Finding a Solution to Climate Displacement: Time to Divert Border Enforcement Billions into Loss and Damage Finance

For this week’s post we welcome top expert on climate displacement Amali Tower, who is executive director of the research and advocacy organization Climate Refugees. You might remember, we had an excellent conversation with Amali on climate change and displacement on our podcast in May. And Amali also participated in the climate discussion thread we did in October. Personally, I (Todd) was honored to cowrite the following piece with Amali, one of the most profound and cutting edge thinkers about what we need to do in our current situation. Amali is also recently returning from a trip to Somalia and Kenya that informs the piece (and please check out her pictures below!). This is the last in a series we have done here at The Border Chronicle leading up to the COP27, the United Nations summit on climate change in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt that begins on Sunday. We hope our journalism and analysis enters into that important conversation that will be happening over the next two weeks!

Finding a Solution to Climate Displacement: Time to Divert Border Enforcement Billions into Loss and Damage Finance

On the cusp of COP27, it is time to build solidarity with the increasing millions displaced by climate, not more deadly walls.

It’s confirmed: this year will be the deadliest for people crossing the U.S. border. Last week the U.S. Border Patrol reported that 853 people have died crossing from Mexico into the United States in fiscal year 2022. The deaths include people who drowned in the Rio Grande and died from exposure in the borderlands deserts. It includes the 53 people who died in San Antonio in June in the back of a tractor trailer.

It is easy to point to the United States’ long-standing deterrence strategy as a primary reason for these deaths. In place since the 1990s, this strategy is designed to force people into dangerous and often desolate places. But we have to broaden this analysis. Over the last two decades, an unprecedented surge of border enforcement has coincided with the intensifying climate crisis, not just in the United States but across the globe.

According to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, climate change has displaced a yearly average of 23 million people since 2008, three times more than war and conflict. During this time, the world’s richest and most powerful countries have constructed walls, deployed surveillance technologies, and hired border guards from Matamoros to the Mediterranean. These same countries—including the United States, Germany, Canada, France, the UK, and Australia—have emitted the most greenhouse gases and are thus the most responsible for the climate crisis. For the world’s richest and most powerful countries, border militarization has become a climate-adaptation strategy.

The good news is that, with the world’s annual climate summit starting on Sunday in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, climate activists have an opportunity to address this crisis. Instead of more walls, border guards, and prisons that make people’s journeys more and more precarious, there is a much more just, restorative, and transformative way for the world—and particularly the countries most responsible—to engage with climate displacement and migration. It is possible to do this without border enforcement.

Loss and Damage

First, world leaders must understand that for many frontline communities, migration is a means of adaptation and, increasingly, a coping mechanism in the absence of climate-adaptation support. Their failure to lower emissions and fund adaptation has led to irreversible loss and damage that now must be compensated.

Rich countries have contributed 92 percent of historical emissions, and they are now responsible for 37 percent of current emissions, even though they compose only 15 percent of the global population. The United States alone, the world’s largest historic polluter, is responsible for 21.5 percent of global carbon emissions, though it accounts for only 4.5 percent of the global population. Central America, in contrast, contributes less than 1 percent to emissions, yet 8 million people there are food insecure, partly as a result of climate change, drought, storms, violence, historic human rights abuses, free market economics, and COVID-19. Across the globe, nearly 1 million people are now internally displaced; there are 600,000 refugees and asylum seekers, and over one million people have tried to cross into the U.S.

For those going to the United States, their fate is often one of walls, armed agents, surveillance, and prison. Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the U.S. federal government has put more than $375 billion into border and immigration enforcement (2003-2023), if you count the budgets of CBP and ICE. This is nearly 12 times more than the U.S. budget dedicated to climate action, including for loss and damage. In DHS documents the U.S. talks about preparing its borders for “mass migrations”—not any sort of climate refugee status—and the annual U.S. national threat assessments are full of talk about migration, including of the climate-induced variety.

The world’s poorest, who have contributed the least to the climate crisis, are paying the heaviest price. The Horn of Africa is experiencing an unprecedented drought, the worst to strike the region in 40 years. The 2020–22 drought has now exceeded the severity and duration of the previous disastrous droughts of 2016–17 and 2011–12. Nearly 40 million people are affected by dire food insecurity and near famine, and 9 million livestock—the lifeblood of pastoralists—have died, further contributing to the malnutrition that afflicts 5 million of the region’s children. The scale of the damage amounts to billions in development setbacks, from which these countries cannot recover. What mechanisms exist to address this reality? Very few.

