Climate pass

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A climate pass is a proposed passport for people who lose their home as climate refugees due to climate change . The passport is intended to enable citizens to have rights in safe states.

About 11% of the world's people live in coastal areas that are less than 10 m above sea level (as of 2010). Many of these areas will be increasingly affected by floods due to climate change, for example in Bangladesh or many island states in the Pacific . Due to the massive increase in hurricanes and hurricanes expected in the event of unchecked CO 2 emissions , it is assumed that the east coasts of China and the United States , with metropolises like New York , will be partly uninhabitable around the year 2100. (→ sea ​​level rise since 1850 ). According to an estimate from 2019, an increase in greenhouse gas concentrations that is still roughly in line with the two-degree target ( RCP4.5 ) and an Antarctic ice sheet assumed to be stable could result in around 360 million people on land life that would be threatened by flooding at least once a year.

There are also areas, for example in parts of Africa , that can no longer serve as permanent residential areas due to desertification. Massive migratory movements can therefore be expected in the second half of the 21st century. However, by 2050, according to World Bank estimates, 143 million people from sub- Saharan Africa , South Asia and Latin America will be displaced within their national borders by the effects of climate change. The refugee movements from Syria in 2015, for example, were preceded by a massive drought in 2011, which is considered to be one of the causes of displacement .

In response to these expected waves of refugees, climate researcher Hans Joachim Schellnhuber brought a climate passport into the public debate for the first time in a speech at the federal delegate conference of Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen in Berlin at the end of November 2017. Anyone who has to leave their home because of climate change should be allowed to enter and settle in one of the countries that mainly cause climate change.

At the beginning of August 2018, the Green Youth also demanded a binding right to asylum from the European Union for those people whose homeland is becoming uninhabitable due to climate change.

The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) expanded the proposal for a climate passport in a policy paper published in August 2018.

The climate pass is based on the Nansen Pass , which was designed for Russian refugees in 1922 after the First World War by the High Commissioner of the League of Nations for Refugee Issues , Fridtjof Nansen . Nansen was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this and for his relief effort in the hunger regions of the Soviet Union in the same year . The Nansen Pass was introduced on July 5, 1922 and was initially recognized by 31 and later by 53 states.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. Scientists demand climate pass. At: klimareporter.de , August 31, 2018
  2. Michael Oppenheimer, Bruce Glavovic: Chapter 4: Sea Level Rise and Implications for Low Lying Islands, Coasts and Communities . In: H.-O. Pörtner, DC Roberts, V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, M. Tignor, E. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, M. Nicolai, A. Okem, J. Petzold, B. Rama, N. Weyer (Eds.) : IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate . October 2019, 4.3.2.2 Settlement Trends ( ipcc.ch [PDF; 10.0 MB ]).
  3. The disaster could have been prevented. At: Spiegel Online , accessed on November 23, 2018
  4. ^ Scott A. Kulp, Benjamin H. Strauss: New elevation data triple estimates of global vulnerability to sea-level rise and coastal flooding . In: Nature Communications . October 2019, doi : 10.1038 / s41467-019-12808-z .
  5. A passport for climate refugees. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 20, 2018
  6. Bernd Matthies : Show climate pass when entering . In: Der Tagesspiegel , November 27, 2017
  7. "It's about solidarity" . At: zdf.de , August 4, 2018
  8. Policy paper: Just-in-time climate policy: Four initiatives for fairness. At: wbgu.de , accessed on November 23, 2018