Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology (Madras) have called upon the international community to provide shelter to those fleeing to escape climate change.

Researchers from IIT-Madras have collaborated with an independent researcher in publishing a paper in this regard. They propose a normative framework with responses to address cross-border migration.  The Paper was published in the reputed peer-reviewed journal WIRES Climate Change

The study cites that the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reports that 40.5 million people were newly displaced in 2020 and 30 million among these were forcibly displaced due to weather-related disasters. Researchers believe that such migration is a result of compound factors.

The multiple interconnections among the drivers of migration – a combination of on-going Global Environmental Changes (GECs) as they interact with social, economic and political conditions – makes it difficult to identify GEC as the only or proximate cause of migration.

 In one such, they have cited the example of residents around the coasting areas in Bangladesh relocating to find shelter in central Bangladesh as rising sea levels have become a concern.

Speaking about the same, Prof Sudhir Chella Rajan, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, said, “In recent years, the increased risks of environmental hazards including climate change, have intensified the push to migrate. One such case is the teeming slums of Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, where the residents are on the frontlines of a climate crisis. People living along the coast have been migrating to the Bangladeshi capital due to monsoon flooding and cyclones caused by rising sea levels. For these residents, the worsening climate change is not a faraway threat. It is a grim reality.”

He added, “Climate scientists have known for more than a decade that tens of millions of people, if not more, will be forcibly displaced from some of the poorest countries as a result of climate change. If their countries are no longer viable homes through no fault of their own, the international community has a moral responsibility to provide refuge.”

Dr Sujatha Byravan, Co-Author of this Research and an Independent Scholar, said, “There is an urgent need to ensure that people from countries that have emitted very little greenhouse gases are not left fending for themselves. Climate exiles or migrants have no legal standing. These are the kinds of issues that ought to be addressed in the climate negotiations track of Loss and Damage under non-economic losses.”

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