OMG! Can you believe it! The UN is pushing a new refugee meme that allows them to get around much of the criticism of the hokey idea of climate refugees! The newest refugees will be:
Victims-of-disaster-induced-cross-border-displacement
When we wrote some time ago about the climate refugee propaganda campaign we noted that many of the traditional refugee groups (the NGOs), who have long been shuffling people around the globe for reasons of protecting them from an ever-growing list of persecutions, didn’t like the idea of watering-down (he! he!) the long-held definition of a humanitarian refugee by adding the word ‘climate’ in front of it.
Now comes word from Petru Dumitriu writing at Diplo that the climate refugee thesis is coming alive with a new name!
“A new seed has been planted in the fertile soil of the United Nations…”
I [Petru Dumitriu] mentioned en passant [to a group of students] the emergence of a new concept in the humanitarian area: climate change refugees. One of the participants asked me whether the legal status of those forcibly displaced due to climate change was not highly questionable. She was right. But so was I!
At the end of 2011, I noticed that high officials of both the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies invoked, on a few occasions, the existence of a new category of refugees: climate (change) refugees or environmental refugees.
Was that just a figure of speech or a rhetorical expression? Can this turn into a legal term one day?
Well, admittedly, ‘no man is a prophet in his own land’, but I cannot refrain from observing that many political and legal concepts that are now currently used in the United Nations system have been at the beginning just simple enunciations or associations of existing independent terms. Sustainable development, human development, human security, or responsibility to protect [Samantha Power—ed] were just intellectual constructs trying to marry into a single expression notions that have not been associated as such before.
Enter the Nansen Initiative!
It seems that climate refugees falls into the same category of novel ideas, fragile and vulnerable to criticism about their meaning, be they legal, political or operational. But many of these ideas have the bad habit of making their own way and adapting and developing the same way as the surviving species in Darwin’s theory.
This is obviously happening with the concept of climate refugees. One year after I had heard about it in official meetings, Norway and Switzerland launched the so-called Nansen Initiative. The naked terminology of climate refugees put on new and sophisticated attire. The stage name of the improved version of climate refugees under the chapeau of the Nansen Initiative is A Protection Agenda for Disaster-induced Cross-border Displacement.
Read it all for more of the juicy details about the Nansen Initiative! Mr. Dumitriu concludes with this:
A new seed has been planted in the fertile soil of the United Nations. Mark my words! We will hear more about the victims-of-disaster-induced-cross-border-displacement, or climate refugees.
For more be sure to see our Climate Refugee category which I began a while ago (end of 2008), but then let languish because I thought the notion so far-fetched. I guess I better pay more attention now that we know about the Nansen Initiative.