During the latest UN climate conference (COP29) in Baku, Azerbaijan, climate-induced migration was one of the key issues in the spotlight for world leaders and climate experts. From hurricanes in the Caribbean to devastating flooding in Spain and Sumatra, each month seems to bring new stories of unnatural disasters that are destroying homes and uprooting families.
By why does this matter to us in BC? Well, do you live in BC? Then your neighbours are becoming climate displaced. Literally.
Roughly 10,000 Jasper residents were forced to flee their homes as wildfire engulfed their town and community in July 2024. This is climate displacement, and it has become an all too familiar story in Canada and around the world.
But the fire in Jasper is not the only case of Canadians being forcibly displaced due to environmental catastrophe. The sad reality is that wildfires across BC and Alberta are becoming seemingly normal. Over 2023, 59,000 British Columbians and 43,000 Albertans were displaced because of wildfires.
As many experts have confirmed, climate change is increasing wildfire intensity. And this increased intensity comes with social and human costs.
The risks of climate and wildfire displacement are not equally distributed. Indigenous communities in BC in particular are at high risk of climate displacement. Numerous Indigenous nations have had to relocate from their homes due to environmental disasters linked to climate change, like the Shackan Indian Band whose community was flooded from overflow of the Nicola River in 2021.
Climate displacement is a higher risk for racialized communities because of environmental racism. Pipelines, waste facilities and highways are often placed in close proximity to Indigenous reserve lands and northern communities. This not only exposes these communities to undue environmental hazards and pollution, but it also increases things like fire risk. Because of colonial management over decades, Indigenous rural communities and reserves often lack sufficient infrastructure for an adequate fire or emergency response.
This kind of disproportionate and racialized reality of climate displacement is also alarmingly global. As reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate change intensifies food insecurity and drains resources further from communities with development constraints (often due to colonial and imperial history).
Annually, over 50,000 Pacific Islanders are forced to flee their homes and countries as a result of climate-fuelled disasters in their small island states. As such, Pacific Islanders have been at the forefront of climate displacement risk, despite the fact that Pacific Island states have contributed the least amongst states to climate change.
This is a wake-up call. Canadians, and especially Indigenous peoples, are now becoming climate refugees – for lack of a better term. We have to acknowledge that climate displacement is a national and international dilemma.
Justice demands that there be support for all those impacted by climate displacement. But in particular, Canada also has a responsibility to support climate refugees as it is one of the highest per-capita greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters in the world.
So, the question is, how is Canadian law and policy responding to climate displacement? And what can it do better?
Understanding climate displacement globally
Before getting into Canada’s law on climate refugees, it is helpful to consider the scope and reality of climate displacement.
The vast majority of climate displacement is internal displacement, meaning those forced to relocate do so within their own countries. In fact, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees considers it a myth that climate change will trigger large-scale movements from the Global South to the Global North, as even with cross-border displacements most refugees travel only to neighbouring countries. The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies reported that in 2020 alone over 30.7 million people were internally displaced by environmental disasters largely related to weather and climate hazards.
Nonetheless, Canada will still be impacted. The Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers (CARL) has stated in its 2023 report that climate change and environmental injustice will inevitably force many to relocate outside of their country, especially those living in small island developing states. And many will come to seek refuge in Canada. As such, Canada needs to have a humanitarian response ready for climate-displaced refugees.
But while we consider an active humanitarian response for climate migrants coming to Canada, we must also acknowledge that climate displacement is happening here, too! From the increase in wildfires across BC, to the 2021 intense rains and flooding that displaced 17,000 British Columbians from their towns and homes, changes in our environment are noticeable, and some people have had to relocate temporarily and even permanently as a result.
Both short-term disasters like wildfires and long-term disasters like rising sea levels are growing at alarming rates across Canada, and they are being experienced repeatedly. One Cree Nation in Northern Quebec was evacuated five times in recent years due to wildfires.
Ignoring climate displacement contributes to normalizing and desensitizing Canadians to the harmful impacts of environmental degradation, pollution and rising temperatures. This can, in turn, prolong the political and institutional processes that allow for these environmental problems. It dulls the visceral concern and reaction we should be having when an Indigenous community is evacuated five times. We can, and must, do better.
