Environmental migration, international politics and the UNFCCC : from 'climate refugees' narratives to adaptation and loss & damage

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UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

Master's Thesis

Environmental Migration, International Politics and the UNFCCC:

From 'climate refugees' narratives to Adaptation and Loss & Damage

M.Sc. Human Geography: Political Geography

Julian Aurel Thoss Supervisor:

UvAnetID: 11128763 Dr. V. D. Mamadouh

Email: jt92@gmx.de Second Reader:

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Abstract

This thesis reconstructs discursive academic and political developments around the topic of environmental migration in order to explain current multilateral policies and explore potential solutions for an equitable governance of environmental migrants in the future. Environmental factors have always influenced human migration, yet climate change sheds a new light on the phenomenon. Sea level rise, natural hazards, and increased water stress are expected to undermine the livelihoods of large parts of the world population, thereby dramatically altering global migration patterns. Though, the complexity of blurring environmental, political, social, demographic and economic migration drivers has led to scientific discords about related definitions, methods, and numbers. So far, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) seems to be the only global platform engaged with environmental migration. Deterred by the lack of facts and numbers, environmental migration was here mostly mentioned in the 'climate refugees' narratives of Small Island Developing States representatives. Due to increased academic awareness and the advocacy of the humanitarian community, migration was mentioned as part of the climate change adaptation policy agenda in 2010. Since then, environmental migration has become part of a complex technical discussion around climate-related Loss & Damage. Concrete policies, however, are still being postponed. Today, there is no internationally accepted legal status, no legal instrument and no institutional protection regime for people migrating due to environmental factors. Drawing on a proposal of Biermann & Boas (2010), the present research findings indicate that a Protocol on Recognition, Protection and Resettlement of Climate Migrants to the UNFCCC could be part of the solution to establish an independent and equitable governance regime for environmental migrants in the long run.

Keywords: Adaptation, COP, Climate Change, Climate Refugees, Discourse, Environmental Migration, Geopolitics, International Politics, IPCC, Loss & Damage, UNFCCC.

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Acknowledgments

First of all, I would like to thank Virginie Mamadouh for supervising a research topic that transcends the boundaries of classical disciplines. Supported by her professional supervision, I could materialize my desire to engage with the political components of climate change, or what Simon Dalby calls "the geopolitics of climate change" (Dalby, 2013). At this point, I would like to thank all my interviewees for their help. In particular, I would like to thank Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, one of the world leading climate researchers and founding Director of the renowned Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), for taking some of his precious time to discuss my research topic. Moreover, I would like to thank Koko Warner, whose expertise shaped my research at all stages. As former Section Head of the United Nations University in Bonn, she could share some first-hand experiences from the most crucial moments in the history of the UNFCCC. Also, I would like to thank Inge van der Welle, Leonhardt van Efferink, and Eric Chu for their active and dedicated support in the early stages of the research process. Last but not least, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my parents, to whom I owe one of the greatest privileges in the world, namely growing up in a peaceful and educated social environment. Without them, I would not have been able to concentrate my thoughts, time and energy on ecological politics and ecopolitical discourses.

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List of Abbreviations

AOSIS Alliance of Small Island States

CCEMA Climate Change, Environment and Migration Alliance

COP Conference of the (UNFCCC) Parties

EU European Union

GCM Global Circulation Model

GDP Gross Domestic Product

GEF Global Environmental Facility

IAM Integrated Assessment Model

IASC Inter-Agency Standing Committee

IDP Internally Displaced Person

IGO Inter-Governmental Organization

IOM International Organization for Migration

IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

LDC Least Developed Country

NAPA National Adaptation Plan of Action

NGO Non-Governmental Organization

OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development

PSIDS Pacific Small Island Developing States

RCP Representative Concentration Pathway

SDG Sustainable Development Goal

SIDS Small Island Developing States

UNDP United Nations Development Programme

UNEP United Nations Environment Programme

UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

UNHCR United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

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1 Introduction

Pictures of refugees and migrants have become an omnipresent part of our media landscape. However, the underlying root causes of migration are hardly talked about and often environmental. In face of climate change and the extensive global population growth, more and more people will have to migrate for environmental reasons. As the topic is hardly addressed in the global political arena, environmental migrants are still facing huge institutional, legal, and political gaps. Recently, however, environmental migration and displacement have become a topic in the climate conferences of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Observers and experts around the world wonder whether this new engagement of the international community under the UNFCCC could bring solutions to the big questions around environmental migration: How can the international community cope with a new nature of human mobility? How can legal and institutional gaps be filled in order to guarantee the protection and assistance of environmental migrants? And how can large-scale environmental displacement be prevented?

As the UN climate conferences are subject to the interests of 196 sovereign states, it is not hard to imagine that solution-finding processes are complex, lengthy and difficult. Given the sensitive nature of both climate change issues and the topic of migration, "the real magic happens in the discourse" (Interview Warner, UNFCCC): How things are addressed is largely determined by perceptions and how actors 'talk' about them. Simply put, the way aspects are mentioned and framed in the political arena shapes the political responses that emerge from the negotiations.

The following research will investigate how the linkages between climate change and migration is addressed in the global political arena, reflected in the following research question:

What role does environmental migration play in the negotiations of the international community under the UNFCCC?

In order to seek answers to this complex question, the research will focus in particular on the following three sub-questions:

1) How did the topic of environmental migration enter the UNFCCC negotiations?

2) Which actors and discourses shape the current policy regime around environmental migration? 3) What could an equitable and effective policy regime around environmental migration look like?

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The thesis is structured as follows: First, the reflection on the methodological proceedings of the research will help to better understand the concept of discourse (chapter 2). An overview of the current refugee protection regime will then provide the necessary knowledge to understand the legal and institutional settings of environmental migration (chapter 3). Subsequently, a brief historical overview of academic literary works on environmental migration will shed light on the current state of related scientific knowledge (chapter 4). The available knowledge on environmental migration will be compared to its representation in the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international scientific body informing UNFCCC policy-makers (chapter 4. 3 ). The academic perspectives on the topic in mind, a discourse analysis will reconstruct the historical development of the topic of environmental migration in the UNFCCC negotiations (chapter 5). The discourse analysis in return will provide the necessary context to understand the current policy regime around environmental migration, manifested in the Cancun Agreements (chapter 5.2), the Doha Decision on Approaches to Address Loss and Damage, and the Paris Agreement (chapter 5.3). Informed by the foregoing analysis, some reflections will be necessary on how environmental migration could be integrated into the UNFCCC in the long run (chapter 6 ) .

