 Good morning. Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of Law Across the Sea, and we have the luck today to have a great guest from the University of Hawaii School of Law. Professor Maxine Burkett is a professor of law at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii and is also currently a public policy fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. I don't know what that is but maybe we'll find out. Professor Burkett attended Williams College, Exeter College, Oxford University, and received her law degree from Bolt Hall School of Law at the University of California in Berkeley. And we're very lucky to have her. Professor Burkett is an expert in the law and policy of climate change. And when I first talked with Professor Burkett, I asked her what she'd like to talk about, and she was right off the bat, said climate-induced migration, which was a new topic to me. And so welcome. Thank you for being here. May I call you Maxine? Of course, and thank you for having me on the show. My pleasure. And, you know, I didn't quote all of your resume. There's just too much to put on the air. We wouldn't ever be over. But, you know, climate-induced migration, I didn't really know what that is and I'm not sure I do now. But as I was going through some of the articles and trying to get a little bit of a grasp of it, I kind of was reminded of an old Bobby Dillon tune, the times they are changing. And that was about social change, but a lot of the wording is very similar. You better start swimming or you'll sink like a stone. And that kind of reminded me as I was going through some of the articles. But tell me, what is climate-induced migration? Give me a simple answer for me, please. Sure. Climate-induced migration describes the circumstances in which some kind of climate-related events forces movement of peoples. It's the migration that happens as a result of some acute or long-term event. So, a particular storm that we can somehow link to climate change or a sort of a longer, slower onset disaster like drought, desertification, flooding, those events can induce people to move from where they're currently living. Okay. Now, is climate-induced migration related to global warming or the sea rise or these type of things that I've heard more about? Sure. What's the relationship? And is it, you mentioned sort of long-term and short-term type things. That's right. So, what's the difference? Is it all related or is it different? That's a great question, which is why sort of the simple answer as to what is climate-induced migration is difficult, but for good reason. I mean, these things are kind of complicated. Even the quotation that you read has dual meaning. There is sort of a stress and understanding. We have to start swimming in some respects, but there's also a story of resilience there. And so, in short, we're looking at circumstances where climate change introduces a new kind of environment to a number of places. People have moved over millennia. That's what humans do. And they move for various reasons. But we're starting to see that climate change impacts are having specific influence on the decision to move. And you asked about time scale. Sometimes that's very short and quick. You know a storm is coming. A super typhoon has passed by. You're displaced. It could be a temporary displacement. It's a very specific event that's induced that. And you may be able to return. You may not. That was the case in other storm events, which may or may not have been linked to climate change. But again, if you think about Katrina, there are instances in which you're forced to move in the moment. Some are able to return. Some are not. But that displacement itself, to the extent that we know these storms are going to be more intense and with climate change, is part of what we understand to be climate-impacted decisions to move. Okay. So can you give me kind of an example? I mean, what is like something that's related to... Or do we know what's related to global warming or not? I mean, is it just too hard to know what is related to what's called global warming and what's that? That's another show. But what are at least the theories of what's a long-term example? Sure. Well, so when we see... When we're talking about climate change or global warming, you can sort of use the terms interchangeably to some degree. But what you're talking about is the fact that our sort of industrialized societies have influenced the atmospheric chemistry, right? And what that means is that the more carbon we've put into the atmosphere has created a greenhouse effect. We're seeing rising temperatures. And with those rising temperatures, we're also seeing specific events affected by the change in sort of the temperature rise, the increased energy in our atmosphere. And so you'll see everything from these more sort of intense and longer storms that we were experiencing in terms of those sort of those major cyclones and super storms. And we'll also see longer-term events that are happening. And these are the droughts, the increasing heat. These are the kinds of seal rise data that we're seeing coming out and that we're observing now. And so both those slower events, ocean acidification is one as well, where we see the higher acidity of our oceans, these are longer-term events that are having impact on people's ability to live in the places that they currently do live. And then there are acute events like those storms, like the coastal flooding that can happen during major events. Okay. So do you link it all together or is it, is there some, is there a difference between what is caused by nature just in the millions of years that we have had nature? Sure. And man, man's influence right into that area. Great question, especially in a situation like this, because one's decision to move has many causes. I'm an immigrant to this country. We came from Jamaica. And the reasons why we left Jamaica are many. Some were curiosity, some were opportunity. People make decisions in the given circumstance. And so migration is always inherently multi-causal. There are some circumstances though, in which you're completely unable to grow your crops in a particular area. And that triggers a number of decisions that follow on. The severity of the environmental background, if you will, will sometimes encourage movement, sometimes rapidly, because the storm is coming or has come and destroyed the space that you're in, or more slowly. What we're seeing right now, for example, in the Pacific Islands is a sea level rise that has multiple causes, but climate