OBMICA Newsletter Editorial June 2022

In 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated that "the most serious impacts of climate change could occur in human migration." Since then, the international community has moved forward slowly to better understand the complex relationship between climate change, the environment, and human mobility, highlighting the role of environmental change as a migration factor and the precariousness of populations in situations of greater vulnerability.

This process has enabled the development of strategic frameworks that address environmentally driven migration from different approaches, such as the processes linked to the work of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (1992), the integration of environmental factors into the objectives of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (2018), the protection of cross-border displaced persons in the Nansen Agenda (2015), and disaster prevention in the Sendai Framework (2015-2030).

The many references to migration that exist in national strategic frameworks reflect the growing importance that countries across the continent attach to addressing this issue. At the same time, these references place local, national, and international actors before the challenge of developing new and innovative initiatives that respond to the needs of the most disadvantaged populations in the face of climate change. Faced with growing pressure from civil society, a wake-up call is needed so that the parties involved offer and implement concrete solutions for stronger climate-change mitigation and more efficient adaptation to its effects. Because of its geographic makeup as small island developing states (SIDS), the insular Caribbean is in the eye of the storm both metaphorically and physically. Every year on June 1 there is a warning call at the start of hurricane season. Due to climate change, these weather phenomena are not necessarily occurring more frequently, but they are becoming more intense. In extreme situations following hurricanes in the Caribbean archipelago, entire islands have been temporarily evacuated, as happened in Barbuda when Irma struck the eastern Caribbean in 2017. "Population mobility [in the context of environmental change] should probably be considered as a phenomenon that occurs along a process ranging from fully voluntary migration [...] to fully forced migration" (Hugo, 1996). Climate is a major determinant of displacement, and there are no multilateral treaties or domestic legislation specifically dealing with displacement linked to climate. OBMICA participates in regional civil society spaces that study these gaps with a view to proposing improvements to the legal framework and the response to these unavoidable challenges.