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2 Discourse Analysis: Epistemology and Methodology

This chapter will lay the methodological foundation of the subsequent research. Criteria like reliability, validity and objectivity, which are used to measure the quality of quantitative research, are hard to transfer to qualitative research approaches. Searching for alternative criteria for the evaluation of qualitative research, scholars have increasingly stressed the importance of reflexivity, or the necessity of researchers to "be reflexive about the implications of their methods, values, biases, and decisions" (Bryman, 2012: 393). A critical methodological and philosophical self-reflection is hence crucial and should guide the research process at all stages. The following pages will shed light on the methodological proceedings of the research, including its underlying epistemological and philosophical assumptions, important key concepts, the data collection process and its limitations.

Geopolitics is both a scholarly practice and a political practice (Moiso, 2015: 220). While early classical geopolitical reasoning mainly focused on the geographical features of political power (e.g. natural resources, territory, etc.), new variants of classical geopolitics persist in the ways politicians, policy experts, military strategists, scholars and the public make sense of international affairs (Moisio, 2015). In contrast, critical geopolitics, a school of thought dating back to the writings of John Agnew, Simon Dalby, and Gerald ÓTuathail in the late 1980s, attempts to deconstruct the ways geopolitical knowledge is constructed (Moisio, 2015: 223). Drawing on post-structuralist ideas of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, knowledge and discourses about the geographical features of international relations are the very research object of critical geopolitics (Mamadouh, 1998: 244). At its core, critical geopolitical reasoning is about how decision-makers understand the world, how they construct stories, how they develop strategies and how they conceptualize solutions to problems (ÓTuathail, 2002). The question of how the environment and geographical arrangements shape human behavior and power dates back to the founding fathers of classical geopolitical reasoning (Mackinder, 1904). While geopolitical reasoning has been characterized by "remarkably persistent" determinist arguments about the interlinkages between environment and politics (Dalby, 2013: 39), political geographers had to rethink and extend their traditional concepts with the changing world order after the end of the Cold War (Reuber, 2000: 37). Political geographers had to transcend traditional topics and research subjects in order to adapt to the diverse upheavals in all political arenas (Reuber, 2000: 39). Since then, the climate has become once again become "matter for explicit geopolitical deliberation" (Dalby, 2013: 38). While the latest generation of critical geopolitical scholarship has made clear that political action is the consequence of modes of knowledge and ways of representing the world (Dalby, 2013: 38), the

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urgency of climate change now requires political geographers to engage with environmental politics, ecopolitical discourses and the political handling of ecological consequences (Reuber, 2000: 39), or what Simon Dalby calls "the geopolitics of climate change" (Dalby, 2013).

Drawing on these calls, the research will investigate environmental migration politics from a stance of critical realism. Critical realism is a particular version of realism that goes back to the work of Bhaskar (1975). Generally speaking, realism can be understood as the claim that there is a real world, which exists independently of our knowledge (Fairclough, 2005). The real world includes a social world and attracts the attention of scholars and scientists (Fairclough, 2005). Critical realism aims at critically scrutinizing this social world: It claims that the social world is, in contrast to the natural world, socially constructed and constituted by events and discourses (Fairclough, 2005: 922). Accordingly, scientific conceptualizations of reality do not reflect the reality but are part of the social world, thus represent a way of knowing the reality (Bryman, 2012: 29). The social world can only be understood "if we identify the structures at work that generate those [..] discourses [..] through the practical and theoretical work of the social sciences" (Bhaskar, 1989: 2. In: Bryman, 2012: 29). Simply put, a critical realist approach aims at deconstructing discourses.

As the concept of discourse can be employed in different contexts, the thesis at hand will refer to the definition of Jørgensen & Phillips (2002: 1), who define a discourse as "a particular way of talking about and understanding the world (or an aspect of the world)". Such an 'aspect of the world' could be, for example, a flood hitting a small island state. The flood is a material fact, an event that occurs independently of people's thoughts and talk. However, not all people would describe the flood in the same way. Some people would draw on a meteorological discourse, explaining the flood as a natural phenomenon caused by heavy rains, while others would categorize the flood solely as an El Ni ño phenomenon. Parts of the population would draw on a climate change discourse and attribute the flood to the greenhouse effect, while others would point to a political discourse, hence attribute the flood to governmental mismanagement and the failure to build reliable dikes. Finally, some individuals would maybe draw on a religious discourse and see the flood as a manifestation of God's will (Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002: 9). Thus, there is not only one discourse about material facts like climate change or migration. Though, among the various narratives and framings, some discourses might be more dominant than others. Both the discourse and its relative dominance may change over time.

This is important because discourse shapes human action: The ascribed meanings and interpretations of a discourse determine how people perceive and respond to material facts. While islanders drawing on a climate change discourse, for example, would possibly advocate for more climate change mitigating, those islanders drawing on a political discourse might champion for a change of government in the aftermath of the flood. Religious islanders, in contrast, might sacrifice their sheep. Simply put, by

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applying a critical realist perspective on the concept of discourse, the present work is not questioning the existence of a physical reality but acknowledging that discourse plays an active role in the social construction of the world. Hence, discourse is particularly important for understanding human action, both at the individual level and in the global political arena:

"It is through discourse that leaders act, through the mobilization of certain simple geographical understandings that foreign-policy actions are explained and through ready-made geographically infused reasoning that wars are rendered meaningful [..]. Political speeches and the like afford us a means of recovering the self-understandings of influential actors in world politics. They help us understand the social construction of worlds and the role of geographical knowledge in that social construction." (ÓTuathail & Agnew, 1992: 191)

Consequently, it is through the analysis of discourse that multilateral agreements and the like can be contextualized. In other words, applying a discourse analysis is key for investigating the phenomenon of environmental migration in the context of the above mentioned research question(s).

