An important story reported earlier this month (November, 2021), features the impact of climate change on the children of southern Madagascar. This is a report primarily about famine caused by climate change, not war, economic oppression or pestilence. Regrettably, the story also includes more than a trace of self-congratulations from and by ABC News Anchor David Muir.

Those of us who don’t have a phobic distaste for modern science recognize that climate change is causing world-wide land use change. Coastal communities are threatened by rising seas. Once fertile farmland is lying fallow because insufficient rain falls. Five-hundred-year floods are occurring one a decade, not twice a millennium.

It is interesting how in the United States and most other industrialized countries, increasing emphasis is placed on rebuilding and expanding its built infrastructure. When it comes to roads and bridges, an important question is largely going unasked. Where do these ribbons of concrete take us, and do their paths take into consideration how our land is changing due to climate change.

For instance, the metropolitan area of Houston, TX has been battered over the past ten years by hurricanes. Isaac devastated Texas’ Gulf Coast in August, 2012. Hurricane Harvey struck in August, 2017 and Hurricane Laura in August, 2020. Despite some enlightened leadership in the area with County Judge [Supervisor, Harris County] Lina Hidalgo and Mayor Sylvester Turner, the private sector seems to believe that nothing bad can happen again for another 500 years, and they rebuild in the areas that have been flooded and destroyed. They are aided by state-wide science deniers like Governor Greg Abbott and Senator Ted Cruz.

People who are homeless or starving are not the only displaced people in the world. The world’s population continues to grow, and that puts people in tighter confines with one another. We like to believe that we live in nation-states, but perhaps our second tightest bond to family is our tribes. And as the global population expands and arable land compresses, more tribes are running up against other tribes – ones whose company they would prefer not to keep.

The result is more war and violence. It may be cloaked under the guise of religious differences, or political differences, or economic disparities. In any event, it is more and more difficult for peace-loving people to find areas to live where they are not threatened by other groups of humans.

When people who don’t want to be neighbors are cramped together, anthropologically we know that peaceful resolution of problems is a hard sell. More often than not, violence is the likely modus operandi of settlement. Conflict and violence lead to displacement. Necessary relocation means refugees – often millions of people moving, often by foot, to new places where they think that they will be physically safe and will be able to find gainful work.

Frequently this traffic rapidly changes directions. In the early 2000s when the U.S. invaded Iraq for no particular reason, millions of Iraqi civilians headed west to Syria where they were welcome in many small villages. But just a few years later, Iraq was more at peace while Syria was engaged in a gruesome civil war with a external counties such as the United States and Russia adding to the mayhem and destruction. By the mid two-thousand-teens, millions of Syrians were fleeing their country, often heading east to Iraq to a land that is similar to their own.

However, in both incarnations of this Middle East refugees-in-motion, many moved toward what they saw as a better life in Europe. In some places, and in cases where the numbers were not too large, the migration to Europe worked, especially since the E.U. was looking for people to fill low-paying jobs. But as the numbers jumped into the millions, the inevitable happened. Refugees were seen as foreigners who were outsiders to their staid communities, and new conflict was born.

Just as the world needs to create new ways to find homes for local, regional, or global refugees, it needs to do the same for those who are displaced by politics as well as climate. These problems become only more severe as population growth creates more crunches. So, what options to people of the world have?

There are basically two ways to find venues where displaced people can live:

1. Find existing land on our planet which currently is largely uninhabited and has the natural resources to sustain a significant number of human beings.
2. Where arable and otherwise resourceful land does not exist, humanity needs to find ways to create new land masses where refugees can move and comfortably live, at least until they are able to find another part of the planet on which to live.

China has built three man-made islands in the South China Sea for military bases against Taiwan and other potential adversaries in the Pacific Rim. Reaction to their construction has ranged from enormous fear of expansion to mockery because there are reports that the islands are falling apart and sinking into the ocean.

Regardless, humankind, under the aegis of the United Nations, needs to find largely unoccupied places for refugees to live. These new homes can be temporary; to give political or climate factors time to reverse themselves. Equally plausible is for them to become “permanent” homes so that they can be free from the strife that caused them such misery in their most recent homes.

Countries large in area such as the United States, Canada, Russia, Greenland, Australia, and others have room for refugee settlements. China is so residentially over-built that it literally has high-rise cities that are vacant and capable of housing literally millions of people.

