New Zealand Prepares to Receive Climate Change Refugees

Good news from a bad news story.

New Zealand is proposing to issue climate refugee visas for Pacific islanders displaced from their homelands by sea level rise.

In the low-lying and vulnerable Pacific islands, the number of people moving within their own nations to flee worsening storms, sea level rise and other climate-related crises is still relatively small.

But countries like New Zealand are making plans now before climate migration grows into a regional emergency.

“We want to get ahead of this before it turns into a real problem … we want to start a dialogue with the Pacific Island countries about this notion of migrating with dignity, if things get to that point,” said climate minister James Shaw, leader of New Zealand’s Green Party.

“One of the options is a special humanitarian visa to allow people who are forced to migrate because of climate change,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a phone interview from the UN climate talks in Bonn, which were hosted by Fiji.

In 2014, a New Zealand judge granted residency to a family from Tuvalu, in part on humanitarian grounds related to climate change.

“The reason why we were throwing around an idea of a visa is because people who have been displaced by environmental conditions like rising seas and climate change aren’t counted under the UN Convention on Refugees,” said Shaw.

Canada should be jumping in with New Zealand on this. We proudly proclaim ourselves a Pacific Rim country and, as a petro-state, we're doing our bit to make these refugees' lives a little more precarious, so it's sort of like we owe them at least that much, a chance to relocate to Canada.