Benoit Mayer

Human Rights in the Paris Agreement

The Paris Agreement contains the first mention of human rights in a climate change treaty. This article recounts the build-up of human rights advocacy since the Cancun Agreements. It then discusses the significance of the inclusion of a provision on human rights in the preamble to the Paris Agreement and explores other relevant provisions adopted at the 21st Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris in December 2015.

Governing Environmentally-Related Migration in Bangladesh: Responsibilities, Security and the Causality Problem

Environmentally-related migration is often cited as one of the human consequences of environmental stress, especially in the context of climate change. Nonetheless, there is a lack of effective and appropriate governance strategies that address the issue due to the complex and multicausal character of environmentally-related migration and the tendency to discuss the issue through security-based discourses that favor alarmist narratives. This paper suggests alternative approaches in responding to environmentally-related migration that seek to avoid these pitfalls. Through the case of Bangladesh, this paper illustrates the need to form cross-sectoral governance policies that avoid oversimplifying environmentally-related migration. Specifically, the paper highlights the limits and dangers of the security-based framework to environmentally-related migration and calls for policy coordination as a potential pathway forward.

Environmental Migration in Asia-Pacific Regions: Could We Hang Out Sometime?

Several proposals for global legal governance of environmental migration have recently been published, almost exclusively by Western scholars. The present article shows the distance – both the geographical distance and the intellectual isolation – between descriptive works on environmental migration as a phenomenon and the normative studies on necessary developments of law and governance. It suggests that this distance resulted in a postcolonial approach of environmental migration, which could impede the protection of environmental migrants. While recalling that governance of environmental migration is generally most likely to succeed in the regional arena, this article argues that Asia-Pacific regions should determine the content of regional legal approaches of environmental migration. Participating in a multi-civilizational discussion is a unique opportunity for rising regions of Asia and the Pacific to affirm their growing diplomatic role and to demonstrate their capacity to be instrumental in the development of liberal forms of transnational governance.

Migration in the UNFCCC Workstream on ‘Loss and Damage’: An Assessment of Alternative Framings and Conceivable Responses

Discourses on ‘climate migration’ have played an instrumental role in initiating negotiations on loss and damage under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Yet, to date, the framing of climate migration has not been clear: it has been considered as a tool for reducing loss and damage (hence essentially a form of adaptation) or, alternatively, as a source of loss and damage for the migrants or for other concerned communities. Moreover, proposed approaches to address climate migration as a form of loss and damage have extended beyond compensation, and remain controversial among developed nations. In the highly politicized field of migration governance, however, this article submits that policy support and guidance in addressing loss and damage could prompt dangerous forms of political interference, such as the imposition of a Western objective of containing migrants to the Global South. It is thus suggested that top-down migration policies may not help vulnerable nations who face loss and damage in the context of climate migration.

The Arbitrary Project of Protecting ‘Environmental Migrants’

The literature of environmental migration is divided. Some authors call for the protection of environmental migrants. Others argue that the concept is arbitrary and protection should be extended to all forced migrants. This chapter identifies three narratives: the rights narrative, the responsibility narrative, and the security narrative. I argue that none of these narratives justifies the implementation of a new governance mechanism for environmental migrants, who are not distinctively more vulnerable than other categories of migrants or non-migrants. Yet, this chapter also shows that virtually nothing in the contemporary governance of migration is based on systematic rational arguments. For example, the nexus requirement in the conventional definition of a refugee excludes many from the protection they need. This shows that the international governance of migration is largely framed by what states perceive as their own interests rather than by ethical considerations. Despite the arbitrariness, the concepts of environmental migration and climate migration could generate change because they attract significant attention. Other challenges are related to the definitions of migrant categories in need of protection—recognizing that states would prefer a narrow definition of environmental migrant. Essentially, protection of environmental migrants must be viewed as a first step toward the protection of the most vulnerable and must contribute to developing the capacities of the states most impacted by environmental degradation.

Climate Change Mitigation in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region

Hong Kong enjoys a high degree of autonomy as a Special Administrative Region of China. Unlike China itself, Hong Kong is not a party to international climate change agreements. While China has declared that the Paris Agreement and other climate change agreements apply to Hong Kong, the implementation measures for Mainland China in fact do not apply to Hong Kong. Its unique position under the ‘one country, two systems’ principle has frequently led to Hong Kong being left out of international cooperation on climate change mitigation. Nevertheless, as this article recounts, the government of Hong Kong has shown increasing interest in promoting climate change mitigation — or at least in being seen to do so. In January 2017, Hong Kong adopted the ‘Climate Action Plan 2030 ’, which is, in essence, a regionally determined contribution to mitigation.

Climate Change Reparations and the Law and Practice of State Responsibility

It has been argued elsewhere that industrial states were legally responsible for interfering with the climate system by failing to prevent excessive greenhouse gas emissions. This paper determines the international legal principles relevant to the remedial obligations of industrial states. It assumes that climate change reparations should aim first at providing a signal for the cessation of the wrongful act (i.e. incentivizing climate change mitigation) rather than addressing the injury. A review of state practice in different fields suggests the existence of relevant exceptions to the principle of full reparation. These exceptions relate to the financial capacity of responsible states, the indirect nature of the injury, considerations of “culpability”, and the limitations of collective responsibility as “rough” justice. Accordingly, it is suggested that climate change reparations should be limited to partial compensation and symbolic measures of satisfaction prone to incentivize climate change mitigation.