The law and climate refugees: Where are we right now?
Canadian refugee law and climate-displaced peoples from abroad
Canada currently lacks sufficient legal infrastructure to handle refugees arising from climate displacement.
Canada’s refugee law system was designed in reference to the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention. Borrowing from the definition made in Article 1A of the Convention, section 96 of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (IRPA) defines a refugee as someone who is fleeing “persecution” on the basis of one of the following grounds: race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or political opinion.
The problem with this definition is that it reflects only what was foreseeable in 1951. The drafters of the 1951 Refugee Convention, focused on the displacement from World War II, did not have climate disasters or environmental hazards in mind when considering human displacement and forced relocation. And so, displacement due to changing climate, pollution, or other environmental factors does not easily fit within this definition.
For starters, under the Convention a refugee would have to establish that they faced environmental harms specifically on the basis of one of the established categories of persecution like race. It has to be a disaster that somehow targeted them because of their identity.
This may be accomplished in specific cases of environmental racism, where state policy places industrial hazards and/or pollution in closer proximity to Black, Indigenous and other racialized communities. However, such a case has yet to be advanced, and it would have to meet the evidentiary burden of proving that either the state or polluters caused the environmental harm, and that it principally targeted or affected the particular racialized community in question.
That said, Canada provides refugee protection beyond just the Convention definition. Canada also grants refugee protection to those it determines are “persons in need of protection” under section 97 of the IRPA. A “person in need of protection” is defined as someone who faces the risk of torture, risk to life, or risk of cruel and unusual punishment, irrespective of the Convention categories.
However, subsection 97(1)(b)(ii) stipulates that a “person in need of protection” cannot be facing a risk “faced generally by other individuals in or from that country [of origin].” In other words, the risk must be specific or “personalized,” and not general. This is difficult for climate migrants to prove, as often environmental disaster impacts anyone and everyone “generally” in the area. And so yet again, Canadian refugee protection standards fail to capture many of those displaced for environmental and climate-related reasons.
While Canada is failing climate refugees at present as there is no obvious legal protection for them, it cannot continue to do so indefinitely. Canada will eventually have to establish a policy response for climate refugees coming from abroad in order to comply with international law.
In the 2020 case Ioane Teitiota vs. New Zealand, the United Nations Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) was tasked with determining if New Zealand breached international law by denying asylum to a Kiribati citizen who was displaced as rising sea levels left the island state without sufficient hospitable land. While the UNHRC did not find any violation of Teitiota’s rights in this case, they did find that climate change and environmental degradation pose serious threats to life. As such, countries have an obligation to protect, and not return, climate-displaced persons who face life threats under Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.
In response to this pending need for legal reform, the Canadian Association of Refugee Lawyers’ 2023 report puts forward its recommendations for updating policy on climate migrants coming to Canada. CARL outlines an expansive legal definition for “climate migrant.”
Their definition of a “climate migrant” is someone who is displaced outside their country due to any of the following: present short-term or long-term environmental disaster, the risk of such disaster, or environmental degradation. These environmental factors must also specifically cause a risk to life, liberty and/or security of the person. CARL also recommends that section 97 of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act be amended to include an exception for climate refugees, so that they could be recognized as “persons in need of protection” without the requirement of “personalized risk.”
The CARL report proposes welcome policy changes that would help establish a more robust refugee law system for climate migrants coming to Canada. However, reform efforts should not end there.
It can be really difficult to isolate environmental injustice as a cause of displacement. This is because climate change, pollution and environmental hazards can contribute to poverty, conflict, and political instability by limiting access to needed resources and hospitable land. These resulting social pressures contribute to human migration.
Usually, climate and environmental hazards are experienced alongside other causes for displacement – not a standalone cause. Any policy to be enacted with regard to climate-displaced refugees also needs to recognize that it is difficult to isolate environmental and climatic causes for displacement, and must consider environmental intersections with conflict, poverty and instability over scarce resources and increasingly uninhabitable space.