Even though social constructivism can be seen as the general umbrella of discourse analysis, a critical realist approach is, according to Fairclough (2005), particularly useful for researching organizational structures and discourses (931): While extreme forms of social constructivism are rejected, the relationship between discursive and non-discursive elements occupies the center stage. In contrast to strong social constructivist approaches, a critical realist approach does not risk giving succor to climate skeptics, who contest the very existing of climate change by presenting it as a social construct (Barnett & Campbell, 2010: 3).

With his theories on discursive knowledge and power, Michel Foucault has played a central role in the development of discourse analysis. Drawing up on Foucaultian thinking (Foucault, 1970) and the discourse analytical approaches of Jørgensen and Phillips (2002), the following three philosophical assumptions will underpin the discourse analytical approach of my research:

(1) Truth is a reflection of the dominant discourse at a certain point in history (Foucault, 1980b. In: Paasi, 1996: 20). Our knowledge does not just reflect the reality but is time-space-specific. A discourse "is, from beginning to end, historical - a fragment of history" (Foucault, 1972: 117. In: Jørgensen & Phillips, 2002: 13). As discourses and their relative importance change over time, truth is a discursive construction and different regimes of knowledge determine what is true and false (Foucault, 1970). Therefore, a historical approach to discursive developments will be employed and discourses will be reconstructed chronologically. The present research attempts to approximate the 'real' phenomenon of environmental migration by examining different academic and political representations of it and how they change over time. Thereby, taken-for-granted knowledge can be approached critically.

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in which we construct common truths and compete about what is true and false. This applies to both academic and political knowledge. Academic and non-academic accounts are produced in a certain intellectual environment (e.g. as part of a certain school of thought, embedded within social hierarchies and a certain organizational structures, etc.), which influence the production of knowledge. Political documents are the outcome of a competition over different framings and narratives. Accordingly, the agreements under the UNFCCC are the outcome of the climate conferences and reflect the competition over national interests in the negotiations. Therefore, the research attempts to put forms of knowledge (manifested in written or verbal texts, policies, etc.) into their broader (social) context.

(3) Within a particular discourse, some forms of action are framed as logical while others seem unthinkable. Generally speaking, framing refers to the way the objective reality is defined: At its core, framing means selecting, emphasizing, and excluding certain aspects of the perceived reality in communication processes (Hallahan, 1999: 207). Aspects of the physical reality, which do not appear in a discourse or are framed as irrelevant, are unlikely to be addressed. This invisibility of certain aspects in a discourse can be either coincidence (e.g. due to the lack of awareness) or the result of strategic concealing. Analyzing framings means hence attempting to disentangle the rhetoric strategies actors are pursuing to justify their views and actions. While the process of framing itself is neither inherently good nor bad, it reflects judgments made by the 'framer' and leads to specific social actions (Hallahan, 1999: 207). In this sense, the commitments made in the UNFCCC agreements are the result of framing processes, which reflect again the dominant discourse of the negotiations at a certain point in time.

Reflected in the research question(s), the examination of the policy regime around environmental migration lies at the heart of the research. According to the Oxford Dictionary (2005), a policy is "a course or principle of action adopted or proposed by an organization or individual" (Soanes & Stevenson, 2005: 1362). Similarly, policies are the "prudent or expedient conduct or action" (Soanes & Stevenson, 2005: 1362). The major characteristic of policies is, according to May & Joachim (2013), that they "contain a set of political commitments that reify the majority enactors' view of the purpose of government" (p. 426). Consequently, the term policy document usually refers to forms of written text that contain commitments and set a course of action, either of (multiple) governments or (multilateral) organizations. A policy regime, hence, describes "the approach that is being used to address a problem or a set of problems" (May & Joachim, 2013: 428). For "a backward mapping of governing arrangements for a given policy problem", however, it is argued, "the lens provided by regime perspectives [..] advances theorizing about policy processes" (May & Joachim, 2013: 427). In other words, since the aim of the research is to identify the historical developments of environmental migration discourses, a focus on the broader system behind single policies may be more useful than

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focusing on policies per se. In practice, a focus on the policy regime entails different thinking about the unit of analysis: Instead of starting with a policy, one starts with a particular 'set of problems' - in this case environmental migration, climate change, vulnerability, and so on - and "seeks to depict the ideas, institutional arrangements, and interests that constitute the governing arrangements for dealing with the problem", thus the policy regime (May & Joachim, 2013: 429). A more detailed understanding of the present 'set of problems' (including the concepts of migration, climate change, vulnerability, and so on) will be provided in the subsequent analysis (chapter 4). Thus, a focus on the policy regime implies that it is not sufficient to analyze policies per se. Instead, the analysis of a broad range of data is required to put the policies into their broader context.

Guided by the discourse analytical framework, both primary and secondary data will help reconstructing the development of environmental migration discourses over 21 years of UNFCCC negotiations. In the center of analysis are those three UNFCCC agreements, which mention migration, namely:

- the Cancun Agreements (UN, 2010),

- the Doha Decision on Approaches to Address Loss and Damage (UN, 2012), and - the Paris Agreement (UN, 2015).

Other UNFCCC agreements and international treaties (Appendix I), academic literature, reports of related organizations and media, official speeches held at the Conferences of the Parties (COPs), and semi-structured expert interviews will put the three agreements into their broader discursive contexts. An extensive academic literature review of more than 100 relevant publications constitutes the starting point of the research process. Underlying all chapters, academic literature will outline relevant scientific knowledge about environmental migration dynamics. Non-academic literature from related organizations and media complements the chapters where necessary. The keywords of the thesis (see

Abstract) have guided the search of both academic and non-academic literature. Gathered articles, books and reports, in return, provided references for further literature. All literature was approached critically and with respect to the above outlined discourse analytical guidelines.

