On October 4th through 6th, the Peace and Justice Studies Association, in conjunction with the Tufts Initiative on Climate Change and Climate Justice, will hold its 2012 annual conference at Tufts. Entitled “Anticipating Climate Disruption: Sustaining Justice, Greening Peace,” the conference will be featuring presentations from a wide range of disciplines, professions, and perspectives on the many complex issues now unfolding amidst disruptive climate change, which promises to be among the most significant social justice concerns in the 21st Century.
The impressive list of plenary session panelists includes: Christian Parenti (Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence), Ken Conca (Environmental Peacemaking), Betsy Hartmann (“Don’t Beat the Climate War Drums”), Ellie Perkins (“Women and Participatory Water Management”), Darlene Lombos (Community Labor United), Burt Lauderdale (Kentuckians for the Commonwealth; New Power Initiative), Wenonah Hauter (Executive Director, Food & Water Watch), Gregor Wolbring (University of Calgary; energy/water ethics), John Peck (Family Farm Defenders), Greg White (Climate Refugees or Mere Migrants: Climate-Induced Migration, Security, and Borders in a Warming World), Tariq Banuri (renewable energy and climate change), Eveline Shen (reproductive justice), and Julian Agyeman (Just Sustainabilities; Cultivating Food Justice)
The Tufts Institute of the Environment is co-sponsoring this event, and Tufts community members are encouraged to attend. Student volunteers are also needed.
To register, visit http://www.peacejusticestudies.org/conference/registration.php or e-mail Dale.Bryan@tufts.edu
So if an island nation is submerged beneath the ocean, does it maintain its membership in the United Nations? Who is responsible for the citizens? Do they travel on its passport? Who claims and enforces offshore mineral and fishing rights in waters around a submerged nation? International law currently has no answers to such questions.
United Nations Ambassador Phillip Muller of the Marshall Islands said there is no sense of urgency to find not only those answers, but also to address the causes of climate change, which many believe to be responsible for rising ocean levels.
“Even if we reach a legal agreement sometime soon, which I don’t think we will, the major players are not in the process,” Muller said.
Those players, the participants said, include industrial nations such as the United States and China that emit the most carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases. Many climate scientists say those gases are responsible for global warming. Mary-Elena Carr of Columbia University’s Earth Institute said what is now an annual sea level rise of a few millimeters will increase dramatically by the year 2100. “The biggest challenge is to preserve their nationality without a territory,” said Bogumil Terminski from the University of Geneva. International legal experts are discovering climate change law, and the Pacific island nation of Tuvalu is a case in point: The Polynesian archipelago is doomed to disappear beneath the ocean. Now lawyers are asking what sort of rights citizens have when their homeland no longer exists.
t present, however, there appear to be at least three possibilities that could advance the international debate about ‘climate refugee’ protections and fill existing gaps in international law.
The first option is to revise the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees to include climate (or environmental) refugees and to offer legal protections similar to those for refugees fleeing political persecution. A second, more ambitious option is to negotiate a completely new convention, one that would try to guarantee specific rights and protections to climate or environmental ‘refugees`.