Climate change: Slow progress in favor of climate displaced persons
States have the obligation to establish measures and actions to reduce risks. The World Bank estimates that by 2050 in Mexico there will be three million in this condition. Nations such as Italy and the US have references to this phenomenon in their internal regulations.
Although some nations are beginning to adopt a human rights approach to displacement caused by climate change, more work still needs to be done to guarantee access to justice and basic guarantees for people agreed on experts at the Seminar "Climate Displacement in the International and National Context".
After recognizing that the issue does not have the same origins in each region, Rosalía Ibarra Sarlat, from UNAM's Institute for Legal Research; Armelle Gouritin, Conacyt-FLACSO professor, and Beatriz Felipe Pérez, from the CICrA Environmental Justice cooperative, emphasized that better legal frameworks are required to prevent citizens from being re-victimized when mobilizing.
Ibarra Sarlat, the coordinator of the Seminar, emphasized that this is a reality: the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center (IDMC) reported that in 2020 there were 40.5 million new relocations, of which 30.7 million were due to natural events, in 149 countries. Legally, she added, this situation is addressed in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which promotes adaptation in nations because there are irreversible impacts before migratory displacements become more frequent.
The also coordinator of the Diploma in Law, Climate Change and Governance at the IIJ, explained: this topic is recognized in the COP16, in the Cancun agreements, when it was established that countries must take the necessary actions to reduce the risks generated by climate change and avoid displacements as much as possible.
The UNAM Law School graduate noted that the measures were taken up in the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage related to Climate Change Impacts (2013), which offers financial support, guidance, capacity building, technical and technological assistance to the poorest nations that are affected.
In 2015, the Paris Agreement adopted the Mechanism but does not accept or condition any form of legal liability or compensation for those affected. "Precisely, here, the parties disassociate themselves from any kind of legal liability, and especially if in the future we start to see transboundary migrations. It leaves it at the level of adaptation that enters in a direct court of the national scope of the parties," she warned.
In turn, Gouritin, Conacyt professor at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO), added that in 2018 the World Bank estimated that by 2050 in Mexico there will be 3 million climate-displaced people: that is, the population equivalent to the state of Aguascalientes. Cities on the northern border of the country will be the main destinations such as Tijuana, Ciudad Juarez, and the Valley of Mexico, so internal and international displacement should not be considered separately.
Mexico has the General Law on Climate Change and the draft General Law to Comprehensively Prevent, Address, and Provide Reparations for Internal Forced Displacement, which is in the legislative process in the Chamber of Deputies but has gaps.
Gouritin asserted: "To present climate displacement as a successful adaptation is a tremendous mistake because ex-situ adaptation is not a success, it is a failed adaptation, a failure, because it would be to deny the drama through which people go through, the communities forced to be displaced and it is known that they face violations of their human rights, in the case of women, sexual violence and the same for children".
Beatriz Felipe Pérez, of the cooperative CICrA Environmental Justice, considered it positive that in some international courts, such as in France, climate reasons are beginning to be seen as important to avoid deportations, for example, a Court of Appeals annulled an expulsion order of a Bangladeshi citizen due to pollution. In addition, another in Germany prohibited the departure of an Afghan because conditions in his country had deteriorated due to the pandemic, climate, and disasters.
In conclusion, the lawyer expressed that "little by little the internal regulations of different countries are beginning to include explicit references to climate migrations, in Italy there are already residence permits for people who are in a serious situation and the United States, although it must be taken with care, President Joe Biden is making much more progress than his predecessors in the case of climate migrations".
Mexico, U.S., and Canada collaborate on water, soil, and climate change
Mexico, from the northwestern part, and the United States, from Arizona, have a territory with degradation, water quality problems, indiscriminate use of resources, overgrazing, and deforestation, said Ignacio Sánchez Cohen, representative of the National Institute of Forestry, Agricultural and Livestock Research (Inifap) to the Cooperative Research and Technology Program for the Northern Region (Procinorte).
This is in the context of the establishment of the working group Water, Soil and Climate Change, established by Mexico, the United States, and Canada, whose purpose is to share information of interest to the primary sector of the three countries, especially related to technology generation models in the context of climate change.
In a press release, the Ministry of Agriculture said that Procinorte was established in 1998 and is a trilateral network of federal agricultural, agrifood, and food system research organizations in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. According to information provided by Procinorte, the objective is to bring researchers from the three countries into contact with each other to work on specific topics and thus transform scientific data into useful information for society.
One of the most recurrent topics is to know how climate change impacts to water and soil resources since it reduces the quality of the liquid and has had an impact on consumption for different uses: domestic, animal, and agricultural. Sánchez Cohen said that the platform seeks ways to optimize the use of natural resources. He added that paleoclimatic databases are being developed on forest fires to learn about the history of the climate through trees and foresee possible scenarios.