For the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP) onwards, a systematic collection of (most) countries' speeches can be found in the UNFCCC database. In the center of analysis are the Statements hold by representatives from Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Russia, South Africa, the United States of America and all Small Island Developing States (SIDS). While the speeches of SIDS were chosen due to their (expected) importance for 'climate refugees' narratives, the speeches of the other countries were selected due to their (expected) geopolitical importance in the international community: The United States of America and the European Union constitute the two biggest economies in the world (measured in nominal GDP), and Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa constitute the 'BRICS',

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the five largest emerging nations, which gather almost half of the world population (BPB, 2016). A comprehensive overview of the analyzed speeches can be found in Appendix II. For the negotiations before COP16, the countries' Statements are less well documented. Through combining the dispersed speeches and quotes from early COPs available in related books and articles, it is nevertheless possible to reconstruct the major discussions around environmental migration over the history of 21 COPs. Semi-structured interviews with related experts contribute to the discourse analysis. The choice of t he contacted people has to be considered within the process of purposive sampling, which implicates that interviewees were recruited "in a strategic way, so that those sampled are relevant to the research questions that are being posed" (Bryman, 2012: 418). Further experts could be identified in the manner of a snowball sampling approach. 10 interviews with experts from multilateral organizations and academia contributed to a profound understanding of the current policy regime around environmental migration. Conducted in Paris, Bonn, Potsdam and via skype or telephone, the interviews focused on experts from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations University (UNU), the Research Centre for Sustainability Studies (RCSS), the Utrecht University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). A detailed overview of the professional engagement of all interviewees can be found in Appendix III. Even though the questions for each interviewee were developed with respect to his or her expertise, they followed a prescribed pattern: While earlier interviews focused on the various linkages between climate change and migration, later interviews built up on this knowledge and went with more detail into the UNFCCC negotiations. Both the most important initial and the most important subsequent interview questions can be found in Appendix IV. All interviews were conducted in English and audio-recorded. An equal number of interviews with academics and policy-makers was striven for and could be realized. The research was conducted according to the guidelines of ethical procedure as they are listed by the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR, 2013).

Although the number of publications on the topic has increased in the last five years, the thesis at hand is addressing a significant gap in the literature around environmental migration: It presents the first attempt to analyze the role of migration in the UNFCCC negotiations over 21 Conferences of the Parties (COPs). However, the aim of the research is not to draw a representative picture of 21 years of UNFCCC negotiations. This would be hardly feasible, given the:

"overwhelming complexity of perpetually shifting positions by multiple actors - key personalities and principals - and multiple institutions - intra-state bureaucracies, inter-state allies and rivals, international organizations - refracted through a heterogeneous mass media with its own

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geographical webs and circuits of circulation." (ÓTuathail, 2002: 605)

Rather, the aim of the above outlined research is to reconstruct some major political and discursive developments under the UNFCCC around the topic of environmental migration only. Also this requires a certain degree of simplification: Any quote and statement in the following has thus to be understood as highly time-space specific. It is acknowledged that 'governmental positions' can vary within governmental bodies and that overall governmental positions can change over time. The same holds true for any organization or political union. Similarly, referring to the 'academic community' may seem misleading in face of the plurality of personalities, institutions, and viewpoints. Nevertheless, these terms are employed from time to time to depict tendencies and make certain developments better understandable for the reader.

The chapter has outlined the methodological background of the research: Drawing on the call of Simon Dalby for more engagement with the "geopolitics of climate change" (Dalby, 2013: 39), the subsequent research will investigate the role of environmental migration in international politics. A qualitative research strategy in the vein of critical realism will provide the necessary methodological background. Drawing in particular on the ideas of Foucault (1972) and Bhaskar (1989) and practices of Fairclough (2005), Jørgensen and Phillips (2002) and Hallahan (1999), the discourse analytical approach will enable the reconstruction of 21 years of UNFCCC negotiations. All multilateral agreements, academic and non-academic literature, official speeches and semi-structured interviews will be analyzed according to the above outlined criteria.

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3 The Current Refugee Regime

Today, there is neither an internationally accepted legal definition or status for people migrating due to environmental factors, nor any legal instrument dedicated specifically to environmental migration (IOM, 2014: 27). The following chapter will examine the current international protection regime for people who are forced to migrate1_.

The International Organization for Migration, or IOM, defines migration as (IOM, 2016):

"the movement of a person or a group of persons, either across an international border, or within a State. It is a population movement, encompassing any kind of movement of people, whatever its length, composition and causes; it includes migration of refugees, displaced persons, economic migrants, and persons moving for other purposes, including family reunification."

Thereby, the IOM, an intergovernmental organization with 162 member states and one of the global key actors in the field of migration, is forwarding a very comprehensive understanding of migration, a concept which is contested among scholars and related organizations: Other definitions include, for example, distinctions between international and internal migration, between emigration and immigration, or differentiations of voluntary and forced migration, also called displacement. Interestingly, some of these differences are not only made by scholars but also exist in international law, manifested in the various UN Conventions related to migration: The rights of (voluntary) migrants are defined in the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of Their Families, whereas the rights of refugees are described in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, which are again different from the rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs), as mentioned in the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. Despite the existence of these international agreements, people fleeing for environmental reasons are faced with a legal gap in international law.

While employing terms like 'environmental refugees' or 'climate refugees' may seem useful from a political perspective, for example to raise awareness of the phenomenon of environmental migration, they seem misleading from a legal point of view. In practice, international refugee law does not cover environmental factors, as the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (UN, 1951), better known as the 1951 Refugee Convention, defines any person a refugee who:

1 It should be noted that the lines between voluntary and forced migration can blur in reality: in practice, the differences between voluntary and forced migration are often rather gradual and subjective than dissociable. Nevertheless, voluntary and forced migrants ('refugees' and 'internally displaced persons') are treated separately under international law.

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"owing to well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of

a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his [sic] nationality and is

unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself [sic] of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his [sic] former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it." (UN, 1951: Article 1[A]; emphasis added)

As environmental conditions are not related to the fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, they do not constitute a basis for international protection in international refugee law (Warner, 2010: 695). In other words, 'environmental refugees' do not fall under the 1951 Refugee Convention and have no right for related protection. There has been a small number of cases where people from Tuvalu, Kiribati, and Tonga tried to receive refugee protection in Australia and New Zealand, arguing that the local climate change impacts share major characteristics of a 'persecutor' (McAdam, 2012: 47). However, superior courts around the world have explained that the Refugee Convention does not cover people migrating for environmental reasons, people searching for better living conditions, or victims of natural disasters, even though they "might seem deserving of international sanctuary" (McAdam, 2012: 46). Even though all claims of obtaining international refugee status for environmental reasons failed so far, McAdam (2012) has pointed out that there remain a few limited exceptions, where governmental actions and environmental changes are so deeply interlinked that exposure to climate impacts or environmental degradation might amount to persecution. These exceptions include situations where "government policies target particular groups reliant on agriculture for survival, in circumstances where climate change is already hampering their subsistence", "a government induces famine by destroying crops or poisoning water, or contributes to environmental destruction by polluting the land and/or water", where "a government refuses to accept aid from other States when it is in need, such as in the aftermath of a disaster", or a few similar cases (McAdam, 2012: 46 - 47). However, such exception remain solely theoretical so far.

