Climate change induced displacement: Leveraging transnational advocacy networks to address operational gaps

According to the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, “Few aspects of the human endeavor…are isolated from possible impacts in a changing climate. The interconnectedness of the Earth system makes it impossible to draw a confined boundary around climate change impact, adaptations, and vulnerability.”¹ This includes human population displacements, which amounted to a staggering 51.2 million refugees, asylum-seekers, and internally displaced people (IDPs) in 2013.²

Unfortunately, as the frequency, duration, and intensity of extreme events affecting populations are on the rise, the humanitarian aid community is stretched thin in the face of multiple complex emergencies and protracted challenges around the world.³

Furthermore, humanitarian organizations and agencies traditionally tasked with providing relief to refugees, asylum seekers, and IDPs are hampered by normative and operational gaps unique to the climate change problem. If climate change is causing displacement across borders, how do existing legal frameworks (founded upon the right to asylum due to fear of persecution) apply in such contexts?⁴ Moreover, asserting that climate change is causing displacement is a matter of debate—the data, and the theories behind them, are just not clear.⁵

In such a context, one question is certainly worth exploring: How can we attain a better understanding of the effects of climate change on human populations? The answer to this question will help fill some of the informational gaps recently identified by expert practitioners like FAO’s Vincent Martin and UNHCR’s José Riera, who stressed the need for scientific analysis to enhance evidence for climate-induced displacement, or for early warning and coordination.⁶

Upgrading an old policy solution

Some part of the answer might be found in an older idea combined with newer technological capabilities.

Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs) enabled by newer monitoring technologies that can track human migrations in near real-time, might help soften the harsher effects of climate change on human populations. TANs often include international and domestic NGOs, research organizations, social movements, foundations, or branches of governments.

Information exchange—the ability to produce timely, granular data for decision making—is one of the main assets of TANs.⁷ Written in the 1990s, the original TAN research literature did not consider modern information technology, beyond an occasional reference to fax machines, email, and cheaper air travel. This, of course, is a reflection of the time it was written, right at the cusp of the digital revolution. Today, mobile phones – about 7 billion in all – are found all over the world, including in the global south. This opens up the possibility of monitoring human migration patterns over time.⁸

Source: DigitalGlobe WorldView-2 Satellite Images

New and plentiful data sources

Indeed, mobile phones, social media, and open-sourced data have empowered crisis mappers and digital humanitarians to offer near real-time analysis and augment situational awareness for first responders in the field. Take, for example, UNOCHA’s Digital Humanitarian Network, a collaboration of volunteer and technical communities, and the Humanitarian Data Exchange (also pioneered by UNOHCA), an open-source web repository of the latest data being crunched by volunteer organizations, researchers, software developers, and other so-called “crisis mappers.”⁹ Such networks have facilitated collaborations between digital and on the ground humanitarians, improving the Ebola response.¹⁰

Source: DigitalGlobe WorldView-2 Satellite Images

Advanced and accessible satellites

Another technology now available to TAN organizations is commercial, high-resolution remote sensing satellites. Since 2000, the number, technical capability, and regulatory capacity of commercial high-resolution satellites has expanded enormously.¹¹ Besides optical precision, another important dimension of remote sensing is “temporal resolution” or “revisit frequency,” which refers to the length of time between a satellite or constellation of satellites’ revisit to the same spot on Earth.

Today, at least four commercial satellite firms are developing constellations of remote sensing “CubeSats,” smaller desk-sized satellites. Given its deep pockets, Google’s Skybox is probably the most likely to succeed. Although its spatial resolution is less than DigitalGlobe’s WorldView-3, its revisit frequency is measured in hours, as it shifts one satellite to the next in the constellation or “flock” in orbit. It also offers remarkable high-definition video from space. Another company, Planet Labs, is deploying a constellation of extremely small satellites called “doves.” By the end of the year, a constellation of about 100 doves will scan the entire planet every 24-hours, emphasizing a democratizing access to up-to-date satellite imagery available to journalists and NGOs around the world.

The Satellite Sentinel Project (SSP) offers an example of an evolving research agenda on the tools, methods, standards, and ethics around the use of such technologies for early warning and documentation of mass atrocities.¹² The initiative is a clear example of how TANs using advanced civilian-sector technologies could fill some of the information gaps in the effort to monitor climate change and social unrest. This would provide additional tools and aid efforts to access data that is traditionally associated with climate change – population movements, water exploration, and the impact of climate change on local environments.
It’s worth asking if lessons can be learned from such contexts to inform what is possible in understanding and dealing with climate-induced displacement. One key development is the Nansen Initiative, a state-led, bottom-up consultative process that brings together states, academic institutions, and civil society to “build consensus on the development of a protection agenda addressing the needs of people displaced across international borders by natural hazards, including the effects of climate change.”¹³ What can be its political and informational contributions to overcome normative and operational gaps in this field? Technology creates greater awareness of population displacement due to climate change. But how that affects policy is less well understood. Future analyses must address this question.

Source: DigitalGlobe WorldView-2 Satellite Images

About the Authors

Joseph Guay is an independent consultant who has developed innovation strategies for the Global Alliance for Humanitarian Innovation (GAHI), World Vision’s Nepal Innovation Lab (NLab), the Global Protection Cluster at UNHCR, and the inter-agency Response Innovation Lab (RIL) drawing from Strategic and Evidence-based Design, Local Strategies Research, and systems thinking. You can follow him on Twitter or email him at jpguay28@gmail.com

Steven Livingston is Professor of Media and International Affairs at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University.  In 2016 he was a visiting scholar with the Governance Studies program at Brookings in Washington, DC. You can follow him on Twitter here.