change is becoming a stronger signal, if you will, in terms of the impact of the ability to grow food, to get fresh water, the ability to have a coastal livelihood and development along the coastline that's not being inundated or impacted on a more frequent basis. Those are the kind of triggers for movement that are joining in with other sort of human decision-making that happens. It's also true, if I could add, that every society, coastal community makes decisions about what happens on their coastlines. Some are wiser than others, and some will cause you to be more vulnerable to those impacts. So when you talk about sort of human inputs, it could be certainly in the front end in terms of how we're impacting our environment and the climate itself, but also in the decision-making that we engage in over time that makes us more vulnerable to sort of coastal flooding, for example, because we've decided to build a lot on the coastlines. We have made smart decisions about how we're going to armor ourselves, if there's natural armors or man-made armors, all of these things will complicate how vulnerable we are. Okay, so, boy, that's a lot of things to think and talk about. You brought up the Pacific Islands. Could you give me some specific examples of Pacific Islands that are being impacted? I gather that we're talking about sea rise, and this sounds like climate change to me as a person that doesn't know a lot about climate change, but it sounds like being caused by climate change. So we have man doing that and causing maybe the polar ice cap to melt and water to rise. Yeah, there are a few dynamics there, and this is a show about law primarily, so I'll do my part in terms of sort of sharing the science of it, because it is important to understand what's causing all of this. What we're seeing in the Pacific is a combination of sort of the climate variability that happens over time. So, for example, we're in an El Nino year. So El Ninos happen. It's just that they're happening on top of the sort of larger climate change that we're seeing, which is this increasing trend, and so what we're seeing in the Pacific is sea level rise that is, at this point, more about thermal expansion. Water gets bigger and takes up more space with greater heat. We're talking about the Pacific now. We're talking about the western Pacific. We're seeing a couple of dynamics happening, but certainly sea level rise, at this point globally, is what we're seeing is about glacier melt. It's also about the fact that there's what's called thermal expansion in which we see water, the oceans, are warming such that it's causing a rise in sea level. So that is actually not good news in the sense that once we start really seeing the inputs of the glacial melt, we're talking about even more impacts in terms of higher sea levels. In the Pacific, we have a number of examples of displacement. There is the internal displacement of the Carter Islanders in Papua New Guinea. Carter Islanders, yeah. And what we see in that case is that an atoll community has had their atoll pretty much carved in half by the rise in sea level and the people of the Carter Islands are then forced to find a new place to relocate. And for them, they have identified Luganville, which is part of Papua New Guinea, and we see that kind of internal relocation occurring. And so they are understood to be the first example of climate refugees because of that sea level rise impact that's more clearly linked to our burning fossil fuels, heightened temperatures, greater sea level rise. That's the move that's happening. Same in the Solomon Islands, we're seeing the Churchill Township, the first municipality to have to coordinate the movement of the entire municipality as a result of compromised land due to sea level rise. We're seeing their freshwater resource impacts, less rain, less fresh water in a lot of the Pacific Islands in the western Pacific. That in Kiribati, for example, that's impacting a people's ability to access water that will help with both drinking and with growing food. So those are near-term events that are happening and we're seeing some events happening here in the United States as well. Okay, now just going back to the Pacific a bit. Okay, you mentioned earlier, people have to deal with these things. What are they doing? What are they doing? And how many are we talking about? How many folks are we talking about? And the reason I ask this is because it's very easy for us to put this out of our consciousness because it's people in some other little island somewhere. And I'm going to get to where that leads us because I don't think it's a spectator sport. I think we're all involved from what I've read. But I'd like you to first tell us what are they doing about it? How many are we involved just in those areas in the Pacific areas? And I want to move on to our United States and Hawaii. Yeah, so the Carteret Islands are a perfect example of there being a sort of a recognition that the long-term viability of the islands is just not there and that in the short to medium term they needed to find a place to relocate to. So this was a very active planned relocation in which, you know, decision-makers came together, sought funding, sought a host community that they could move to, sought economic development in that new community because they're fish and taro people and you can't do that where they're moving to in terms of high land. So there are these very specific examples of planned relocation. You have countries like Kiribati that have been really powerful voices in the international community about their plight with respect to having a very a dire sort of prognosis in terms of long-term viability. It's likely not going to be able to sustain many more generations of life there and they are now in the sort of pursuing an effort to migrate to other places under a policy of migration with dignity. So training up their young folks to have skills that might be useful for communities that they would relocate to whether in Australia or New Zealand or even here in the United States. So like the song says, they have to start swimming or they'll sink like a stone and they sounds like they've started to swim. Now we have to take a little bit of a break right here and then we'll come back and maybe talk a little bit more about where we're going in the United States. Thank you. Hi, I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii.com. I hope you'll join me every Friday at 2 p.m. to discover what's likeable about science. Aloha, I'm Kirsten Baumgart, Turner, host of Sustainable