The 1951 Refugee Convention was drafted in the aftermath of World War II and originally meant to respond only to "events occurring in Europe and elsewhere before 1 January 1951" (UN, 1951: Article 1[B]). Adopted by 145 States, the legally binding Convention "is the centrepiece of international refugee protection today" (UNHCR, 2010: 2). 16 years later, the Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, in short 1967 Refugee Protocol (UN, 1967), amended the Convention from 1951 and widened both the temporal and geographical scope of the definition, omitting its limitation to European events before 1951 (UN, 1967: Article 1[2]). The rest of the refugee definition, as illustrated above, has not changed until today. Closely linked to human rights law, the importance of international refugee

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law lies in the codification of the basic rights of refugees, thus of those people whose governments are not able or not willing to protect them (UNHCR, 2010). The Convention further stipulates that refugees should not be penalized for their illegal entry or stay and contains various safeguards against their expulsion. Even though the establishment of asylum proceedings and refugee status determinations are left to the individual states to develop, and are hence characterized by significant disparities among different states as governments, the 1951 Refugee Convention lays down basic minimum standards for the treatment of refugees, including access to courts, education, work and travel documents (International Justice Resource Center, 2016). These standards are under the official supervision of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in short UNHCR (UNHCR, 2010). Established around the same time like the 1951 Refugee Convention, the UNHCR has the United Nations' official mandate to protect and support refugees and asylum-seekers, internally displaced persons, and stateless persons (UNHCR, 2016). Addressing the needs of 'environmental refugees' is not part of the mandate of the UNHCR (Interview Franck, UNHCR).

People on the run, who have not crossed an international border, constitute the group of internally displaced persons, or IDPs. The rights of internally displaced persons (IDPs) are defined in the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (UN, 1998). At the intersection of humanitarian and migration policy, they consist of thirty recommendations upholding the human rights of IDPs, but address aspects of migration management only marginally (Gemenne & Brücker, 2015: 249). As they are a document of soft law, id est non-binding law, states are free to apply them or not. In the context of environmental migration, they also apply only to those displaced internally by natural disasters, thus, where the nature of forced migration is (to a certain extent) unambiguous. People fleeing internationally from natural disasters and people migrating for slow-onset environmental changes, like sea level rise, are neither falling under the 1951 Refugee Convention nor are they addressed by the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement (UN, 1998).

The legal lacuna is probably the most intriguing in the case of 'disappearing islands'. If, in the case of small island states, a whole national territories would disappear under the water surface, the inhabitants would become de facto stateless and maybe, if the affected state would be considered to have ceased existence, even de jure stateless (McAdam, 2012: 120; UNHCR, 2009). The Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (UN, 1954), however, defines only those persons as stateless, who are "not considered as a national by any State under the operation of law" (UN, 1954: Article 1[1]). The permanent disappearance of the physical territory of a Small Island State would in all likelihood imply the loss of the government, "may mean the "State" will no longer exist for the purposes of this provision" (McAdam, 2012: 139). Consequently, the residents of a disappeared state would not even be recognized as stateless, but faced with an unprecedented situation. International law only contemplates

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cases of 'disappearing states' where a successor state begins to exist on the former territory, for example through merger with another state or extinction by voluntary or involuntary dissolution (McAdam, 2012: 139). Pondering the dissolution of a state because of climate change entails hence novel questions that go far beyond existing policies and laws.

Until today, there is no coherent, overarching framework addressing environmental migration and displacement. Contrary to the notion of 'environmental refugees', people fleeing for environmental reasons are not protected by the international refugee protecting regime but faced with legal and institutional gaps. Especially since increased immigration fears in many Western countries have led to an accelerated securitization of immigration and integration policies in the 1990s (Mamadouh, 2012), multilateral consensus-building on migration questions is difficult (Interview Mokhnacheva, IOM). Due to the sensitive nature of the topic, the refugee definition has hardly changed since 1951, a time where refugees were mainly a post-World War II phenomenon and climate change not yet in the public conscience. Since then, migration and asylum policies have been mostly been perceived as questions of national sovereignty (Interview Mokhnacheva, IOM).

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4 Academic Perspectives on Environmental Migration

The reasons for human migration are innumerable, but are often said to be mainly economically dominated (Czaika, 2015). However, many of the stimuli and forcings which drive human mobility have always been environmental (White, 2011: 10). There are many examples where human kind has traditionally made use of migration when confronted with environmental changes (Assan & Rosenfeld, 2012: 1047). The livelihood strategies of nomadic and pastoral societies always involved seasonal patterns of movement to cope with the resource scarce environments of arid and semi-arid regions (Berger, 2003: 245). Also intruders into the Roman Empire were often motivated by crop failure and famine (White, 2011: 10). Surprisingly, deeper academic engagement with environmental migration is relatively new.

This chapter will examine scientific perspectives on environmental migration. First, a brief historical overview will outline some major milestones in the literature on environmental migration. The historical approach will lead to an understanding of the current state of knowledge on the topic, exemplified for environmental migration in the case of Small Island Developing States. As these countries have become icons in discourses around environmental migration, a deeper academic engagement with their faith will help to substantiate the general understanding of environmental migration. In the second part of the chapter, it will be investigated how environmental migration is treated in the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an international scientific body which officially informs the UN climate conferences (IPCC Secretariat, 2013).

