Searching for shelter in the Climate Crisis Era: ecocide and migration

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to examine whether and how environmental criminal law at an international level, coupled with strategic use of environmental law at a national level, may lend a hand to enlighten and make evident the violence behind eco-migration. Forced displacement is well represented in auxiliary contexts of soft law, often amalgamated with societal instruments, but they do not work for setting up legal barriers to ecocide coming from governmental and corporate (dirty) activities that hasten human mobility flows in various areas of the planet, not always the poorest ones. Based on environmental migration outlook, the aim of this chapter is to examine whether and how environmental criminal law at an international level, coupled with strategic use of environmental law at a national level and, of course, soft law or societal instruments, can be amalgamated for setting up legal barriers to ecocide coming from governmental and corporate activities that are responsible for major environmental harm that often hasten mobility flows. The international criminal justice system does not include the protection of the environment from harmful effects of ecocide including one of its more intricate consequences, that is, territories affected by environmental damage resulting in forced or voluntary migration flows, both induced by the suffering of native populations, as well as other eco-victim archetypes (García Ruiz, 2018). As a natural consequence, this chapter also discusses the eventual right to migration of environmentally displaced populations, inasmuch as the concepts of ‘migrant’ and ‘displaced person’seem not to have the same meaning. Speaking on behalf of the vulnerability and adaptive capacity approaches along with ‘loss and damage’, ‘migration as adaptation’, securitization tendencies and migrationfriendly solutions (Etzold & Sakdapolrak, 2016; Ober & Sakdapolrak, 2017; Fröhlich & Kleep, 2018; McNamara et al., 2018; ), this chapter recommends searching for integrated paths in which voices from potentially involved communities can be heard.