Hawaii. Thanks for watching Think Tech this summer. We have a lot of terrific shows of great importance and I hope you'll watch my show too every Tuesday at noon as we address sustainability issues for Hawaii. They're really pertinent as the World Conservation Congress approaches in September and the World Youth Congress that's focusing on sustainability next year as well. Have a great summer and tune in at noon every Tuesday. I'm Jay Feidl and I'm the host of Research in Minoa Mondays from 12 to 1 on ThinkTechHawaii.com. Take a look at us and learn about geophysics, learn about planetology, learn about the ocean and earth sciences at UH Minoa. You'll really enjoy it. So come around. We'll see you then. Well, we're back with climate-induced migration. It's not a spectator sport and we haven't really got into why it's not a spectator sport yet because we've just been watching islanders in the Cartourette Islands who have been turned into refugees by sea-rise and I'd like to just ask how many approximately how long have they lived there in those islands and now they can't live there any longer and how many folks are we talking about? Well in this case we're talking about about 2,000 people that were moving. They've been in the island for hundreds of years. You're talking about a community, not an insignificant number that then needs to reintegrate into or integrate into another community and what's important to understand is oftentimes these kinds of migrations are happening from sensitive places to other sensitive places. So there's a political aspect of this also. Right, there's a climate and political aspect. So Papua New Guinea has a lot of vulnerability and it impacts with respect to climate change. We're anticipating in terms of changes in precipitation and also impacted by sea level rise but there's also civil conflict that has been in their recent history and that's true of other countries in the Pacific like Fiji where you're seeing there you know being both internal and cross-border migration that's going to happen. Okay now we've talked about those other people okay the other people in the Pacific islands. What do things look like for Hawaii and the United States? I mean how about Manhattan? How about Honolulu? How about Kailua? What can you tell us about what the outlook is for home? Sure well I'll start sort of at the United States level. We know that there are at least 16 communities that are right now working through some plan of relocation so and that's in the state of Washington that's in Louisiana and that's in the state of Alaska. So we know that it's happening in in the US and that's that's not even talking about places like Manhattan that have high population but also high capital and resources in very flood prone and very vulnerable locations like we saw after Superstorm Sandy. So if we even set aside the sort of the the impacts to our economy and major economies in our major cities we're talking about communities that have to leave throughout our continental United States and Alaska. In Hawaii what we're looking at is a number of very vulnerable resources at the coastline you know that we have a lot of very valuable locations real estate and otherwise at the coastline that is going to be impacted by sea level rise and already we're seeing some impacts of that. High priced homes. Many high priced homes. We do have high islands that we have parts of our island that would would continue to sustain us so that while there are going to be other impacts like again freshwater availability and heat we know that in terms of sea level rise if we plan appropriately we could fashion other communities that are not going to be as vulnerable to coastal inundation but that's a massive management and political concern that we need to get get ahead of and that is outside of the possible probable I would say immigration in migration of people from the other countries of the Pacific and elsewhere that might need to come here for better prospects. Oh there are two questions that you've you've raised for me one is I guess are we doing anything are we making any plans we've talked about other states like Alaska that they're they're actually conscious of it and aware of it we're out here in the Pacific and we see a some islands that people have become refugees we certainly don't want that to happen here are we doing anything about it that's one question second question is you're now talking about refugees coming to Hawaii or to the United States well okay so I want to be very careful here because when we were talking about refugees um the you know refugee the term has a number of different definitions right so when we talk about it in sort of informal conversation we understand that we're we're describing those that have been displaced um likely under dire circumstances and uh and they're they may not have a home to go back to at least one that's viable now when we're talking about it in the legal context that these are not refugees by the definition in the convention right for a couple reasons one is that most of the people that are moving as a result of climate impacts are moving and will move internally so they will be within country so we're you know we're not talking about those that are crossing borders that have some conflict or political conflict or urgent reason to to run from prosecution for example so absent that legal definition that's where the law it needs to do a lot more work in terms of what the protections are for people that are displaced are there folks that want that are being displaced as climate refugees in that sense that are saying can we come to the United States or can we come to Hawaii or is that something that's a prospect I would say it's it's probable we're seeing evidence that that may be one of the triggers that has pushed communities and peoples for example we've seen some studies um looking at the lack of arable land uh or decreased crop yield in mexico for example encouraging cross border migration in those cases if you were to ask someone why they're moving they're not going to say well i'm it's a client it's climate change and we're seeing less rainfall etc etc but if you were to sort of peel back the layers a bit when you see these cross border migrations then you can understand that viable livelihoods are being compromised in places that are vulnerable and then are sort of encouraging again pushing people to move and this is uh this is quite um I think it's a it's one of those circumstances that are quite uh awful if you think about the inputs you know what what what