4.1 The 'New' Literature Field on Environmental Migration

Environmental influences on migration were first conceptualized by Friedrich Ratzel, one of the founding fathers of the discipline of human geography (Piguet 2013, 149): In the vein of geographical determinism the famous German geographer published his book Anthropogeographie (1882), where he mentioned the environment as an important factor on human mobility. A few years later, the geographer Ernst Georg Ravenstein lay the foundation for modern migration theories, in which he incorporated similar ideas. His groundbreaking paper The Laws of Migration (1889) named an

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"unattractive climate" as one determinant among others which "produced" and is "still producing currents of migration" (286). Despite these and some other early accounts, the emerging field of migration studies lost sight of the natural environment during the twentieth century. According to Piguet (2013: 151), this shift is mainly due to four reasons: the demise of determinism, the Western idea that progress implies a decreasing impact of nature on human fate, the rise of an economic paradigm in migration theory and the constitution of the specific field of refugee studies, developed upon a strong political premise according to which "[s]tates make refugees" (Piguet el al., 2011: 4). Hence, most migration theories do not incorporate the environment in a meaningful manner (Black et al., 2011).

In contrast, the field of environmental literature has recently taken up the topic of migration in the context of climate change research. Even though knowledge about climate change has existed for more than a hundred years, it was not until the 1980s that the topic received broader international attention (Weart, 1997: 34). Simply put, the earth's climate is driven by the balance between incoming solar energy and outgoing heat radiation (Barnett & Campbell, 2010: 8): The planet is encapsulated by atmospheric greenhouse gases (mainly carbon dioxide, but also others like methane, nitrous oxides and halocarbons) which absorb about the half of the solar radiation and keep the planet much warmer than it would be otherwise, a phenomenon which is better known as the 'greenhouse effect' (see figure 1). Since the Industrial Revolution, human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, have increased the concentration of these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, reinforcing thereby the greenhouse effect (Barnett & Campbell, 2010: 8). Through the increased concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases more solar radiation is kept in the atmosphere, which is hence warming up. An increase in the global mean temperature in return causes various other (climatic) changes, like changes in evaporation and rainfall patterns, the melting of glaciers and ice-sheets, or increases in extreme events, and poses serious risks to the stability of ecosystems and the livelihoods of the people who depend on them (Barnett & Campbell, 2010: 9).

With the raise of climate change research it was soon realized that the risks to the people's livelihoods would have the potential to influence worldwide migration patterns. Even though firstly mentioned by Lester Brown from the World Watch Institute in the 1970s (Klepp & Herbeck, 2016: 57), the term 'environmental refugees' gained broader popularity when it was officially introduced by Essam El-Hinnawi, a researcher working for the United Nations Environment Programme (Black, 2001: 1).

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Figure 1: Explanation of the Greenhouse Effect (Le Treut et al., 2007: 115)

According to his understanding, the term described:

"those people who have been forced to leave their traditional habitat, temporarily or permanently, because of a marked environmental disruption (natural and/or triggered by people) that jeopardized their existence and/or seriously affected the quality of their life [sic]. By ‘environmental disruption’ in this definition is meant any physical, chemical, and/or biological changes in the ecosystem (or resource base) that render it, temporarily or permanently, unsuitable to support human life." (El.Hinnawi, 1985: 4. In: Bates, 2002: 466)

Similarly broad is the influential definition used by Myers & Kent (1995), two researchers from the Oxford University:

"Environmental refugees are persons who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their traditional homelands because of environmental factors of unusual scope, notably drought, desertification, deforestation, soil erosion, water shortages and climate change, also natural disasters such as cyclones, storm surges and floods. In face of these environmental threats, people feel they have no alternative but to seek sustenance elsewhere, whether within their own countries or beyond and whether on a semi-permanent or permanent basis." (18 - 19)

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'Climate refugees' can be thus seen as a vague sub-category of 'environmental refugees', two notions that are often used as synonyms and popular far beyond academia in popular discourses. Though, many authors reject 'refugee' terminologies, claiming that they forward a simplistic understanding of the phenomenon and are misleading from a legal perspective (Black, 2001; Raleigh et al., 2008; chapter 3) and refer rather to 'climate migrants', 'environmental migrants' or 'environmentally displaced persons'. Correspondingly, there is no consensus definition for migration influenced by environmental or climatic factors. Even though referring to the same phenomenon, terminology ranges from general phrasings like "environmental migration" (IOM, 2014: 21), "environmentally induced migration" (Raleigh et al., 2008: 3) or "environmentally induced population movement" (Piguet et al., 2011: 17) to more climate change-related language like "climate-induced migration" (Bettini & Andersson, 2014: 160), "climate change-related movement" (McAdam, 2012: 52) and even "climigration" (Warner, 2011: 20). In the context of natural disasters, some authors tend to replace notions of 'migration' with 'displacement', leading to a similar broad choice of phrasings (see figure 2).

Figure 2: The Plurality of Phrasings around Environmental Migration

Some scholars have argued that the early landmark publications on the topic have largely been characterized by an alarmist perspective on environmental migration, manifested for example in "alarmist estimates" of future numbers of environmental migrants and a focus on security aspects (Piguet el al., 2011: 4; Interview Warner, UNFCCC). In this context, one of the first academics gaining

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public attention in the 1990s was the Oxford professor Norman Myers, who predicted that the issue of 'environmental refugees' "promises to rank as one of the foremost human crises of our time" (Myers, 1997: 175; Interview Coelho, IOM). Thus, not only climate change but also the migrants themselves were conceptualized as a threat. According to his analysis, the world would face about 200 million 'environmental refugees' at the end of the twentieth first century, one of the most cited numbers which still appears in media and advocacy campaigns (Piguet, 2013: 154).

Another key author who shaped the academic debate on environmental influences on migration and security was Thomas F. Homer-Dixon, Professor at the University of Toronto. His theories on environmental conflicts resulting out of resource scarcity are still among the most cited accounts on the topic. For Homer-Dixon, migration is part of a larger environment - conflict nexus in the sense that "environmental change may contribute to conflicts as diverse as war, terrorism, or diplomatic or trade disputes. [..] For example, the degradation of agricultural land might produce large-scale migration, which could create ethnic conflicts as migratory groups clash with indigenous populations" (Homer-Dixon, 1991: 77, 85). According to his accounts, the linkages between environment, migration and conflict were unambiguous: Environmental change will destroy the livelihoods and trigger resource conflicts, consequently people will have no other choice but to migrate, a process which will eventually lead to violent conflicts (Homer-Dixon, 1991; Homer-Dixon, 1994).

