The Working Group "Climate Migrants" is at work online, as part of the World's People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, April 19--23, 2010
CLIMATE MIGRANTS
GLOBAL CONTEXT
Photo: Arizona Indymedia
Climate change, caused by predatory actions of capitalist model, has become one of the main causes of migration globally: 50 million in 2010 and the estimate for 2050 is that 200 million people could eventually be at risk of being displaced, although other estimates consider more than one million climate migrants for the future.
In addition to causing infrastructure saturation and urban services, undermining economic growth and increasing the risks of conflicts; forced migration due to weather conditions would have a detrimental effect on health education and social indicators, and also due to humans groups affected, it would have a negative impact on food sovereignty and the ethnic map, promoting global depeasantization phenomenon.
Likewise, as climate change has turn into an influential gravitating factor on migration, massive human displacement (especially to cities) have also influenced on climate change.
LOCAL CONTEXT
The experience of our region has always been based on renewable and non-renewable raw material extraction economy, which has caused and is still causing land degradation, deforestation and global warming.
Bolivia is one of the countries that currently suffers the consequences of climate change and has transformed a growing percentage of its residents in climate migrants; lack of water, soil erosion and natural disasters have disrupted families, leaving hundreds of jobless farmers who have been forced to leave the country to other regions where their rights or obligations are not recognized.
Regarding fauna and flora, the disappearance of hundreds of native species leaving regions devoid of natural resources, represents another cause of climate migration.
One of the strongest effects is overpopulation of cities that are facing lack of basic services, jobs, health, education, intercultural and social conflicts.
III. FUNDAMENTAL DEFINITION
CLIMATE MIGRANT
It is a new definition proposed by social organizations, from their own experience as climate migrants.
The concept of climate Migrant involves those human groups who abandon their place of origin as a result of climate change effects: floods, pests, climate cycle disorder, global warming, as well as the implementation of the capitalist economic model that deforests, degrades, and uncontrollably extracts non-renewable resources and encourages monoculture.
REFUGEE
The dictionary defines the concept of refugee as a person who forcefully abandons his place of origin and is conditionally accepted and limited in the full exercise of citizenship.
IV. ACTIONS
1. To demand that international agreements consider the definition of climate migrant and that all states of the world comply with its determinations.
2. To design global policies from the peoples, addressing climate change for governments to structure their local policies and internal regulations, respecting the systematic participation of peoples and territories involved.
3. To develop a declaration of human rights for climate migrants, valid and recognized globally.
4. To create an international peoples’ organism that promotes a permanent investigation on political, social, cultural and economic situation of climate migrants, and controls as well the implementation of the policies proposed in this document.
5. To demand the creation of an economic fund exclusively integrated by developed countries classified by the UN as the ones primarily responsible for climate change, in order to seek attention to internal and external climate migrants.
6. To create mechanisms that regulate migration due to climate causes towards our countries, in order to prevent the occupation of our territories within a policy of migration control.
7. As an international policy, technology transfer must be formulated from developed countries as payment of climate debt, which also origins migration due to climate causes.
8. Recovering ancient technology to set up a development model, under the view of living well that overrides the facts to “developmental” practice.
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