Climate Migration and Our Current Legal Systems

Taylor Oliver

In the past, when summer winds down and fall begins, the threats of a wildfire catching spark would diminish until the following summer. Recently, however, that threat has extended to be year long due to decades long droughts and disappearing snow caps.  The Marshall Fire, outside of Boulder, Colorado, burned 1,100 residential homes and multiple commercial buildings, including a hotel. This horrible tragedy fueled by the ever-changing climate crisis  was devastating to the community and the state of Colorado. Another recent example of the destruction characteristic of natural disasters is the Camp Fire in California, which almost completely destroyed the town of Paradise. Three years later, the town has not fully recovered but has seen some rebuilding. Oddly enough, a housing boom is happening with many new people moving there. The once densely forested area has lost a lot of tree cover that will take decades to return to what it was. Realistically, that’s only if another wildfire does not spark again destroying any new progress that has been built. There are far reaching consequences from wildfire damages, just one of them being, where will people go when their residences are destroyed? According to the World Meteorological Organization, the extreme weather that comes with climate change has increased over the last fifty years. This trend has created more damage than deaths, costing $202 million USD per year over that fifty-year period. These global phenomena have created thousands of “climate refugees”. Whether they decide to relocate before disaster strikes or they’ve already lost their homes due to climate change, climate migration has a large impact on many facets of life on this planet. Whether you reside in the forest or suburbia, climate change and its related extreme weather will continue to increase, affecting millions of people over the globe. As climate change comes knocking on everyone’s doorsteps, how will the destruction of where we live, creating a migration, forced or voluntary, affect our current legal systems, locally, state-wide, federally, or globally?

As Maxine Burkett highlights in their work “Behind the Veil”, there are virtually no legal fields that climate migration does not affect. Currently the legal system is not equipped to deal with all the consequences that come from it. Like with most things in this world, climate change may not necessarily impact the entire world population similarly, as “the least responsible for global greenhouse gas emissions are subject to the greatest disruption.” The impact of climate change on indigenous and lower socioeconomic communities is greater. In fact, Burkett’s view is that because of how the system is, it has contributed or produced “the erratic and uneven vulnerability to [climate change].” This also leads to problems with no one acting or taking responsibility to alleviate these problems, as there are so many intersectional implications of the law. These problems with our current legal system come from the fact that it was created in a period of stability, and it does not account for the climate crisis that is currently happening and will continue to get worse. Specifically, Burkett also points out, environmental law as a whole in its current state is unequipped to deal with the problems that we are facing, and to compartmentalize this law, looking for clear domains that it affects, does not address complex natural systems that we actually face in real world applications.

Looking past just environmental law and towards immigration law, as already stated, this legal system is also lacking in addressing the problems we face from climate migration. Currently in the United States, there isn’t a path to asylum for those seeking it due to climate migration. Although a bill (H.R.2826) has been introduced to the House, which aims “to establish a Global Climate Change Resilience Strategy, to authorize the admission of climate-displaced persons, and for other purposes,” it has not seen much movement. Unfortunately, it was introduced in April of 2021, and the only progress that it has made since then, was that it was referred to the Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship in October 2021. There is push back against the bill because on both sides of the aisle, despite the need for humanitarian protections to these vulnerable communities, it is looked at as a national security problem. Anyone living in the United States knows that immigration is a controversial subject to many in this country.

Domestically, there have been some measures to begin voluntary relocation of these vulnerable communities. Specifically, the The Isle de Jean Charles Resettlement project is a federally backed, as well as state and locally funded, program to relocate “current and former residents of [the] Isle… [to] a safer and more sustainable community.” This project is the first of its kind and aims to help voluntary relocation into better (stronger and less flood prone) homes in order to protect against rising sea levels. It also must follow the criteria that the new community is economically sustainable, and collaboratively designed by the community. This effort does spark some questions. Since, there are many vulnerable communities to climate change around the country, how will it be decided which of these communities are given support, and how are the relocations done in a way that allows those communities to thrive? Where will funding come from in the future? Will it always be federally, state-wide, locally funded as it was for the Isle de Jean Charles?

Climate migration has widespread implications in many legal fields from environmental law, immigration law, to local property rights. Although climate migration is happening on a domestic and international scale, our current systems are severely lacking in addressing what to do presently  and in the future to account for the problems that arise from it. Whether you live in suburbia or in remote locations, you can guarantee that climate change will have some effect on you. The “seasons” of when to expect natural disasters are no longer sequestered to parts of the year, but are year long and widespread. We can only expect them to continue to get worse. As climate migration is something that will affect everyone on this planet, all legal fields will need to start finding answers on how to deal with it to address the many questions that have already arisen.