However, the straightforward arguments on the linkages between environmental change, migration and conflict of these early publications have come under critique (Black, 2001; Bettini & Andersson, 2014). Especially the empirical basis for quantitative data seems weak (Black et al., 2011: 4; Warner et al., 2010: 697). Estimations about the number of future 'environmental refugees' range from 25 million to 1 billion by 2050 (IOM, 2014). Even though it is evident that environmental conditions can be in many ways the reason for (forced) migration, more recent accounts draw attention to the conceptual problems which render such estimations impossible.

Since the mid 2000s, more empirical research on the topic emerged, with an increased focus on case studies in different countries. In cooperation with various renowned researchers and universities, some large-scale international research projects, like the EACH-FOR project of the European Commission (2009), the Where the rain falls project (2011) of the United Nations University, or the Foresight: Migration and Global Environmental Change report (2011) of the UK government, allowed to combine and compare the findings from the different countries. Given the policy-oriented nature of the research, they also became popular among the policy-makers of the UNFCCC (Interview Warner, UNFCCC). As large parts of these studies were published in academic journals, they shape the academic debate on environmental migration until today (Afifi, 2011; Warner et al., 2010) .

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diversity in environmental migration patterns and draws a much more nuanced picture of the phenomenon. First of all, it is now acknowledged that different types of environmental change (e.g. droughts, sea level rise, soil erosion, marine depletion, etc.) influence migration in different ways, making generalizations about environmental migration difficult. Though, when talking in broader terms, it is important to distinguish slow-onset environmental changes, like desertification or sea level rise, from environmental sudden-onset disasters, like hurricanes or floods. Not only the links between environmental change and migration are more explicit in the case of natural disasters, also the nature of migration tends to be generally different: Evidence suggests that slow-onset hazards are positively affecting long-term labor migration, while sudden-onset disasters are more characterized by short-term distress migration, meaning that in most cases distress migrants return home after the security is restored in the place (Raleigh et al., 2008: 37; Black et al., 2011: 7). Despite different types of environmental change, evidence suggests that environmentally induced migration tends to be rather internal, thus within countries: Notions of 'environmental refugees' migrating from the Global South to the Global North have largely been disclaimed (Afifi, 2011; Piguet et al., 2011; Raleigh et al., 2008). Secondly, it is widely recognized that environmental drivers of migration are hard to dissociate from other social, demographic, political and economic migration drivers (Black et al., 2011; Warner et al., 2010). Except from the case of natural disasters, environmental influences on migration patterns are mostly indirect, for example, through the reduction of crops, livestock or fisheries productivity. As a drought could affect the income of a farmer, for example, environmental migration could equal in some cases economic migration. Identifying one single cause of a conflict, or one single cause of migration, is mostly impossible (see figure 3). By contributing to unemployment and food insecurity, environmental change can increase economic instability or existing social and political conflicts, in other words, interact with other economic, political or socio-demographic factors (Black et al., 2011). However, all direct and indirect drivers of migration are in the end subject to the personal decision-making process of the (potential) migrant, a decision-decision-making process which is not only influenced by the severity of the environmental impacts but also by personal characteristics and circumstances like age, sex, education, wealth, or the personal social network (Black et al., 2011: 5). As all external circumstances are subordinated to the individual decision-making process, the lines between voluntary migration and forced displacement are blurred in reality. In other words, in face of the same external circumstances, one individual might decide to stay while another individual might feel 'forced' to leave. When exactly migration becomes 'environmental' is hence a philosophical question.

Given these conceptual problems, academics have started to argue that the vulnerability of individuals and collectives is crucial for understanding the influence of environmental change on migration (Raleigh et al., 2008). "[T]he relative risk experienced by individuals, households and communities to

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adverse changes in their environments" and their "ability to anticipate, cope with, resist and recover from a disaster" is determining the influence of environmental change on migration (Raleigh et al., 2008: 3 - 4). This "predisposition to be adversely affected" is constituted by both the individual's exposure to experience a specific environmental risk and the individual's resilience to that specific environmental risk (Agard & Schipper, 2014: 1775), both of which are influenced by the whole environmental, social, economic, political and demographic context. Referring to the same notion, other accounts identify three elements of vulnerability: exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity (Carmin et al., 2015: 165). Thus, even though there is no single meaning of vulnerability, it has become a key concept among scholars (O'Brien et al., 2007; Raleigh et al., 2008) and related organizations (IOM, 2014; UNHCR, 2015) for analyzing climate change impacts and migration linkages. In contrast to the rather deterministic explanations of the early landmark publications, vulnerability approaches to environmental migration aim at identifying why certain people are more vulnerable than others. As vulnerability is not equally distributed across households, social factors like gender, race and class status can have significant influence on individual and household migratory responses (Carmin et al., 2015: 184). For example, there is widespread agreement that the livelihoods of the poorest are the most likely to be adversely affected by climate change (Black et al., 2011: 8; Carmin et al., 2015: 166). In the same time, their financial capacities to migrate might be limited. Consequently, "[o]ften, the most vulnerable are those who do not possess the economic and social capital to move (trapped populations)" (IOM, 2014: 7; Black et al., 2011).

With this in mind, much of the recent literature conceptualizes migration from a climate change adaptation approach (Betzold, 2015; Black et al., 2011; Islam et al., 2014). Instead of conceptualizing refugees as a possible negative consequence of climate change, migration and relocation is suggested to be part of the solution: Migration can help people to lessen their vulnerability and exposure to environmental risks and disasters, to diversify their income and livelihood strategies and to build resilience where environmental change threatens livelihoods (Betzold, 2015; Black et al., 2011; Islam et al., 2014). In other words, voluntary migration should be encouraged in order to avoid eventual displacement (Black et al., 2011). In cases where alternative adaptation measures are not effective and the affected populations too poor to move on their own ('trapped populations'), it is suggested that planned relocation can offer solutions (Islam et al., 2014; IOM, 2014). Through resettlements of populations, pressure on local water and land resources can be decreased and the habitability of these islands preserved or at least significantly prolonged. Additionally, migrants can send remittances and goods to their remaining family members and thus help to build their resilience. Therefore, migration of some individuals can help a community to remain viable in the long run (Black et al., 2011).

