Developed nations should accept climate refugees: Experts

The developed countries, which are responsible for the lion's share of carbon emissions, should accept climate migrants while also financing vulnerable states like Bangladesh, experts said at a seminar on Wednesday.

"It is said that one in seven people in Bangladesh are going to be displaced by 2070. In terms of migration, we see that the US and Canada are taking all our engineers, but they are not really receiving our climate refugees," said Farhan Hossain, a climate-change researcher working for a non-governmental organisation, at the event.

"It is going to be a very big problem in the heavily-populated countries and we will not be able to house these climate-refugees inside our borders," he said at the seminar organised by the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS) at its conference room.

Emeritus Professor Geof Wood, of international development at the University of Bath, was the key speaker at the seminar titled "Rediscovering Our Common Wealth: A Philosophical Argument About the Case for the Precautionary Principle in Relation to Climate Change with an Intergenerational Discounting Theme."

"Climate change affects the most vulnerable first and hardest-droughts, fires, floods, and crop failures. It impacts the myriad species and habitats that make the earth such an intricately beautiful place to live," he said.

Millions are at risk of being displaced and becoming "climate refugees" because of sea level rise, river erosion, cyclonic storms, and salty water creeping inland, scientists say.

Bangladesh is expected to have about a third of South Asia's internal climate refugees by 2050, according to a World Bank report in 2021.

"So far, legal opportunities for migration of climate displacement victims to developed countries are absent, although they can seek refuge on human rights issues," M Zakir Hossain Khan, a climate-policy analyst and executive director of Change Initiative, told TBS.

"That is why countries like Bangladesh need to make international protocols so that developed countries are forced to take such people and mobilise resources," he added.

At the seminar, Climate-Negotiator Asaduzzaman said, "I have seen some of the dramatic moments when the $100 billion of support each year to developing countries has been announced (by countries responsible for carbon emissions). We were overjoyed at the time. But so far, one-third of that money has been released."

MA Sattar Mandal, a professorial fellow at BIDS, chaired the event.