However, virtually all land on Planet Earth is accounted for. It is either owned by a private enterprise or the government is holding it for recreation, environmental protection or future development.

The post Finding New Settlement Areas for Refugees appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Buried in the 90-minute smorgasbord of exaggerations, lies, false conflations and middle-school platitudes passed off as a State of the Union Address on Jan. 30, 2018, there was a phrase that should make everyone’s blood boil. Somewhere between the shameless exploitation of real peoples’ tragedies and the nuclear saber rattling, Trump [er, neo-Nazi speechwriter Stephen Miller] threw out this line:  “All Americans are Dreamers.”

What was the purpose of that line? At first, it might sound like an innocuous lyric from a Sesame-Street song [“the lovers, the dreamers, and me…”] But it was anything but a reflection of the innocent wishes of children or a testament to an American value. It was, in reality, a slam against people subject to DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.]

In fact, it’s just like the All Lives Matter meme used by retrograde thinkers like Trump and other white nationalists to counter the Black Lives Matter movement. By saying that “All Americans are Dreamers,” Trump/Miller are signaling that they don’t take the official Dreamers seriously and don’t support them.  Saying “All Americans are Dreamers” is saying that  DACA recipients don’t deserve special status or extra attention. They’re just a bunch of freeloaders, trying to get to the front of the line, ahead of the real Americans.

Trump’s speech made it clear that he and his allies/enablers in Congress clearly have no “intention” [the phrase used by Mitch McConnell] of resolving DACA. He conflated immigrants with terrorists and violent gang members. He applied the All Lives Matter approach to DACA—and his base knows what that means.

After hearing this, I can only conclude that DACA is dead, that 800,000 Dreamers are about to be betrayed by the Trump administration, and that another once-all-American value is about to be tossed aside.

The post Trump’s SOTU DACA dis: All Americans are Dreamers appeared first on Occasional Planet.

These days, there’s an app for just about everything—even for being a refugee. According to the United Nations High Command on Refugees [UNHCR], apps and websites have become a common tool for refugee assistance.

It all started several years ago, when aid workers realized that the vast majority of displaced Syrians were using smartphones. That’s when aid organizations began partnering with developers to create free apps aimed at helping refugees navigate the complexities of starting a new life in unfamiliar territory. According to a recent article in The Atlantic, the most successful of the resulting technologies are helping refugees gather crucial information, reconnect with lost relatives, and establish a legal identity in new countries.

Here’s an incomplete rundown on what’s out there, which ones are working best, and some examples of failures:

What’s out there

The most useful apps and websites are the result of collaborations among well-established aid agencies, says UNHCR:

Refugeeinfo.eu is an online platform providing useful information to refugees making their way through Europe, including services provided by local NGOs and details regarding asylum processes. The website, which is the result of a partnership between Mercy Corps, Google and The International Rescue Committee among others, currently receives up to 3,000 visitors per day.

Refugee Aid app collects and shows information on the location of services provided by humanitarian agencies in several European countries, thus helping aid providers coordinate their efforts, and refugees locate points of assistance. The app has been built in collaboration with several organizations including the British and Italian Red Cross, Save the Children and Médecins du Monde.

Many other apps exist as well—created by well-meaning developers and organizations—but it can be hard to gauge their effectiveness. At Apps For Refugees, you’ll find a variety of options, including:

First-contact.org, a website that “provides refugees with essential information during their journey. It covers data and information about NGOs and situation reports about all countries in Asia andd Europe, refugees might pass through.Countries covered: Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Germany, Greece. Available in Arabic, English and Pashto.

InfoAid  an app with “up to date information for refugees on their way through south-east Europe. It covers all countries on the Balkan route, including updates about the situation at the borders, weather reports for the Turkish Sea, ferry strikes, transportation information, security advisories, information for children traveling alone and many more topics.”

Scanbot, an app that allows refugees to “scan all their important documents with a smartphone and store them as PDF local or in the cloud. Free App and free storage.”

Refunite,  “a web-based platform whose mission is to reconnect refugee families across the globe with missing loved ones.” The organization has projects in 9 countries: Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, Somalia, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and the Philippines.

But some of the sites on Apps for Refugees—as well as others not listed on the site—have proven to be failures, says UNHCR:

Take Refoodgee, an app launched by Berlin-based startup Memorado to connect newly arrived refugees with locals through food. It’s been praised by the media, but the app hasn’t been updated for months and only counts a few hundreds users. Refugees Welcome has been dubbed the “AirBnB for refugees” because it pairs refugees looking for a temporary place to stay with hosts in European cities. But one of the app’s employees told the Huffington Post the service couldn’t find enough hosts to keep up with the demand. The number of rooms listed on the app decreased significantly after an initial spike, she explained.

