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8 J. Hum. Rts. & Env't. 1 (2017)

handle is hein.journals/jhre8 and id is 1 raw text is: Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, Vol. 8 No. 1, March 2017, pp. 1-5 Editorial Climate, justice and displacement: reflections on law, policy and the future of human rights in the climate crisis The environmental and climate migration debate began more than three decades ago when the United Nations Environmental Programme published its report on 'environmental refugees'.1 Early discussions proceeded largely unnoticed by the broader public until environmentalists started using the term 'environmental refugees' in the mid-1990s to demonstrate to decision-makers the vivid threat presented by inaction in mitigating man-made climate change.2 Instead of yielding strong commitments to C02 emission reduction, however, the security implications of climate migration drew attention from Western security agencies; perhaps because of their search for new tasks after the end of the Cold War. It took close to another decade for the projected 'threat' of people potentially migrating because of climate change from, allegedly, the global South to developed (main emitter) countries to transform into concerns for the migrants themselves. Against this background, the first legal debates to gain a high degree of publicity clearly focused on 'climate refugees' and on the search for adequate modes of protec- tion. The approaches advocated oscillated between the pursuit of a new convention on climate refugees and an amendment to either the Geneva Refugee Convention or to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).3 These approaches, which can be called treaty approaches, did not prove viable for various reasons: in specific cases, it often proved empirically difficult to disentangle the triggers driving the movement of people, whether these were climate and other envir- onmental causes - or economic ones. It therefore proved equally difficult to reach an agreeable definition of the term 'climate refugees' for legal and scientific purposes. Last but not least, there was no political appetite amongst states for a new or amended treaty - either under the refugee or the climate regime. Moreover, from a protection per- spective, the debate initially placed a strong emphasis upon those who fled from natural disasters across international borders, with a high degree of focus on the especially visible example of environmentally-forced migrants from shrinking and submerging small island states (the so-called 'canary in the coalmine'). 1. E El-Hinnawi, Environmental Refugees (United Nations Environmental Programme, New York 1985). 2. N Myers, 'Envimnmental Refugees in a Globally Warmed World' (1993) 43 BioScience 752. 3. F Biermann and I Boas, Preparing for a Warmer World: Towards a Global Governance System to Protect Climate Refugees. Global Governance Working Paper (2007) <http://www. sarpn.org/documents/d0002952/Climate refugees-global_govemanceNov2007.pdf> accessed 16 November 2016; B Docherty and T Giannini, 'Confronting a Rising Tide: A Proposal for a Convention on Climate Change Refugees' (2009) 33 Harv. Envtl. L. Rev. 349; WBGU, World in Transition: Climate Change as a Security Risk. Flagship Report (German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), Berlin 2007). 0 2017 The Author Journal compilation 0 2017 Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd The Lypiatts, 15 Lansdown Road, Cheltenham, Glos GL50 2JA, UK and The William Pratt House, 9 Dewey Court, Northampton MA 01060-3815, USA

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