Kenyan and Somali farmers and pastoralists interviewed in October said they have never experienced drought conditions like these. Those who can travel and secure enough water and food for the journey are leaving their homes in droves. They are heading for displacement camps in the cities and across borders to villages shared by people of the same ethnicity.

Over 1 million are displaced in Somalia alone, a country with a carbon footprint of zero. Across the two countries, dozens of pastoralists and farmers spoke of losses and setbacks from multiple, compounding climate events from which they can’t recover. Harkening to climate security, one pastoralist described the 2019–22 East Africa locust infestation as a “missile sent from the skies.”

It’s Time to Pay Up

And this brings us to our fundamental question: instead of putting countless billions into border enforcement, what if this money were used for something else, like addressing the greatest existential threat to humankind? What if instead of building walls, invasive surveillance technologies, drones, and weapons to fortify and blockade borders, that money were instead used to address, for example, the drought and desertification in Somalia?

Although global leaders from rich, polluting countries want to avoid even benign discussion of the issue, experts, even from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, now contend that the era of loss and damage is here. It’s time to pay up, they say, and establish a finance facility to help the billions who are suffering now and those who are at further risk in the years to come.

The failure to establish such a fund is a result of 30 years in which leaders of rich, polluting countries have resisted progress in the UN climate negotiations. Perhaps the most well-documented incident occurred in September at a New York Times event, when U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry dismissed talk that the U.S. would lead discussions at the upcoming UN climate talks and compensate countries for the loss and damage incurred by climate change. “You tell me the government in the world that has trillions of dollars,” he said, “cause that’s what it costs.”

But just a month later, Kerry appeared to be changing his tune, even indicating that the U.S. would not be “obstructing” discussions on loss and damage at the upcoming UN climate talks. Just two weeks ahead of COP27, Kerry seemingly took a sharp turn on U.S. policy, telling reporters at the Council on Foreign Relations, “We believe we have to step up, and we have a responsibility. We accept that.”

Heading into negotiations, however, the U.S. has remained clear that any talk of legal liability and reparations is a nonstarter, leading many to wonder whether the U.S. approach to loss and damage represents a true shift in position or only a carefully calibrated change in words.

Kerry was right, though, about the money. The projected economic costs of loss and damage are astronomical. According to one study, developing country costs by 2030 could range from an annual $290 billion to $580 billion. By 2050, the costs are expected to skyrocket to $1.8 trillion annually.

We need not look to the future, however, to understand these needs now.

One-third of Pakistan remains underwater after the June floods, which affected 15 percent of its population, even though the country contributes less than 1 percent of global carbon emissions. All four provinces of the country are affected, and damages are expected to exceed $40 billion.

Nigeria is experiencing the worst floods the country has ever seen. More than 600 people have been killed, 1.3 million displaced, and 31 of 36 states are affected. The economic costs are unfathomable, as leaders scramble to avert food shortages.

Madagascar is experiencing what the World Food Programme deems the world’s first climate-change-driven famine.

These are but a few of the world’s increasing climate crises, in a time of compounding global crises when existing sources of finance, including insurance and humanitarian and development aid, are painfully inadequate to deal with the severe loss and damage of climate events. Oxfam research has shown that international funding, generally from high-polluting countries, proceeds with little accountability. That is, states often fail to meet their development aid targets, yet they find billions every year to fund border enforcement.

What Kind of World Do We Want?

What’s playing out at the U.S. southern border is forced migration, fueled by desperation. To deny or ignore this is political folly.

Yet this is what we have seen at so many UN climate summits over the years. In 2021 at the COP26 in Glasgow, for example, rich countries diluted language and outcomes pushed by the Global South for a Loss and Damage finance facility.

Revolutionary change must be bold and creative. We must dare to ask, what kind of world do we want, and what could we do with diverted funds to bring that vision to reality? Imagine if we used this money to not only help people move but also to help them stay?

Let’s imagine if new and additional finance were made available to people experiencing losses and damages so that their governments were not forced to divert funds away from education, health care, public infrastructure, food security, livelihoods, and agriculture in order to respond to increasing and compounding climate crises. Let’s imagine a world in which this access to funding was based on need instead of seeking interest payments through loans, pushing odious cycles of debt. Let’s imagine that this access to funding was based on defending human rights.

Let’s imagine a world where people don’t have to die for the simple act of crossing a border (globally, more than 51,000 people have gone missing traveling across borders since 2014). These are the rights at the heart of the climate justice battle that we all must fight.

And just how will we pay for this? It’s time to enact the polluter pay principle. To find the funding, one need only look to the money pumped into the border industrial complex and to the subsidies doled out to the fossil fuel industry.

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