Then there are more blatant cases of failures. The “I Sea” app claimed to allow its users to scour the Mediterranean to spot migrant ships in distress by showing real-time satellite images. But the live feed turned out to be nothing more than a static image of the ocean, and the app was shut down after much uproar.

Why well-intentioned apps fail

“In many cases, well-intended developers find themselves confronted with the realities of operating in an unfamiliar and challenging context,” says UNHCR. Most developers are not prepared for the logistics of working in emergencies. Many agencies have to be involved. And refugees have virtually no internet access.

Another problem is that developers may assume that convenience will make an app successful. What they don’t understand, says UNHCR, is how refugees actually function day-today.

One clear example of this is the multiplication of information-sharing apps aimed at listing useful data such as access points for food, healthcare, or border crossings. We’ve noticed that refugees still prefer to speak with UNHCR staff and partners face-to-face, even when this information is made available online. That’s because rumors, changing rules and regulations, and fluctuating asylum policies have led refugees to seek accurate and up-to-date information from trusted sources. An app built by an outside developer may do little to fill that trust gap.

The future of refugee apps

Looking ahead, many emerging technologies could have applications that would help refugees. For example,

Red Cross and Red Crescent societies have their own reconnection initiative, called Trace the Face. It publishes pictures online of people looking for missing relatives and lets them search photos that others have posted of themselves, filtering by criteria like gender, age, and country of origin. Before long, facial-recognition software could transform this database and others like it into advanced people-finding machines.

Biometric identification tools hold promise, too:

Refugees who want to establish a legal identity in a new country confront countless obstacles—they may have fled without their birth certificate, for instance, if they ever had one. So the UNHCR Biometric Identity Management System, active in 25 countries, collects fingerprints, iris scans, and photographs, and can link them to citizenship records and dates of birth.

Undoubtedly, technology can be useful in humanitarian crises like the ongoing refugee debacle. But the best hope for helping refugees is, of course, to stop creating more of them.

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“Climate change is not just about statistics. Climate change is not just about science. Climate change is about human rights.”

– Ursula Rakova, Founder and Director of Tulele Peisa

Behold the ravishingly beautiful Carteret Islands—an atoll of six low-lying islands not far from Papua, New Guinea, in the southwest Pacific Ocean. The Carteret Islands are more than eight thousand miles away from where I sit as I write this post, and, incredibly, some of them are disappearing. Not long ago a distance of thousands of miles would have made it easy to overlook the human and environmental tragedy unfolding on Carteret—but not anymore. The age of information sharing has made it possible to witness firsthand the stories of how people’s lives are being upended by the effects of global warming and climate change—even in the most remote of places like Carteret.

The Carteret Islands have been inhabited for more than one thousand years. But now, as the land is being swallowed by the rising sea, the islands’ communities are grappling with an uncertain future.

It’s been said that the Carteret islanders are the world’s first official climate-change refugees. Through no fault of their own, they have become the first wave in what scientists predict will become a tidal wave of global dislocations and humanitarian crises caused by global warming and environmental degradation.

Forced to abandon their ancestral homelands due to food shortages, rising sea levels, sinking shorelines, and the dangers of storm surges and king tides, the islanders face life-altering choices resulting from economic and political decisions beyond their control. In the video below, their anger and sadness is heartbreaking. The choice for them is clear. They can stay and watch the islands shrink and slowly disappear. Or they can evacuate, “leaving their values and conscience behind,” and try to rebuild their community on mainland Bougainville. Either way, the islanders bear a deep burden of loss.

In “Sisters on the Planet: Carteret Islands,” a video produced by Oxfam New Zealand, we meet Ursula Rakova, hero and founder of Tulele Peisa, a community organization supported by the Carteret Islands Council of Elders. With little to no government funding, Ms. Rakova decided to develop and implement an evacuation plan for Carteret’s three thousand inhabitants. As of the filming of the video, Ms. Rakova had managed the successful migration of one thousand seven hundred of her fellow islanders, even while continuing the essential work of documenting the history and traditions of the vanishing islands of the Carterets.

