As world leaders meet in Baku, Azerbaijan, to discuss progress on actions in response to climate change, thousands of local campaign groups are organising their own actions to draw attention to the impact of the climate crisis across a wide range of issues, including the No To Hassockfield campaigners who wish to see the closure of the Immigration Removal Centre (IRC) near Consett, County Durham.
Around the world people leave their homes for a variety of reasons including war, violence, poverty and food insecurity. As the earth’s temperature increases millions of people are now facing unsustainable lives due to climate change which causes floods, fires, drought and crop failure leading to famine. Genocides, ecocides, famines, wars, colonialism, rising inequalities and an escalating climate collapse are all interconnected crises that reinforce each other and lead to unimaginable suffering. While humanitarian crises are unfolding in Palestine, Yemen, Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, Kurdistan, Lebanon, Balochistan, Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh/Artsakh, and many other places, humanity is also breaching the 1.5C greenhouse gas emissions limit.
The right to move with dignity
Parts of the world are becoming increasingly uninhabitable. No To Hassockfield believes that all human beings should have the right to move to places where they, and their families, can live safely and with dignity. Migration is in part about the solution to the climate crisis, ensuring that the world’s population can adapt to a changing environment.
More than 50% of the people on the move around the world are women and children. Evidence suggests that women are subject to violence on every stage of their journeys, often fleeing gender-based violence in their home countries, traveling from conflict zones, easy prey for traffickers, and then subject to violent border push backs. They are often forced to stay in unsafe and squalid accommodation (including outside), some giving birth en route, before finally reaching a place of safety only to be subjected to state violence and inhumanity.
COP29
The COP29 (Conferences of Parties) is being held, right now, in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a petrostate whose entire economy is built on fossil fuels, with the state-owned oil company Socar’s oil and gas exports accounting for close to 90% of the country’s exports. Many of those attending this year’s COP will be loathe to criticise the Azerbaijan government. Human Rights Watch recently published a statement explaining how it couldn’t be certain that attenders’ rights to peacefully protest would be guaranteed
Joining up the dots between multiple man-made crises and current UK asylum policy is crucial, and this month’s demonstration at the IRC will focus on these links.
Climate-linked mobility is emerging in both wealthy and poor nations, but it is the wealthy nations that have contributed most to the problem of climate change through dramatically higher per capita emissions, while less wealthy countries continue to bear the brunt of the costs.
Whilst massive multi-national companies like SERCO, who now run Derwentside IRC, make huge profits, many communities in the global south are being left with nothing. Land grabs by large corporations and the destruction of large swathes of forest exacerbate problems already faced by indigenous people. Funded climate adaptations could protect communities from the impacts of climate change so they can thrive and maintain their livelihoods and land. Until such schemes are rolled out to all those affected, we will continue to see ‘climate refugees’ joining those fleeing war and persecution.
Ed Miliband, the UK’S Secretary of State for Energy and Net Zero has said that the UK would lead efforts at COP29 to secure the global agreement needed to stave off the worst impacts of climate breakdown, in talks that have been thrown into turmoil by the re-election of Donald Trump as US president. António Guterres, the UN secretary general, will be at the talks, with the leaders of about 100 countries, mostly from the developing world, which is struggling with the increasing economic impacts of climate-driven disaster.
Comments
Julie Ward from No To Hassockfield and long term environmental campaigner said:
“It’s important to understand the complex reasons why increasing numbers of people feel driven to leave their homes in search of safety, security and sustainability. Faced with floods, famine, forest fires, desertification and numerous other life-threatening circumstances the choices are increasingly bleak for millions of people. We in the developed world bear the largest responsibility for the factors driving climate change. We must therefore recognise our responsibility for innovative, humane, and just responses including rapid decarbonisation, reparations and an asylum system that doesn’t criminalise those fleeing unsustainable lives but offers hope over despair, a welcoming community instead of incarceration. At a time when we should be investing in the green economy the costly policy of locking up vulnerable people is a shameful waste of public money. COP29 might be happening far away but the decisions that are made in Baku will have long lasting ramifications for communities everywhere. At No To Hassockfield we recognise our collective responsibility to act for the benefit of future generations whilst showing compassion to those affected by the multiple existential crises facing life on Earth whose natural human response has been to seek a more sustainable life free from fear, poverty and violence. We should remember that none of us are free until all of us are free.
Agnes Tanoh, Spokesperson Facilitator at Women for Refugee Women, said:
“I was forced to leave my country when civil war erupted. I never planned to seek asylum, but now I am a refugee. Separated from my loved ones while I hope to talk to them, huge them, smile back to them, laugh with them. That is the life every human being deserves.
I came to the UK seeking safety, but I was locked up in immigration detention. It left me scarred: detention, anxiety, poor mental health, lack of confidence and much more.
No-one seeking safety should be detained. My message to the Labour Government: build a new, compassionate asylum system; end the hostile environment of your predecessors. A compassionate world is possible, you can make the change. Let’s do it now.”
Gemma Lousley, Policy and Research Manager at Women for Refugee Women, said:
‘It is nearly three years since Derwentside opened, and in this time very little has changed. Women who have already survived trauma and violence continue to be locked up there indefinitely, retraumatising them and inflicting long-lasting damage on their mental health. Their detention continues to serve no purpose other than to harm, as the majority of women locked up are eventually released, to continue with their cases.”
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