‘Climate Refugees’- The Climate Crisis and Population Displacement: Building a Trade Union and Civil Society Response - 11 February

A woman wading through flood waters is replacing the polar bear as the defining image of climate change. Delegates to the UK’s first trade union and Friends of the Earth conference on Climate Refugees (Saturday 11 February) learned that in the past six years over 140 million people have been displaced through climate-related disasters – one person every second.

The risks will redouble in coming decades, reversing years of development activity in the global South. In a keynote speech, Asad Rehman (FoE) said that to achieve our goal of UN action to address the climate migration crisis means creating a new narrative which draws wide support across civil society and is based on the principles of ‘justice, empathy and humanity.’

Briefing delegates on the hard evidence of climate change, Prof Joanna Haigh (Grantham Institute) said that every indicator was flashing: rising sea levels, warming oceans and shrinking Arctic sea ice. ‘Globally warming is not globally uniform,’ with the greatest increases in polar regions and across sub-Saharan Africa. The current growth in carbon emissions would place as much as a quarter of the world’s population exposed to water scarcity, flooding impacts and crop failures.

For Unite the Union, Diana Holland was ‘angry and ashamed’ at the government’s inhumane treatment of child migrants. Trade unions have shown through campaigns such as Chile Solidarity and organising migrant domestic workers what international solidarity can deliver. Where union members are impacted by climate change, our demand must be for a Just Transition, with everyone at the table.

Reinforcing this message, Chidi King (first right, see left) said that the ITUC (International Trade Union Confederation) was developing a Just Transition programme to engage trade unions, governments and communities in demands for investments in low carbon technologies, green jobs and new skills. Climate change would drive up global poverty: so zero poverty and zero carbon were two core issues for the ITUC.

Zita Holbourne (second right), PCS Vice-President, argued that it was impossible to separate climate change impacts from other causes of human displacement, including war, fear of persecution, famine and poverty. For many climate refugees, their ordeal is not over when they arrive in the UK, where they are often treated as third class citizens. Unless we are to pass to our children a world worse than ours, we need a new vision for race equality in 2025, based on social justice and equity.

Saturday’s workshops covered the planetary emergency, building trade union solidarity, challenging racism and xenophobia, the Moving Stories of climate migrants, and creating a new narrative around climate refugees. Also, the Environmental Justice Foundation presented its excellent short film, Falling through the Cracks.

UPDATE: Tina walks free from court.

The charges for contempt of court have been dropped in a major victory for the anti-fracking movement and the right to peaceful protest

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Tina Rothery, Lancashire Nana and anti-fracking campaigner, is being aggressively pursued for legal costs of over £55,000 and the likelihood of a possible two-week prison sentence, thanks to the actions of fracking company, Cuadrilla. Her supporters, including well-known figures such as Emma Thompson, Vivienne Westwood and trade union leaders, as well as NGOs and campaign groups, have today called on Francis Egan, CEO of Cuadrilla, to drop the case as completely unjustified. Hundreds are expected to gather outside Preston court on Friday when her case is heard, under the banner #IamTinaToo.

Paul Ridge of Bindmans solicitors said: “I have never seen a company behave as aggressively and for such a sustained period towards a single protestor on the matter of costs as in this case by Cuadrilla.”

This is what it looks like on the front line of the fossil fuel industry in 2016. As water protectors at Standing Rock attempted to remove burned-out trucks that had been blocking the bridge, police attacked them with tear gas, concussion grenades, rubber bullets and water cannon in subzero temperatures, seriously injuring many. Reports suggest 300 people were injured and 27 needed hospital treatment.