2011 was a year of extreme weather events in the United States: devastating floods along the Mississippi River, severe drought in the southwest, tornadoes and hurricanes with grave impacts. Making the connections between a rise in extreme weather events and climate change was the focus of Governor Jerry Brown’s December conference on Extreme Climate Risks and California’s Future, held at the Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.
Governor Jerry Brown offers opening remarks at the conference on Extreme Climate Risks and California's Future.
The impetus for the conference was a recent report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), entitled Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation. Rising global temperatures, the report argues, will lead to frequent and longer periods of heat waves as well as shifts in precipitation patterns that will lead to more frequent and severe floods and droughts. All of which will stress and strain our economies, leading to greater numbers of “climate refugees”, those displaced by extreme weather events, unless we act now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and put in place measures to adapt to a changing climate.
In our blog we’ve written extensively on the connections between rising temperatures, changing climate patterns, and the impacts on California agriculture. At a time when climate change appears to be on the political backburner, the Governor’s conference put climate change and its real life impacts on people back in the forefront.
The President of the California Farm Bureau Federation, Paul Wenger, addressed the conference attendees about the real concerns that climate change will lead to greater water scarcity in California. Farmers and ranchers will find their ability to produce food and fiber deeply challenged if adequate water supplies to produce their crops and livestock are not available.
The conference was an important step by Governor Brown to demonstrate his commitment to maintaining California’s work to address climate change and move us toward an economy that supports renewable energy and sustainable, healthy communities with good jobs. But the path forward is not always clear.
California will need to invest in making the transition towards a clean, green economy possible. We cannot avoid the worst impacts of climate change without the resources needed in our communities to reduce GHG emissions and adapt to a changing climate. That’s why CalCAN sponsored the Agriculture Climate Benefits Act, Senate Bill 237, and it’s why we will continue to make the case for AB 32 investments in our communities, now and into the future.
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 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`.