The Interplay between Climate Change, Economy and Displacement: Experience from Asia

Only after the devastating tsunami of 2004 shook the policy-makers, scientists and academics has climate change (CC) emerged as one of the strongest forces that can cause economic loss and massive human displacement. CC could now be linked to a number of contemporary dimensions, such as securitisation, poverty, migration and refuge. However, climate security or environmental security poses a few questions. Whose security, what do we mean by security and what are those elements that pose threats? Have we ever thought that climate and climatic disruption may pose threats to human kind that seriously? The attendant consequences of climatic disorder, such as crop failure and infrastructural breakdown, may lead to severe poverty conditions which may tend to social unrest (Garnaut, 2008). Both poverty and unrest can create sufficient conditions to induce population displacement. Until recently, migration and refugee scholars might have somehow missed seeing the link between CC and displacement. The Indian Ocean disaster in 2004, the Fukushima catastrophe in 2011 and some other environmental tragedies beyond Asia, such as Haiti and Chile, suggest that there is a direct link between CC with human displacement. The classical migration theorists tended to generalise myriad factors of displacement using a push-pull approach.