Last week, more than 100 advocates, academics, and reporters joined the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) for a webinar with three leading experts on climate migration and resilience. Presenters discussed the biggest challenges that communities and workers are facing due to the climate crisis.
As the climate crisis brings about more frequent and intense weather events, from wildfires to disastrous flooding, some families have been forced to flee to new communities. Maxine Burkett, Professor of Law at the University of Hawaii and a CPR Member Scholar, explained that while decisions to migrate are often multifaceted, families affected by extreme weather events are now considering climate change and environmental disaster in decisions about whether to leave their homes and communities.
Burkett added that slow-onset disasters, such as sea-level rise, and planned relocation are among several climate-related triggering scenarios that scholars focused on migration and displacement are studying. According to her research, millions of climate migrants will likely remain within their nations' borders, posing a range of infrastructure and other issues. And, of course, we must also prepare for cross-border migration and the unique challenges it presents with regard to asylum and refugee laws and border conflicts.
Matt Hauer, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Florida State University, agreed with Burkett that migration decisions involve many factors. In addition to environmental concerns like extreme weather events, families consider economics, demographics, and social and political issues. Hauer's research confirms that even when families have ample reason to move, they are simply not eager to leave their communities. If they do make the difficult decision to leave, they often move only short distances where they have established social networks or job opportunities. In trying to shape policy, this means that cities, counties, and states that are most likely to be "receiving communities" should begin to plan for incoming migrants by conducting outreach to their communities and positioning themselves to ensure migrants have access to programs that enhance their quality of life.
Saket Soni, Executive Director of Resilience Force and the National Guestworker Alliance, has focused his research on how we enable families to return home after they have fled or are forced out of their communities due to a climate disaster. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, an estimated 400,000 people were forced out of the metro area. These families were locked out of the job market post-Katrina. Instead, thousands of migrant laborers were brought in to help with disaster relief and reconstruction and found themselves exploited by contractors who did not pay their wages, forced them to sleep in uninhabitable buildings, and exposed them to dangerous working conditions and toxic hazards.
Soni quickly learned that whether an individual was displaced or was brought in amid climate change, the sources of their vulnerability and power were the same. Recognizing that racial, economic, housing, and other social inequities are compounded in the aftermath of climate disasters, he is particularly interested in identifying the government interventions and social supports that can be put in place to help families return home and ensure that laborers brought in to rebuild receive fair wages, livable housing, and safe working conditions.
To tune in for the full conversation, you can watch the recording below.
To learn more, please take a look at these additional resources:
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Katie Tracy | February 5, 2020
Last week, more than 100 advocates, academics, and reporters joined the Center for Progressive Reform (CPR) for a webinar with three leading experts on climate migration and resilience. Presenters discussed the biggest challenges that communities and workers are facing due to the climate crisis.
James Goodwin | February 4, 2020
On Thursday, the House Oversight and Reform Committee's Environment Subcommittee will hold a hearing to examine the harm to children posed by the Trump administration's attack on one of the most wildly successful clean air protections in American history: the Obama-era Mercury and Air Toxic Standards (MATS). The rule, adopted in 2012 after literally decades in the making, has reduced coal-fired power plant emissions of brain-damaging mercury by more than 81 percent, acid gases by more than 88 percent, and sulfur dioxide by more than 44 percent. Altogether, its pollution reductions have saved thousands of lives.
Karen Sokol | January 28, 2020
On January 17, a panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a much-awaited decision dismissing Juliana v. United States, a climate case that gained more traction in the courts than anyone had expected, given, as U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken stated in her opinion denying the motions to dismiss in the case, it was "no ordinary lawsuit."
Joel A. Mintz | January 27, 2020
From time to time, a judicial decision from a federal court has the potential to have a profound impact on American society and government policy. Such a case is Juliana v. United States, in which a group of 21 young people, together with an environmental organization and "a representative of future generations," brought suit against numerous federal agencies and officials seeking a judicially mandated plan to phase out fossil fuel emissions and a drawdown of excess atmospheric carbon.
James Goodwin | January 23, 2020
When the Trump administration released its recent proposal to gut the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), it trumpeted the action as a long-overdue step to "modernize" the law's implementation by "simplifying" and "clarifying" its procedural and analytical requirements for federal agencies. If these words sound familiar, that's because they're the disingenuous claptrap that opponents of regulatory safeguards repeatedly trot out to camouflage their efforts to rig legislative and rulemaking processes in favor of corporate polluters. Put differently, those terms might as well be conservatives' code words to describe something that will cause more trips to the emergency room for urban children who suffer from asthma, more toxic contaminants in our drinking water, more irreversible degradation of fragile wetlands, and more runaway climate change.
Dave Owen | January 23, 2020
On Thursday morning, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and EPA released a final rule determining which aquatic features are covered by the Clean Water Act. Already, the press coverage is following a familiar pattern: farming lobbyists praise the rule as a major victory, and environmentalists condemn it as an abdication of clean water protection and water quality science. The former part of that pattern has always been interesting to me. It's true that the farm lobby has been a prominent and effective participant in debates about this rule and its predecessors. But I think much of its participation, and the resulting press coverage, has been misleading. This new rule does offer benefits to farmers (at a likely cost to water quality), but the benefits aren't likely to be nearly as great as the rhetoric would lead you to believe. The goal of this post is to explain the changes the new rule actually makes for farmers and the reason those changes are more modest than you might expect.
Katie Tracy, Robert Verchick | January 22, 2020
It's no secret that President Trump has harassed staff at federal agencies since his first moment in office. Days after his inauguration, he blocked scientists at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) from talking to the press and the public. He famously cracked down on federal labor unions and chiseled early retirees of their expected pension benefits. Now he's requiring hundreds of staff from USDA's Economic Research Service and the Bureau of Land Management to leave their homes in the Washington area and move to offices out West or risk losing their jobs.
Alejandro Camacho, Robert L. Glicksman | January 21, 2020
The Trump administration has fired the latest salvo in its never-ending assault on environmental safeguards: a proposal from the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) to overhaul its regulations governing federal agency compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Victor Flatt | January 15, 2020
It's not just wildfires in Australia or our rapidly warming oceans (to the tune of five Hiroshima bombs every second). Climate change affects every aspect of our world, and it's forcing us reevaluate all of the human institutions we've built up over years, decades, and centuries. One such institution that CPR Member Scholar Victor Flatt has begun investigating is the legal profession itself.