Climate Migration and the Politics of Causal Attribution: A Case Study in Mongolia

Migration is always multi-causal. Ascribing a specific cause to migration, such as through the concept of ‘climate migration’, participates consequently to a political exercise – a play of shade and light where attention is focused on the responsibilities of certain actors, rather than others. This is the case, this article argues, regarding internal migration in Mongolia, whereby, during the last two decades, nomadic or semi-nomadic herders as well as inhabitants from small urban centres come to settle in insalubrious suburbs of the capital, Ulaanbaatar. The Mongolian authorities are keen to highlight the changing environmental conditions that can be traced to climate change: a change in precipitation patterns and an increase in average temperatures contribute to cause large loss of livestock during harsh winters (dzud). Yet, a multitude of other factors concurrently influence the migratory behaviour of Mongolia’s nomads: unregulated and unsustainable pastoral practices, the insufficient provision of basic and support services in the countryside or, more generally, the lack of public support to the agricultural sector. Identifying the concurring causes of migration suggests alternative response measures, and this article argues that Mongolia should urgently rectify its development policies to provide a room for each of its citizens.

The State of the World's Refugees 2012: In Search of Solidarity

Coming rather unhelpfully right at the end of the book, this is the most complete definition I could find. The problem for these Ghanaian migrants is that the external world fails to deliver its reciprocal obligations. Globalisation does not always entail much interconnectedness and support; rather, it imposes a life-world of exclusion, marginality, setbacks and failures. Here is my sketch of the life-world of Ghanaian migrants from coastal fishing communities who end up in Castelvolturno, as distilled from Lucht’s powerful multi-sited ethnography. The push factor is the drastic decline in fish stocks off the Ghanaian coast. Amongst various reasons adduced for this, one is the plundering of these resources by European fishing boats, both legally by purchase of fishing quotas and illegally. The purchase of fishing rights does nothing to redress the livelihood loss for the fishing population, so young men are constrained to migrate. Most aim initially for Libya, where conditions for them are very bad, and thence to Europe. But the EU’s immigration policy offers them no chance of legal entry. Hence they are forced to make the doubly hazardous journey across the desert and the sea, both with their attendant dangers: clapped-out trucks and leaky boats, both impossibly overcrowded and prone to break down; death by starvation, thirst and heat exhaustion, or drowning; and ruthless fleecing by agents, thieves, and bribe-grabbing officials. For those who make it to southern Italy, another round of hardship and exploitation awaits, chasing the lowest-paid and most demeaning jobs in the black economy. Worked to the bone for wages that are often lower than agreed, the final blow comes when the workers are frequently robbed on their way back to their miserable accommodation by local gangs of thieves. Lucht pulls no punches in his critical phenomenological analysis. The brutal irony of an EU and global political economy that destroys people’s livelihoods and then denies them the chance to improve themselves except via ‘illegal’ migration into soul-destroying work in the margins of the Neopolitan informal economy does not go unnoticed. For Lucht the EU’s system of migration control amounts to ‘necropolitics’, the trivialisation of death-in-migration. Where his account scores over the many others that describe migrant life in southern Europe is that it also documents, via first-hand accounts of those who survived, the terrible privations of the desert and sea crossings, marked by multiple deaths along the way, and it rounds off the analysis by fieldwork in the sending villages. Here, in these fishing communities where ‘living is rotting’, people not only see their livelihoods disappearing year-on-year, but also families somehow have to cope with the trauma of the death-in-transit of so many young men: deaths whose reality is often never confirmed, except slowly, by the non-receipt of any news. These ‘death-worlds’ constitute ‘new and unique forms of social existence ... conferring upon them the status of the living dead’ (175, Lucht’s emphasis). These are some of the violence of life and death in the shadows of the global political economy which are all-too-rarely emphasised by the chronicles of migration.

Research handbook on climate change, migration and the law

This Handbook seeks to provide an overview of the myriad of ideas and debates that emerged in recent years on climate change, migration and the law. What is often reduced to the simple terms such as “climate migration” or “climate refugees” emerged as a rather complex theme. Climate change affects human mobility in multiple ways, often indirectly, and always within the context of particular societies and communities. It is not always possible to identify specific scenarios of climate migration and, a fortiori, to single out “climate migrants.” In turn, these conceptual intricacies make it more difficult to analyse how existing law applies to – and how new laws and policies could relate to – what should perhaps best be called the “climate-migration nexus.” As editors, we were committed to giving voice to different views, even if those could be conflicting, rather than pushing for a particular narrative of our taste. We thus leave it to the readers to weigh multiple arguments through further research. Thus, the chapters gathered in this Handbook are written by authors from different backgrounds and perspectives to reflect the multiple on-going discussions on the topic. These chapters develop diverse and sometimes conflicting understandings of, among others, the implications of climate change for human mobility, terminological choices, and views about desirable steps to be taken. This introduction provides a general background to the chapters that follow. A first section discusses some difficulties in conceptualizing the climate-migration nexus. A second section offers a broad overview of relevant legal developments. A third section examines the political and normative implications of discussions on the climate-migration nexus. A fourth section presents the outlines of this Handbook.