Internal displacement in Canada: The need for an Indigenous-centred response
In addition to supporting climate refugees from abroad, Canada also needs to consider legal responses for internally-displaced Canadians. As we work to combat the causes of environmental displacement, it is important that our provincial and federal policy-makers adjust our social and spatial infrastructures to support climate displacement within Canada.
A strong policy response for internal climate displacement would also need to actively consider the autonomy of Indigenous communities. We have already seen a BC-led response to Indigenous climate-displacement that reinforced and reproduced colonial harms. For example, RCMP officers in BC threatened to have the Ministry of Children and Family Development forcibly separate Tl’etinqox First Nation families from their children if they did not comply with the evacuation orders as wildfires threatened the community.
In BC, the Emergency and Disaster Management Act, RSBC 2023, c 37 (EDMA) was one of the first pieces of legislation drafted in accordance with the Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act (DRIPA), meaning it was co-developed with Indigenous Peoples and seeks to align with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Although not perfect, it does include explicit recognition of Indigenous jurisdiction (ss. 2(2)(e); 33-36; 37-38; 41; 55; 90; 120).
EDMA includes a requirement to consider “intersectional disadvantage” in the development of Risk Assessment (s. 51) and Emergency plans (s.52). Intersectional disadvantage is defined as: “the intersection of social categorizations of persons or classes of persons, including Indigenous identity, race, economic status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, age and ability, in ways that may result in overlapping systems of discrimination or disadvantage or disproportionate adverse effects…”. While these are positive developments, EDMA at its core still defers to provincial authorities, in spite of the option of incorporating Indigenous agreements.
As Professor Jocelyn Stacey writes,
EDMA simultaneously incorporates new thinking on emergencies while also doubling down on old assumptions...The question of jurisdiction – or who gets to decide – is answered through an array of possible agreements with Indigenous governing bodies, which the province may choose to enter into. But at the same time, the province retains its claim to sovereign authority to act in the face of emergency, unimpeded by new requirements to cooperate with Indigenous Peoples.
We need our policy-makers to work with Indigenous nations and provide them the means to respond to environmental emergencies and evacuation themselves, and on their own terms. We also need the government to address the fact that Indigenous communities are often situated closer to pollution sources, pipelines and other industrial facilities that increase environmental risks. Recently, the federal government has passed Bill C-226, committing itself to develop a national strategy to combat environmental racism. As a matter of justice, Indigenous climate displacement needs to be considered and addressed through a community-centred lens as part of this strategy.
Climate refugees are people first, not problems first
Talking about climate displacement is so important for the environmental justice movement. However, it is equally critical to address climate displacement in a way that does not reinforce pejorative attitudes towards refugees and migrants.
Refugees and migrants should not be used as a prop to warn politicians to act on climate change and the environment. For starters, as has been discussed, climate displacement is already happening throughout the world, including to Canadians. It is no longer a “future risk” but a present reality. But more importantly, this language reinforces xenophobic rhetoric and biases against migrants, by implying that refugees and migrants are a burden that ought to be mitigated. When refugees are presented as the “risk to be avoided” it shifts attention away from environmental injustice, and towards immigration controls like border surveillance and migration restrictions.
When we discuss climate displacement and environmental justice, we need to emphasize the right villains. Migration and refugees are not the problem, and human mobility is normal, as well as being crucial for human dignity and personhood irrespective of environmental disaster. We need to instead focus energies on attributing blame and responsibility on political leaders who are enabling climate change and environmental degradation and industries that are disproportionately responsible for pollution and climate disaster.
Advocating for climate migrant rights needs to be done in conjunction with advocating to stop the causes of climate displacement. Environmental justice demands that everyone have the right to live in health and security and in tandem with their environment wherever they are situated. No one should be made subject to forced evacuation because of an inhabitable environment. The discussion of environmental displacement must first and foremost centre the right for people to stay where they already are and not be exposed to environmental hazard, and also their right to move freely.
Migrants have rights, and so does the environment. They should never be seen as juxtaposed or at odds.
Sabrena Khadija for Unbound Philanthropy x Fine Acts (Creative Commons)
Top photo: Fort McMurray wildfire, 2016. (Photo: Jason Woodhead / Flickr Creative Commons)