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strategies and in their radicalism: While some scholars call for an pro-active implementation of planned relocation (Islam et al., 2014), others caution that the encouragement of migration should be limited to providing incentives for voluntary labor migration. Indeed, there is a long history of failures of planned relocation in the context of large-scale development projects, for example in connection with hydro-power projects (Interview Mokhnacheva, IOM; Cernea & McDowell, 2010). Evidence suggests that relocated communities often face increased vulnerability, problems of landlessness, unemployment, homelessness, social marginalization, food insecurity, reduced access to resources, (mental) health issues and higher morbidity (Barnett & O'Neill, 2012; Cernea & McDowell, 2010). Thus, the resettlement of those living on islands in anticipation of climate impacts carries a high risk of maladaptation, with adverse social and environmental outcomes (Barnett & O'Neill, 2012). But also the promotion of voluntary migration can generate ambiguous outcomes: While reducing population pressure on islands may have positive effects on local resources, migration can lead to unintended brain drain, a loss of productivity, the increased dependency on remittances, or the loss of community leaders and thereby increase vulnerabilities (Julca & Paddison, 2010: 723). Thus, even though the promotion of migration and resettlement are mostly seen as part of the solution to avoid eventual climate related displacement, evidence remains contested due to the lack of experience.

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4.2 Example I: Environmental Migration and Small Island Developing States

Most of the case studies in the more recent literature have focused on perceived hotspots of environmental migration, regions where human societies seem to be particularly prone to the impacts of climate change. Hotspots of environment migration are not necessarily the regions where most environmental migrants (will) come from, but the regions which are perceived to be the home of many (future) 'environmental refugees'. Because of the broad spectrum of available knowledge about these hotspots, a closer look at one of these regions helps better understanding the very nature of environmental migration. Regions perceived as potential hotspots of environmental migration are, for example, some countries in South East and Central Asia, the countries of the Sahel zone or the Middle East. However, among all regions, 'disappearing' Small Island Developing States (SIDS)2_have

probably attracted most of the scholarly attention on the topic (Barnett & Campbell, 2010; Farbotko & Lazrus, 2012; McAdam, 2012; McNamara & Gibson, 2009). The imagery of cultures becoming submerged by the rising seas has led to a whole literature body on the topic and is hence particularly suitable to exemplify the phenomenon of environmental migration. Due to their high vulnerability to climate change, their small contribution to global greenhouse gas emissions and their symbolic faith, SIDS have become icons in the discourses around 'climate refugees'.

Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are a distinct group of 38 independent UN member states and 20 associate members of regional commissions, a grouping that was introduced at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), better known as the Rio Earth Summit (UN-OHRLLS, 2015: 5). Despite their geographical, political and socio-economic differences, SIDS are said to share certain characteristics and development challenges, what explains their political unity in the international community. These include smallness, remoteness, proneness to natural disasters and similar environmental problems, like land degradation, biodiversity losses and coastal and marine pollution caused, inter alia, by population growth and urbanization (Betzold, 2015: 482). As most SIDS are located in the waters of the tropical and subtropical latitudes, they are expected to face similar climate change impacts (Betzold, 2015: 482).

Studies predicting future migration patterns from SIDS are confronted with the same conceptual and methodological problems like in any other region. Today, there are no reliable data describing the influence of climate change on migration from SIDS. However, in contrast to the early 'climate 2 Not all Small Island Developing States are islands in a geographical sense. Belize, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, and

Suriname are small and low-lying coastal countries that have been recognized as SIDS because they share most of the other characteristics common to SIDS.

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refugees' voices, many recent academic accounts are critical towards straightforward notions of 'disappearing states' (Farbotko & Lazrus, 2012; McAdam, 2012; McNamara & Gibson, 2009). Even though many SIDS are expected to experience land losses, it is unlikely that whole inhabited islands will disappear within this century. Rather, the islands' "risk of complete submersion is only a very distant possibility" (Julca & Paddison, 2010: 720). As most small island states are constituted by several, often hundreds or sometimes thousands of small islands, the disappearance of the whole territory of one country is even more distant.

In face of these huge time periods, most criticism towards the narrative of 'disappearing states' is based on the uncertainties underlying long-term predictions of climate change. According to the view of McAdam (2012), for example, deliberations about the possible disappearance of states far beyond this century may be "academically stimulating", but "their practical relevance is undermined by some of the assumptions on which they are based" (p. 119). Nevertheless, it is acknowledged that SIDS "are among the first and worst affected by climate change", even though their greenhouse gas emission are on a global scale negligible (Betzold, 2015: 481). As the majority of human communities and infrastructure is located in the coastal zones of small islands and on-island relocation opportunities are often limited, sea level rise still poses one of the most widely recognized climate change threats to SIDS (Nurse et al., 2014: 1619). Especially the Pacific atoll nations and certain other low-lying islands, like the Maldives, the Seychelles, the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, Nauru, Kiribati, or Tokelau, are extremely vulnerable to even small rises of sea level (Burns, 2000: 236). Consequently, some islands of the Pacific countries could become uninhabitable long before they get submerged (McAdam, 2012: 124), because the indirect effects of sea level rise, like saltwater intrusion into fresh water supplies, coastal erosion, higher tides and increased swampiness and salinity of land resources, seem to be "of great concern" (Burns, 2000: 242).

Sea level rise is only one of many components of climate change, which poses a threat to SIDS. While environmental literature on Small Island Developing States was long dominated by studies around sea level rise, the focus has shifted with the increased empirical research towards a more nuanced understanding of "the complexity of small island vulnerability" (Nurse et al., 2014: 1618). Some argue that island's vulnerability to climate change derives more from "their proneness to natural disasters" than from sea level rise per se (Julca & Paddison, 2010: 718). Given that vulnerability is constituted not only by the geographical exposure to environmental changes but also by the society's ability to cope with these changes (Raleigh et al., 2008: 3), some authors suggest that the "structural vulnerabilities they face in terms in terms of development" and other "unique characteristics of Small Island Developing States", like smallness and remoteness, are the reason for their low capacity to cope with natural hazards (Julca & Paddison, 2010: 717). For example, many SIDS are characterized by the