Environmental Migrants and Responses to Disasters: A Human Rights-Based Approach

With all the challenges climate change raises, it is expected that migrations due to environmental disturbances will occur more frequently in the next few years. Those migrations include not only cross-borders and long-term but also internal, short-term, and short-distance, such as the movement of people to shelters during environmental disasters. In this sense, this work aims to demonstrate that climate change is a recurring and growing cause of migration, whether in slow or sudden-onset environmental events. It also aims to investigate the development of international law and its applicability in dealing with climate change and disaster-related movements. Through a qualitative analysis of the characteristics and responses of two States – The United States and the Philippines – this work seeks to answer to what extent economic, political, and cultural differences among countries can impact the responses to environmental disasters, influencing thus its related movement. The analysis includes aspects such as infrastructure, food, and other relief and recovery issues that may influence whether a person will need to leave his or her home and whether this migration will be short-term or long-term. The central hypothesis was that, despite international law, the responses would suffer significant variations according to national particularities, as there are no international legally binding treaties specific to this matter. However, this hypothesis was only partially confirmed, as although there are relative divergences in the method of the responses provided by the United States and the Philippines, the results of those responses were quite similar during the different phases of the disasters analysed.