Somewhere in the blue expanse of the Pacific Ocean is a tiny smattering of islands known as Tuvalu, blips on the map east of Papua New Guinea and north of New Zealand. In 50 years time they will no longer exist.
Nestling on the edges of the endless red sand of central Australia are a smattering of refugee detention centres, carefully placed where there is a lot of space and not many people to see them. Debate about Australia’s treatment of refugees has swept across this vast country during the past two years, as detainees use self-harm in an attempt to be heard, and the Australian Government comes up with strategies like the ‘Pacific Solution’ in an attempt to move the problem to anywhere but here.
In 2001 – the year of the Tampa and the ‘children overboard’ affair – the federal government approached the government of Tuvalu about the possibility of processing refugees there. But this collection of Pacific islands was dealing with refugee problems of their own. In October 2001, the New Zealand government agreed to accept the entire population of Tuvalu over a period of time – effectively as environmental refugees.
‘Environmental refugees’ is a term that is creeping slowly into use to describe those who have been displaced from their homes by environmental change, whether that be climate change, deforestation or pollution. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies estimates that there are now 25 million such people across the globe, making up over half of the world’s total refugee population. Yet according to the United Nations they don’t exist. Environmental refugees, like people who can no longer survive in their birthplace due to famines, the construction of giant dams or a paddock full of land mines, don’t meet the UN definition of a refugee as someone with a ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted’ in their home country. Without recognised refugee status, environmental refugees can’t access what limited help is available.
While the inhabitants of Tuvalu are facing a very immediate problem, with the waters of the Pacific rising around them, rising sea levels are not the only result of climate change. In 2000 Robert Watson, the then chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change addressed the fact that many parts of the world had been suffering from major heat waves, floods, droughts and extreme weather events.
‘While individual extreme weather events cannot be directly linked to human-induced climate change, the frequency and magnitude of these types of events are expected to increase in a warmer world’, he stated.
In 1998 one such extreme weather event hit Nicaragua, in the form of Hurricane Mitch, which killed 10,000 people. For Josefina Ulloa Velasquez it wasn’t just a climate statistic but very real: ‘Everyday following the storm, we worked from 5am to midnight helping people who were so desperate they sometimes fought over food. My defenses are low now and my nerves have been shattered by the horror of it all... Now conjunctivitis, micosi and diarrhoea are setting in on people. In my family eight people have been