuels for greener options like solar, wind, and other forms of renewable energies. It’s about switching to more sustainable options, or like Professor Vinod called it, “a climate-benign” method.
”
The above excerpt is from a user comment on BIGWIG.
Southeast Asia is one of the regions most heavily affected by the planet’s rising temperature, and the impacts are being felt in the form of rising sea levels, increasingly frequent and extreme weather patterns, and intensifying heavy rainfall. The rising temperatures have impacts on everyone, but some communities — especially those in developing countries — are more adversely affected by climate change. In Southeast Asia, there are already families and communities who have been forced to leave their homes in search of livelihoods elsewhere because of the direct effects seen from the heating of the planet. This includes resource scarcity such as that of drinking water, destroyed crops that contribute to a loss of livelihoods, and increased frequency of extreme weather patterns that make areas become too dangerous, hot or wet to be inhabitable.
Emergence of climate refugees People being forced from their homes due to climate change are commonly referred to as “climate refugees”, although this is not a term that exists in international law. According to the 1952 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, a refugee is defined as a person who has crossed an international border “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) does not endorse the term, and instead refers to them as “persons displaced in the context of disasters and climate change”. According to Visiting Professor Vinod Thomas at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, climate refugees are those who are forced to move from their homes and places of livelihood because of climate change impacts of water scarcity, crop failure, sea-level rise and storm surges.
