‘Climate Passport’ for People Driven Away by Global Warming Proposed

A climate researcher proposed on Thursday the establishment of a kind of ‘climate passport’, allowing people who have been driven away from their homes due to the impact of the global warming to move freely around the world.  

On the sidelines of the UN climate talks in Poland, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), said that a future ‘climate passport’ could be modeled on the League of Nations Passport, the so-called Nansen Passport, that was first issued to refugees of the Russian civil war in the 1920s to move freely across borders.

However, rich developed countries are likely to object to such proposal because of the ‘climate refugees’ that could head their way, the Associated Press points out.   

The UN talks on climate in the Polish city of Katowice are taking place two months after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a special report on the climate situation on the planet, saying the world needs to spend US$2.4 trillion every year until 2035 to slow down the effects of climate change.

At the start of the Katowice summit last week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said that carbon emissions in the world’s developed economies are set to increase this year for the first time in five years, as higher oil and gas use has more than offset dwindling coal consumption.

According to the latest available energy data, energy-related carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in North America, the European Union (EU), and the advanced economies in Asia Pacific are set to increase by 0.5 percent in 2018, bucking a five-year-long declining trend, the IEA said.

A day before that, the World Bank Group said it would double its current five-year investments to US$200 billion in the period 2012 through 2025 to support countries in their climate action plans.

At the Katowice summit this week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said that “We see incredible momentum from all segments of society to lower emissions and make the transition from the grey economy to the green. We have the ways. What we need is the political will to move forward.” 

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