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How does Trump’s refugee ban affect people’s lives? Two recent videos document the real impact. They take the viewer behind the partisan policy debates, behind factual distortions, and behind the spin, to demonstrate how lives have been altered by decisions made in Washington DC.

  “Starting a New Life in America: A Syrian Refugee Story,” follows the Abdo family of war-torn Aleppo who gained entry to the U.S. during the Obama presidency. Filmed and produced by a young Syrian-American, the video takes us into the Abdo home, where we learn of the family’s hopes for the future and of their deep gratitude to America and their successful adjustment to life in Lowell, Massachusetts.

The second video tells the story of Clemson University PhD graduate Nazanin Zinouri, an Iranian who found herself caught in the chaos and uncertainty of Trump’s disastrous first refugee ban. Zinouri, who has lived and worked in the U.S. for seven years, was taken off her return flight from Dubai and denied re-entry into the U.S. after traveling to Iran to visit her family. Following a public campaign on her behalf, which included the advocacy of Senator Lindsay Graham, Zinouri was allowed to return to her life and her home in South Carolina.

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Syrians—4.8 million of them–constitute the largest segment of the current world refugee population.  But there are many other refugees —16+ million — who are not getting equal media attention. We read a lot about people fleeing the war in Syria, who are taking dangerous boat trips across the Mediterranean to Europe and hoping to settle in safer parts of the world. But, worldwide, many other men, women and children are displaced outside of their countries. They’re just as desperate and just as in need. If you’re interested in the numbers, here’s a rundown of those other refugees, with data supplied by the United Nations High Command on Refugees [UNHCR].

Definitions matter: Refugee vs. migrant

Before looking at statistics, it’s important to get the definitions right. According UNHCR, politicians, news media and people in casual conversations often don’t make the proper distinction among refugees and migrants, and that can be a problem.

Refugees are persons fleeing armed conflict or persecution. There were 21.3 million of them worldwide at the end of 2015. Their situation is often so perilous and intolerable that they cross national borders to seek safety in nearby countries, and thus become internationally recognized as “refugees” with access to assistance from States, UNHCR, and other organizations. They are so recognized precisely because it is too dangerous for them to return home, and they need sanctuary elsewhere. These are people for whom denial of asylum has potentially deadly consequences Refugees are defined and protected in international law…

…One of the most fundamental principles laid down in international law is that refugees should not be expelled or returned to situations where their life and freedom would be under threat.

Migrants choose to move not because of a direct threat of persecution or death, but mainly to improve their lives by finding work, or in some cases for education, family reunion, or other reasons. Unlike refugees who cannot safely return home, migrants face no such impediment to return. If they choose to return home, they will continue to receive the protection of their government.

The distinction is important, says UNHCR, because

…conflating refugees and migrants can have serious consequences for the lives and safety of refugees. Blurring the two terms takes attention away from the specific legal protections refugees require. It can undermine public support for refugees and the institution of asylum at a time when more refugees need such protection than ever before.

Who’s fleeing, where are they, and how many are there?

After Syrians, the next largest group of refugees arriving in Europe are Afghanis fleeing Taliban rule. UNHCR reports that there are 1.5 million registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan, with hundreds of thousands more unregistered living in the shadows.

350,000 Somali refugees currently live in the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya, making it the largest refugee facility in the world. Some residents of Dadaab have been there for as long as nine years.

About 2,000 refugees from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria are confined by Australia on an essentially uninhabited island off its coast.

Between 200,000 and 500,000 members of Myanmar/Burma’s persecuted Rohingya minority are living in refugee camps in Bangladesh. Early this year, the Bangladesh government began moving forward with a plan to move the refugees to a remote island that is underwater for much of the year.

5.2 million Palestinians are registered as refugees by the UNRWA.

Which countries are hosting the refugees?

Ten countries are taking care of more than half of the world’s 21 million refugees. The top 10 are: [in rounded numbers]

• Jordan [2.7 million]
• Turkey [2.5 million]
• Pakistan [1.5 million]
• Lebanon [1.5 million]
• Iran [980,000]
• Ethiopia [736,000]
• Kenya [550,000]
• Uganda [477,000]
• Democratic Republic of Congo [383,000]
• Chad [369,000]

UNHCR also maintains large refugee camps in India, Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan, Mauritania, Jordan, Gaza and Ethiopia.

