The Borders of Climate Change
While Singapore is currently spared from the worst effects of climate change, others are left to bear the brunt of ecological damage. Indeed, we need only look to our next-door neighbor who was hard-hit by a ‘once in 100 years’ flood that affected 11 Malaysian states in late December and early January, resulting in overall losses of US$1.46 billion and 12,000 people displaced.
Climate change raises grave social dangers in the form of border conflicts as people forced to flee from escalating threats of climate disasters and resource scarcity clash with restrictive immigration policies. In light of growing anti-immigrant xenophobic sentiments, public discourse must strive to actively curb alarmist rhetoric to avoid provoking a mass cultural backlash that would distract from humanitarian efforts.
Within climate discussions, it is not uncommon for terms such as ‘natural disasters’, ‘unsustainable development’ and ‘refugees’ to summon up bleak visuals of developing nations — undoubtedly an influence of mainstream journalism’s employment of problematic tropes in framing populations from the global South. One of the key ways in which dominant views of climate change are imagined and understood falls clearly within a traditional North-South geopolitical frame. We must be wary of how climate refugees are being discursively transformed into unwanted, threatening internal and external ‘Others’; the issue demands attention in the form of a critical social science of climate change.
Political geographer, Mike Hulme, has persuasively argued that engaging with climate change takes us well beyond physical transformations that are observed, modeled and predicted by natural scientists. Our understanding of climate is also filtered through cultural and political lenses and interpreted through concepts, tools and languages. Hulme asserts:
Climate cannot be experienced directly through our senses…Climate is an idea that carries a much richer tradition of meaning than is captured by the unimaginative convention that defines it as being ‘the average course or condition of the weather of a place usually over a period of years as exhibited by temperature, wind velocity and precipitation…Climate has both physical and cultural connotations…Climate can change physically, but climates can also change ideologically.
It is imperative to recognize how persistent colonial modes of thought are in geopolitical reasoning and how Northern specifications of the global continue to reproduce the South as inferior; subject to surveillance, development and management in Northern terms. All equity-based environmental movements should seek to center those most affected by climate disasters, drawing on their experiences to better implement effective and adaptive solutions, to guard against reproductions of paternalistic ways of governance over other nations.
The Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP), a thinktank that produces annual global terrorism and peace indexes, predicts as many as 1.2 billion people may be displaced by ecological threats caused by climate change by 2050. Yet, most climate refugees continue to remain de facto excluded from international legal protections, as their flight is frequently prompted by natural disaster and/or economic turmoil rather than by ‘‘persecution’, at least as that term is understood in the Western context. Under the purview of the Geneva Convention, political refugees from war receive aid and eventual asylum placement from UN and other relief agencies. Climate refugees currently receive no such help.
While much of international climate risk management has focused on mitigation and adaptation strategies, we must acknowledge that robust humanitarian aid is needed in the eventuality that the limits of such technological projects are exceeded in order to minimize potential loss and damages.
Current estimates of climate finance needs for residual loss and damage in developing countries range between US$290 billion to US$ 580 billion in 2030. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, only 54% of the global humanitarian appeals could be funded in 2019. International climate financing is clearly lacking — even as we arrived at these numbers without having accounted for loss of life, cultural heritage, and ecosystem services.
In this vein, we must be critical of climate solutions rooted in neoliberal logic. State actors often refuse to take in refugees by casting them as potential threats to national security while openly welcoming select foreign laborers deemed desirable by market demands. Capitalistic expansion perpetuates state-sanctioned violence in the name of securing “national interests’’, defending borders and creating conditions favorable for capitalist markets (no matter the cost to health, the environment, or the most vulnerable people).
It is all too common to see corporate entities praised for promoting cap and trade, natural gas, and “clean coal” as alternatives, while simultaneously regarding the climate refugee as a problem to be treated as any other humanitarian crisis — with relief, shelters, and temporary aid. To practice such exclusionary border control policies founded on market value assigned to human lives by exploitative labor systems is to maintain a modern-day eco-apartheid.
In response to a global tightening of immigration policies as part of pandemic restrictions, it is notable how immobilization orders are imposed on members of certain national origins but not others. The deployment of racialized border policing preserves imperial relations by containing colonial damage within the cartographic boundaries of developing nations.
In confronting this political reality, it is useful to consider the concept of ‘ecological debt’ to establish the role and resulting moral obligations of developed nations in this climate crisis. The term in this context is defined as ‘the debt accumulation by Northern, industrial countries toward the Third World countries on account of resource plundering, environmental damages, and the free occupation of environmental space to deposit wastes, such as greenhouse gases from the industrial countries’.
Short-lived humanitarian responses supplied by developed nations is an insufficient replacement for international cooperative action in legislating rights-based norms and policies for countries most likely to be impacted by migration induced by climate change and the environment. Climate resiliency efforts must push for a reframing of the migrant crisis, whose rights and needs should become a focal point of policy in protecting global human security.
India’s environment minister Leena Nandan, who spoke at the World Sustainable Development Summit in 2022 emphasized that helping developing nations adapt to the impacts of climate change is more important than pressuring them to cut emissions faster.
To quote her, “Climate justice has to be a part of it. Where is the equity otherwise?”.
