Climate Justice Without Freedom: Assessing Legal and Political Responses to Climate Change and Forced Migration

Abstract

There is a notably unequal quality to the global ecological interdependencies created today by climate change (Waldron 2002: 137). The misfortunes of those who are displaced by its worst effects, that is, those `forced to leave their homes, lands and livelihoods because they have been destroyed by the effects of climate change' (United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs Reliefweb 2015) are manufactured by society as a whole. The suffering of the displaced is induced by practices that are collectively sustained yet individually encountered by some more readily than others. Of critical importance is how we choose to respond to this condition of forced intimacy. Will the illusion of `distant suffering' (Boltanski 1999) continue to be the primary strategy used by states to deny the immanent nature of ecological threat or will the reality of large-scale displacement sharpen global normative consciousness of suffering and generate a more cosmopolitan outlook on our common fate? With nearly 25 % of current global migratory movements triggered by extreme hydro-meteorological events, including violent storms, intense flooding, or heat waves (see The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) 2007) and one in every 45 of the world's populations expected to be displaced by climate change affects by the year 2050 (see Myers 2005; see also the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007), the era of climate `effect publics' has well and truly arrived, producing in the process a more intense politicization of freedom of movement and human rights commitments. Communities that traditionally have tended to migrate temporarily as a form of adaptation to seasonal weather patterns are now being forced by necessity to flee lands rendered uninhabitable. Unable to meet basic subsistence needs within their own country of origin, such people, undeterred by restricted border access, migrate illegally, if necessary, to escape their destitution. Forced `involuntarily' to leave home and frequently country due to declining resource conditions, the climate migrant is denied both the opportunity and the choice aspects of their freedom (Sen 2010: 371). Freedom from interference is denied when the climate displaced are deprived of the power of agency to prevent various ills from happening to them (e.g., excessive carbon pollution leading to further ecological devastation). Not only is the ability to secure one's freedom from ecological persecution denied but also, one's fate as a victim of ecological destruction is made contingent upon the circumstances in which one acts (if the individual is an inhabitant of a poorer, most climate vulnerable region in the world and flees his or her ecological victimization across state borders illegally, he or she relinquishes essential legal protections). The consequential links connecting the individual's capacity to choose the circumstances in which he or she acts and the experience of being free is thereby severed.