Personally, as a person of first-world privilege, I admit that I find these numbers unfathomable. To make the statistics relatable, I have to resort to a rather small-minded, ethnocentric comparison with cities I’ve been to:  Lebanon, for example, is hosting as many people as currently live in San Antonio, TX. If everyone living in Cleveland OH left the city, that number would equal Chad’s refugee population.

The conditions that have forced these people to run for their lives, and for the lives of their families, are as scary as they come. Can any of us sitting comfortably in front of our computers reading this imagine ourselves on the run, or living in the conditions the refugees are enduring? I can’t. I know, too, that writing about this situation isn’t much. But at the very least, we owe it to these other human beings to know that they exist and to reach beyond ourselves to try to help.

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About 1,200 Afghani, Iraqi and Iranian refugees—currently housed in terrible conditions on islands near Australia—are supposed to come, over time, to the US, under an agreement signed by Barack Obama and Australia’s prime minister Malcom Turnbull. But Donald Trump doesn’t want them. Yesterday, he called the deal “dumb,” and says he will refuse to accept any of the refugees who come from countries banned by his Jan. 27 executive order.

So, who are these refugees? First of all, they are not “illegal immigrants,” as Trump labeled them during his disastrous phone call with Turnbull.  This Washington Post article helps clarify what’s really going on:

The measure was necessary because of Australia’s draconian immigration policies. Asylum seekers who reach the country by boat are never settled in Australia proper. Instead, they’re sent to Nauru or Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island for “offshore processing.” Right now, there are about 2,000 people between the two islands, including many children. The vast majority come from Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq. Many were transported to Australia by smugglers across a treacherous sea route hundreds of miles long. (At least 1,200 people have died trying to make the trip, one study found.)

After arrival, the migrants are thoroughly vetted; about 80 percent of those people are legitimate refugees, according to the Australian government. And most have been at a camp for more than a year, living in an immigration limbo. They are unable to leave their camps but also forbidden from settling for good.

Critics say that this amounts to indefinite and illegal detention; several reports have documented widespread abuse and mistreatment. Last year, a U.N. committee report found multiple cases of “attempted suicide, self-immolation, acts of self-harm and depression” among children who had lived in prolonged “detention-like conditions.”

Australia has a very tough stance on refugees. Despite the inhumane conditions at the island detention facilities, the Australian government has remained “resolutely unwilling to resettle refugees in Australia.”

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull campaigned in 2013 on a vow to “stop the boats.” His posters bore slogans like, “No Way: You will not make Australia home.” Instead, his government looked to other countries willing to accept the refugees. And they didn’t have much luck until the United States stepped in. America has already begun their own vetting on the refugees that they will resettle. Several told CNN that they had already had one round of interviews with American officials.

So, what was in “the worst deal ever,” anyway?

The Guardian explains:

In November the US agreed to take an undisclosed number of refugees from Australia’s offshore detention regime. The resettlement option was only to be available for detainees who had been found to be refugees (under the refugee convention). Others who were assessed and found not to be entitled to protection would not be deemed eligible. Applicants were to be interviewed twice by US officials before being resettled, in a process that was to take between six and 12 months. If a refugee missed out on US resettlement, the existing options of Papua New Guinea and Cambodia were still available.

As the Telegraph reported:

It has never been clear whether Australia offered anything in return for Washington’s concession. There has been speculation that Australia could take asylum seekers who arrive in the US, or that Canberra may have volunteered to send extra troops to Iraq or to conduct a freedom of navigation exercise patrol near Chinese-claimed territories in the South China Sea.

Others suggested that Australia, which already hosts American troops and has followed the US into each of its wars since Second World War, offered nothing as part of the deal – and that it was this element which infuriated Mr Trump.

Then, during his first ever contact with Turnbull, Trump belligerently accused the Australian prime minister of “seeking to export the next Boston bombers.” And when he essentially hung up on Turnbull, he also disconnected from the island-bound refugees whose conditions, said a United Nations psychiatrist, are “akin to torture.”

No one is certain about what will happen to the refugee deal forged between Obama and Turnbull. It looks as though the Bannon-Trump presidency is on course to channel the hard-line, anti-refugee stance of Australia’s Turnbull. But there’s also talk that Bannon-Trump might honor the deal. Unfortunately, in the Bannon-Trump era of lies and alternative facts, it depends on what the meaning of “honor” is. The Guardian puts it this way:

“ Trump could still honour the deal but simply accept none of the refugees who apply.

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