we're seeing and how we tend to treat people that are migrating so I want to be very careful because it's not as much of a uh a security's concern although it might be over time it's more of a humanitarian concern and when we think about people that might be coming to hoi are we prepared to address what might be a humanitarian issue in terms of people that have had to leave because their livelihoods have been compromised by activities that were beyond their control especially in the pacific where inputs to climate change have been negligible and talking about political climate as opposed to the weather climate sure that's a whole new mix it is especially in the current day yes you know I I suppose uh being an academic you know my hope is that more information helps but I don't know that that's true storytelling also helps right so when we hear stories of people that are forced to move and you hear stories of of native communities that have been relocated over time over centuries like we're seeing playing out on on the continental us then to have to contemplate another relocation based on again something to which they've had very little input it's we're seeing a series of of I would argue justices that we need to be more proactive about addressing well you know I still want to get to what we're doing about it in here in hawaii what we're doing about it in the united states and again what we should be doing about it but you reminded me of a story by john steinbeck uh who wrote a book called grapes of wrath about a drought in united states and it sounds very much the same type of idea yes although I would say you know we do have an you asked earlier about how much we can link to climate change these a lot of these events have happened before right a lot of novel ocean acidification the kind of sea level rise we might see are not experiences sort of the physical world hasn't had that impact since we've been sort of had civilizations and had a dog in the fight if you will but you're you know we have seen droughts and the dustball phenomenon before and then you're you can tell the resilience of a community by its ability to bounce back from those things which they seem to have done which they have done sure and the difference here is that climate change is sort of a continual inexorable rise and change it's sort of this notion of a new normal that you may hear a lot with respect to climate change but in fact we're not talking about a steady state we're not moving from one to another steady state we're actually seeing this sort of continued and rate of change as well as the change itself so the story of the grapes of wrath it was about a drought and there was a lot of social things going on and political things going on at the same time and and the land however seems to have gone back but now I hear that that we may not that there may be some chance that that's not going to be as easy as it happened in the 30s and the 40s yes although that was a pretty tough time right to live but so so let's come back what are we doing here in Hawaii what are we doing in the United States is there hope for us sure I mean I think we you know the the more we sort of act on the information that we know and we work with all voices at the table in terms of making decisions about how to be more resilient and how we might deal with migration uh under what we understand to be the case now we'll be able to make better decisions so I would say there's hope but I think we're we're we're running out of time in terms of doing that in a way that's not under duress that's not reactive is there a plan in Hawaii now for migration specifically there's a lot happening with respect to climate okay can you take both of those issues yeah so I would say right now with respect to migration we're at a sort of investigative stage right we're trying to understand how much of the in migration we're seeing from other communities or movement of peoples in the Pacific for example is in any way attributable to climate impacts and then using that information to try to project future forecasts on that so we can better plan right because most people want to know what's the risk what are we risking here by acting or not acting in terms of climate we have you know we have a number of things that are on the mitigation front like our 100% renewable mandate with respect to electricity that's a massive example of how we might reduce our emissions and be more resilient because for the most part you know fossil fuel reliance does not allow for adaptation resilience as well in place solar panels when when farms all of those sorts of things can make you more resilient so it's a sort of it has co-benefits there's the fewer emissions more resilience with respect to to energy we also have you know working on adaptation frameworks that are in our planning act we have a inter-departmental climate adaptation committee that's looking to streamline our responses to sea level rise that's that's being sort of headed out of DLNR there are efforts to make us more resilient okay i'd like you to just comment briefly to close this session on how we should approach climate refugees what what what it should be our legal and our human responses and i think they're different perhaps yeah perhaps they shouldn't be but yeah i think um we are this is one of the challenges of climate change that needs better law and policy attention and we need to be able to respond to the the the risks that we're we're facing we're looking the number of people globally who might move we're looking at a number that maybe around 200 million the range is quite large but we know that we have the magnitude that requires response what we see in the in the in the U.S. right now is that there are attempts to have coordinated responses that are happening through the Obama administration's efforts that are really important to look at and support there is a really big legal and policy challenge but i do think that we as humans can understand the vulnerability of being forced from our homes many of us love where we live so do so many others in the in the world especially our pacific island neighbors and so being um having the compassion interest empathy for that will be will be critical when you think about the issues you know you've raised a lot of uh points here uh about climate change and climate refugees and uh it really touches home but i think we've we've scratched the surface we've scratched the surface on this and we really appreciate you coming in to to tell us about thank you very much thank you for having me