The German Marshall Fund of the United States (GMF) launches a new transatlantic grantmaking initiative that investigates the impact of climate change on migration patterns. The initiative will convene leading experts on climate-induced migration to develop a final report on policy solutions for stakeholders and policymakers.

Another initiative is launched to research the links between climate change and migration by the German Marshall Fund. You can read more about it at their web-site. This project is now one of many researching this topic and has gathered leading experts in the field.

Short update here. Yet another report was published this week on the issue of climate change and displacement. Have a read about it at the Euractiv pages. 

I can also recommend this website (towardsrecognition.org) advocating recognition of environmentally displaced persons.

The talks on a global climate change agreement continues this and next week in Bonn. One of the many side-event will focus only the issue of forced migration/displacement. The event is organized by the Norwegian Refugee Council and has many high level speakers such as Craig Jonstone, Deputy UN High Commissioner for Refugees. 

The side event on forced migration and climate change is on the 8th of June

Furthermore, the latest negotiation text includes a reference to human mobility (para 25 e), which we can just hope will stay in the text also after the Bonn-negotiations. I have yet to find an EU position on this issue. Please feel free to let me know if you happen to sit on that information.

The think tank headed by Kofi Annan, Global Humanitarian Forum, published a report last week on the human impact of climate change, covering a wide range of issues including environmentally displaced persons. The report does not bring too much new facts on the table regarding this issue, but it has some interesting case-studies illustrating the devastating impact of climate change in Bangladesh, Ghana and and small island states. The report contributes to the growing recognition of the subject and is definitively worth a read.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) published a policy paper on climate change and displacement in May, which is also worth a read together with a New York Times article on the topic that came out last week. There finally seem to be a momentum to recognize the issue at the international level and hopefully the end-text in Copenhagen will address this issue properly.

It has been a while since my last update here and I intend to do something about it now. There have been many interesting things happening around the world on the issue of environmentally displaced persons. A side-event at the climate change conference in Poznan dealt with the issue, so did a conference hosted by the Refugees Studies Centre in Oxford in the beginning of January, the Parliamentary Assembly in the Council of Europe debated the issue and more.

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A calculation from the European Commission estimates that Norway has increased it GDP with 6-8 billion Euro’s a year as a direct consequence of their membership in the European Economic Area (EEA), which gives Norwegian business access to the internal market in the same way as EU-members. The calculation was leaked to Norwegian media today and has apparently been used as leverage to push Norway into increasing their contributions to new EU member states in the re-negotiations of the EEA-agreement.

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