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Protesters at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28) in Dubai, December 12, 2023. Inside the conference, participating nations most at risk from climate change and related sea level rise pressed for a commitment to phase out fossil fuels.
On Wednesday, the 199 COP28 participants reached a historic agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels to stave off the most calamitous effects of climate change. Or, did they punt and leave humanity with a few prosaic declarations that do little to get at the current realities of greenhouse gas emissions going up instead of down?
As The Guardian explains in its first-draft-of-history deconstruction of the agreement, “transitioning away” from fossil fuels doesn’t carry the same urgency as a “phaseout,” the term favored by the majority of COP participants, among them the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), the countries that have suffered the most severe climate damages and whose citizens face the supreme penalty for the developed world’s indifference: submersion under the sea and the exodus of their people.
“What goes up must come down” may be a law of physics, and one that should come into play when it comes to carbon emissions. And yet, that principle isn’t one that fallible world leaders are in a hurry to embrace despite the net-zero deadlines. “We see a litany of loopholes,” in the COP28 pact, said AOSIS lead negotiator Anne Rasmussen of Samoa. “It does not advance us beyond the status quo.”
Not that the evidence of climate disaster wasn’t available in the lead-up to COP28. In mid-November, the Fifth National Climate Assessment, prepared by the U.S. Global Change Research Program and 14 federal departments and state contributors, delivered another dire set of warnings, sounding much like the prologue of a Greek tragedy. Climate change is evident in every region of the country. Despite ongoing city and state adaptation and mitigation initiatives, the realities of extreme heat, heavy rainfall, rising sea levels, and other threats put millions of Americans at risk for displacement.
Within days of the report’s release, Sen. Edward Markey (D-MA) and Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) reintroduced their Climate Displaced Persons legislation, which would create formal protections for people uprooted by climate disasters. Currently, people affected by climate-related disasters are not considered refugees and are ineligible for resettlement.
Shoehorned into news cycles dominated by war and presidential election-year gambits, however, these developments quietly faded from the headlines.
Instead of seriously confronting the planetary dangers that sent 32.6 million people into the climate diaspora in 2022 alone, the COP28 proceedings degenerated into the performance art of politics. The political acrimony stoked by the wealthy oil-producing states determined to protect their extraction prerogatives overshadowed the warnings and fears expressed by the countries at most immediate risk from extreme heat and rising seas.
COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber of the United Arab Emirates, who is also the CEO of Adnoc, the UAE’s national oil company, introduced the discordant note that sent negotiators scrambling at the eleventh hour. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C,” he said.
The unwieldiness of the intricate COP framework guarantees that migration solutions will continue to be crafted outside its jurisdiction.
“The Republic of the Marshall Islands did not come here to sign our death warrant,” John Silk, the Pacific Ocean island country’s minister of natural resources, countered. “We will not go silently to our watery graves.” Five years ago, the country began crafting a sophisticated national adaptation plan, one of the world’s first, that aims to keep the Marshallese in their home islands as long as possible.
Beginning in 2040, according to an in-depth report by Grist, an online climate magazine, the country plans to abandon those atolls that have been reclaimed by the seas. It has also laid out a decision-making strategy for subsequent years: If, by 2100, the country can no longer protect its citizens, the government plans to work on relocating whatever citizens remain. Many Marshallese have already joined the climate diaspora, resettling in Arkansas, Oregon, and Washington state. (The former American possession, which was the site for dozens of American nuclear tests after World War II, maintains a free association compact with the United States that cedes control of its waters and airspace to American military forces.)
The unwieldiness of the intricate COP framework guarantees that migration solutions will continue to be crafted outside its jurisdiction. In its negotiations with Tuvalu, for instance, Australia has offered to allow 280 Tuvaluans the right to migrate there each year. At that rate, it would take 40 years to relocate the entire population of 11,000.
There are multilateral venues and national processes other than COP that focus on climate-driven migration, according to Lauren Herzer Risi of the Environmental Change and Security Program at the Wilson Center, a Washington-based global affairs think tank. “I don’t know that the climate COP is ever going to be the place for climate-related migration conversation to make it into negotiations in a meaningful way,” she said. “But it needs to be part of the conversation, because the big piece of adaptation is people being able to move.”
Related climate financial shortcomings also got lost in the tumult. COP28 participants have agreed to a roughly $650 million “loss and damage” fund, first proposed three decades ago by Vanuatu, an AOSIS member, that would assist developing countries that suffer the disproportionate impacts of climate change. Getting the developed countries to pay into the fund for their roles as greenhouse gas emitters is significant, but the sums so far pledged are insufficient to meet the need. The 2022 Climate Vulnerable Economies Loss Report, produced by 20 countries that are “systemically vulnerable to climate change,” found that these at-risk places have already shed some $525 billion due to temperature and precipitation extremes.
International climate migration pressures are being brought to bear in the U.S. even if they aren’t explicitly acknowledged in Washington. Responding with fences, barbed wire, and deportations has yet to dissuade people from attempting to get into the U.S. by any means necessary. The collapsing Central American food chain has forced thousands of desperate people to flee to America’s southern border. The national climate assessment was blunt: The “climate-related shocks to the food supply chain have led to local to global impacts on food security and human migration patterns that affect US economic and national security interests.”
Internal migration will eventually complicate domestic and international policymaking. Given its hostility to displaced people, Congress is unlikely to respond well to setting up new immigration frameworks to handle people from other countries affected by climate disasters: With more than 120 million Americans in coastal regions, about 40 percent of the U.S. population is itself at risk. Alaska and Louisiana have worked to relocate entire shoreline communities threatened by sea level rise.
Louisiana, which has experienced dozens of hurricanes and tropical storms since Hurricane Katrina, has some of the country’s highest out-migration rates. Hurricane Maria and subsequent storms have persuaded Puerto Ricans and U.S. Virgin Islanders to move to the mainland. Wildfires are contributing to outflows from California to states like Idaho, which has its own wildfire threats. Yet most Republican politicians persist in downplaying climate risks and the ensuing migrations to come.
To stave off historic movements of people and other catastrophe effects of climate crisis, carbon emissions must decline by 45 percent by 2030. The strategies currently in place, however, would only reduce emissions by less than 10 percent by the decade’s end. Former Vice President Al Gore, a longtime climate advocate, fumed that COP28 had been “stacked against a successful outcome” by the petrostates and other fossil fuel interests. He told a Financial Times interviewer, “One billion climate refugees could be moving across borders in this century if we continue to expand the areas that are physiologically uninhabitable for human beings.”
