Climate, Conflict, and Refugees: Examining the Impact of Environmental Change on Human Security

Arundhati Ponnapa
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“There’s a long list of crises that can have a natural resource base,” said Anne C. Richard, former assistant secretary of state for population, refugees, and migration, at a Stimson Center panel on June 13, 2017, on the impacts of climate change on human security and mobility. The panelists included Kelly McFarland of Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of Diplomacy (ISD), Rod Schoonover of the National Intelligence Council, and Sally Yozell, director of Stimson’s Environmental Security Program.“The people hit hardest are the ones that can’t move,” said McFarland, stressing the need to collect data and plan for long-term environmental changes and potential crises. He presented a new working group report from ISD that outlines the challenges of climate-related migration and offers 10 guiding principles for optimizing adaptation and resilience-building tools, such as assessments of the needs of sending and receiving communities.

One of the challenges is the lack of a legal definition for people displaced by climate change: “It is hard to come up with who exactly is an environmental migrant, because of the fact that there are other drivers involved in getting them to move,” said McFarland. While the panelists agreed that global consensus is required on this issue, Schoonover suggested that global governance structures like multilateral treaties “seemed to work better in the last century.”